I summoned the spirit of my mother and of dissatisfied customers everywhere, and wrote a letter to the CEO of Dixon Ticonderoga:
Enclosed find six dozen Dixon Ticonderoga No. 1 pencils sealed in plastic; seven never-sharpened No. 1s in a box; and a dozen used pencils in various stages of breakdown. They are what remain of the shipment I received from a warehouse in New Jersey in December, 2009. It has been very frustrating to deal with these pencils. I couldn’t help using them, hoping that the next one would not be broken inside. I have felt the point bend before breaking and can even sense the lead wobbling inside the shaft. Chunks of lead have gotten stuck in my electric pencil sharpener at work, and I have had to throw the pencil sharpener away. Manual sharpeners have had to be disassembled. As part of my job, I attend editorial meetings where I act as a kind of recording secretary, marking changes in pencil on page proofs, and it is not just frustrating but also embarrassing when my pencil lead breaks in front of other people.
Mostly, writers of complaining letters are looking for refunds or free merchandise. I was not sure what I wanted, but it was not more defective pencils. I had thrown in pencils that had broken in midsentence. I said I was returning “the unused portion” rather than putting them in the garbage, because if someone rescued them, as I had the No. 2 on Park Avenue South, I would be unleashing on the world the same frustration that the pencils had caused me. The gist of the letter was, simply, Take these pencils. Still, I wanted some response, so I probed the reasons for the poor quality of the pencils:
I would be really curious to know what you think happened. Was the graphite defective? The workmanship? Or was it the shipping that was at fault? Did someone drop them? Where were they made? Do you have quality control? Can you account for the discrepancy between these useless Dixon Ticonderogas and your company’s proud history and motto, “The Best of Its Kind”?
_______
I didn’t have much hope for a response, so I scraped along with four eraserless pencils that I had bought at an art-supply store in the Village. But before long a friend, browsing on pencils.com, discovered that a pencil company called Cal Cedar had brought back the Blackwing—black, with a distinctive flat eraser. Devotees of the Blackwing had been paying up to forty dollars apiece for these pencils after they were discontinued, in 1998. My friend placed an order and gave me a box of twelve Blackwings. The lead is ungraded, but it is definitely softer than a No. 2, and very expressive. The Blackwing motto is “Half the Pressure, Twice the Speed.”
I was addicted. They were like Oreos. Soon I was consuming them by the dozen. The descriptions on the boxes are like the tasting notes for wine. The “graphite formulation” of the Palomino Blackwing 602, which is charcoal gray with a black eraser, is “Firm & Smooth.” The Palomino Blackwing, black with a white eraser, is “Soft & Smooth.” The company has since come out with a white version, called the Blackwing Pearl (I think of it as a First Communion pencil), described as “Balanced & Smooth.”
Not long after my first acquisition, Cal Cedar threw a pencil party to celebrate the revival of the Blackwing. The host was Charles Berolzheimer, of Cal Cedar, a sixth-generation pencil-maker. He was dressed in shades of pencil lead. Hundreds of pencil enthusiasts were there, at the Art Directors Club, drawing, graffiti style, on big sheets of white paper, adding to small communal notebooks, creating do-it-yourself thaumatropes, experimenting with the camera obscura and the camera lucida. One woman wore two Blackwings in her hair. A gigantic display pencil hung from the ceiling, and on the way in everyone was given a free pencil, either a Palomino Blackwing or a Palomino Blackwing 602.