A time line of the pencil covered one long wall, documenting the contributions associated with many famous names: Faber, Eberhard, Dixon, da Vinci, Thoreau, Borrowdale (the original graphite lode in England). Among the champions of the Blackwing were Stephen Sondheim, Chuck Jones (the father of Bugs Bunny), John Steinbeck, Vladimir Nabokov, and Faye Dunaway. The time line also included pioneers of such ancillary products as the pencil sharpener and the eraser crimp, but on that night, which was my first foray into the cosmopolitan world of pencils, my favorite fact was this: Every pencil is a sandwich. All these years, I had been wondering how the lead got inside the pencil. It turns out that pencils are made from slats of corrugated wood about the size of a Hershey bar. The graphite is laid in the grooves, another slat is glued on top, and then the sandwich is sawed into individual strips, which are sanded, painted, fitted with ferrules and erasers, and there you have it: delicious Blackwings.
Pencils.com also began to try to tempt me with multicolored erasers, but I was not taken in. The eraser that comes with the Palomino Blackwing is flat, like an elongated Chiclet, fitted into a distinctive flat ferrule by means of a tiny clamp. It can be extended and slotted back into the ferrule for longer life—or, better yet, reversed, providing fresh edges for your precision erasure needs. The flat ferrule keeps the pencil from rolling off Stephen Sondheim’s piano, say.
But I do not rely on the erasers that come crimped into the tops of pencils. The erasers on my oversupply of defective Dixon Ticonderogas were virgins. I can always tell that a foreign pencil has entered my collection when the eraser is worn flat. I make a lot of mistakes, thus requiring an eraser at least as large as an ice cube. The eraser available from the catalogue is the Magic Rub, which is of grayish-white vinyl in the shape of a domino. I use it to erase the screeds I sometimes feel compelled to write in the margins of proofs and then regret. Part of my routine is sweeping the eraser crumbs off my desk like foundry dust after every job. I used to take just one eraser at a time and wear it down to a nub—a nub that I’d then search for frantically, worried that the cleaning lady had thrown it out. Now I grab a whole box of twelve Magic Rubs. When a twelve-pack gets down to the last layer of three, I get anxious and have to visit the supply cabinet.
As I learned at the pencil party, eraser-tipped pencils have a contentious history. It was in 1650, in Nuremberg, that lead was first glued to wood, creating the modern pencil, but it was not until 1858, according to Henry Petroski’s authoritative book The Pencil, that an enterprising Yank named Hyman Lipman, of Philadelphia, patented a method of attaching an eraser to the pencil. Joseph Reckendorfer bought him out and patented a new, improved eraser-tipped pencil in 1862. In Europe, despite the fact that in 1864 an eight-foot-long rubber-tipped pencil was carried in a parade honoring Lothar Faber, the German pencil king, the eraser is more likely to be sold as a separate item.
In England, erasers are called rubbers, after the material they were originally made from. Actually, that’s backwards: rubber got its name because the substance was good for rubbing out mistakes. (What we call rubbers the English call French letters. The French word for eraser is gomme.) Before rubber, the material most suited for erasing pencil marks was bread crumbs. A snob might say that the eraser-tipped pencil is like a sofa bed: it sounds like a good idea, but it often features neither the best possible sofa nor the best possible bed. Focusing on the eraser, unscrupulous pencil-makers sometimes stiffed consumers with inferior lead. Or maybe the lead was OK, but the eraser smeared your mistakes around, making them more conspicuous. The effort to combine two distinct things in a single product can result in a decline in the quality of both.
Friends of mine who are artists are particular about erasers; the traces left by an Art Gum or a Pink Pearl—smudges and blurs—can give texture to a drawing. Stick erasers permit artists to erase without laying the meat of their hand on the work. I have seen an eraser made by Koh-i-Noor (a pencil company whose name was meant to evoke precious stones) that was supposed to erase ink and said on its label “imbibed with eraser fluid.” There are electric erasers that look like the tool the dental hygienist uses to polish your teeth. A former colleague on the copydesk, the late Bill Walden (stiff-bristle hair, gritted-teeth grin, breast pocket full of writing instruments), had a prototype of a battery-operated eraser; it drilled holes in paper.
According to Petroski, Nabokov remarked that “his pencils outlasted their erasers.” (Why didn’t Véra give him a Magic Rub?) John Steinbeck “could not use pencils once he felt their ferrules touch his hand.” I am in Steinbeck’s camp. Once the pencil has reached half its length, that fancy ferrule on the Blackwing digs into my hand. Recently I passed along a whole fistful of used Blackwings to a colleague. I sharpened them first, and she was deeply appreciative. She uses them down to the nub.