At that pencil party, I encountered for the first time a handheld long-point pencil sharpener. Until then, I had not known that a handheld pencil sharpener could be anything but a toy; I have one in the shape of the Empire State Building that I treasure for sentimental reasons, but it is useless except as a cake decoration. The party featured a Sharpening Lounge, where there were state-of-the-art wall-mounted X-Acto sharpeners along one wall (they not only deliver a beautiful point but do so in reverent silence) and copies of a pencil-yellow manual called How to Sharpen Pencils, by David Rees. It is one of very few books worthy of the dual category “Humor/Reference.”
Until I went to the pencil party, I felt very alone, a crank among co-workers who were content to stick their No. 2 pencils in any of the various electric pencil sharpeners on the premises. And until I read David Rees I hadn’t realized why it was that, although I, too, relied on an electric pencil sharpener at work, it left me chronically unsatisfied: you can’t see what’s going on in there.
David Rees specializes in the artisanal sharpening of No. 2 pencils: for a fee (at first, it was fifteen dollars, but, like everything else, the price of sharpening pencils has gone up), he will hand-sharpen your pencil and return it to you (along with the shavings), its point sheathed in vinyl tubing. “If you can carve a totem pole with a chainsaw then you can sharpen a pencil with a pocketknife,” Rees writes. Otherwise, you are better off with an old-fashioned manual pencil sharpener, such as the one that my father mounted on the wall in our basement in Cleveland circa 1960 (Chicago, APSCO Products, with Type 2A Cutter Assembly), or the industrial-strength Boston Ranger 55 that my predecessor Lu Burke gave me, with the warning “It chews pencils.” After reading Rees, I took a closer look at Lu’s Boston Ranger and found that it has a lever on the crank that you can set for your desired degree of pointedness (B, M, F).
Somewhere along the line, the office boy devolved into an electric pencil sharpener. Mine was a Panasonic, and it gave a pretty good point, if you snatched the pencil out of its jaws in time. But it began to jam more and more frequently, no doubt because I was feeding it from my store of defective No. 1 pencils. I suppose the shattered lead was getting stuck in the blades, but of course I couldn’t see in there, much less clean the blades with a soft-bristle toothbrush, as Rees recommends. So I did the next best thing: I unplugged it and beat it against the desk.
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One day I received a package in the mail with the return address of a Manny Rodriguez, in Lake Mary, Florida. I had the name mixed up with Manny Ramirez, and wondered what the baseball great was sending me from camp. Inside was a gross of No. 1 pencils and a letter:
Dear Ms. Norris,
Thank you for your letter. I was saddened to see that you had struggled so long with these pencils and I appreciate you taking the time to share the issues you experienced with us. To help bring you some closure to the matter, let me provide some answers for your questions.
Closure! That’s what I wanted. Not more pencils but closure. The serious tone of the letter made me wonder: Did I stand in relation to Dixon Ticonderoga as the writers of letters complaining about commas and hyphens stand to me? My first reaction is always along the lines of “Get a life.” I am going to try to be more sympathetic to them from now on. I will write back, if only to offer closure.
The letter went on:
Here at Dixon Ticonderoga, we truly do strive to be the best. Each batch of pencils undergoes very stringent quality control measures. We mark all our pencils with a batch code so we can track that batch. When first produced, the batch will undergo various methods of quality control testing which look at everything from the overall appearance of the pencil down to the break strength of the lead. These test results and a sample of each batch is then kept on file for years to come should we have any future issues. Any consumer complaints we receive regarding our pencils are then logged and tracked back to the original batch. We went ahead and pulled the results for batch 219 and can assure you that this batch did pass our quality control methods and that we did not see a complaint history for it.
“Batch 219”—I liked that.
So what happened to your pencils? Your letter very much perked my interest. I personally oversaw the testing [of ] your pencils. Although our quality control department and I have not made it all the way through the seven dozen+ of them, I can say that with many of the sharpened pencils you sent we experienced the same breakage issues. With the pencils from the unopened box, we have not experienced issues with these. As such, we feel there are two possibilities to what went wrong here: