1. Shipping Damage-As you probably know, the number one lead can be a bit fragile. It is extra soft and more susceptible to shipping bumps and bruises. Somewhere along the way before it came to you, these pencils may have been dropped or mishandled in some way. This could cause breakage within the pencil and lead to the issues you have experienced.
2. Sharpener Damage-As pencil sharpeners wear out they can sometimes shatter a pencil’s core. Once again, the extra soft lead is more susceptible to this kind of damage. The first time a pencil is sharpened is usually when this occurs. This can be very frustrating as the lead will be shattered after that first instance; however, you will continue to use the pencil and even sharpen it in other sharpeners with the same results, but the damage to the core has already been done. I highly suggest that you replace your sharpener if it is more than a few years old.
It was signed Kristen-Lee Derstein, Marketing Manager, Dixon Ticonderoga Company.
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In a very helpful appendix to How to Sharpen Pencils, “Pilgrimage Sites for Pencil Enthusiasts: A Checklist,” I learned of the existence of the Paul A. Johnson Pencil Sharpener Museum in Logan, Ohio, in a pocket southeast of Columbus. Ever since wandering into the Sharpening Lounge at the pencil party, I have been keenly aware of the need in this country for a pencil-sharpener boutique. It would be like an Apple store, but more artisanal. Williamsburg would be a good place for it.
Once, passing a storefront in Times Square with the words StubHub in the window, I thought for a moment that my dream had come true . . . but then I remembered that StubHub is a clearinghouse for theater tickets. Given that we still lack a pencil-sharpener boutique, a museum would have to do—maybe it would have a souvenir shop. I knew that Logan also had a canoe livery and a washboard factory, and I pictured myself, in Thoreau mode, paddling from the washboard factory to the pencil-sharpener museum, ideally in the company of David Rees. Rees himself had never visited the Chartres of pencil-sharpener pilgrimages, and unfortunately was not free to join me. He had done his research, however, and warned me that the collection consisted mainly of novelty pencil sharpeners.
So on a perfect late-summer day, I went by myself, making a substantial detour on the way back to New York from the annual weekend on Kelleys Island, in Lake Erie. Leaving the island, I took the ferry to Marblehead, at the tip of the peninsula that forms Sandusky Bay, and instead of swinging east through Cleveland, as usual, I headed south: Route 4 to Bucyrus, 98 to Waldo, 23 to Columbus, which I skirted on I-270, and 33 past Lancaster to Logan. The air was pungent with fertilizer. There were acres of corn and pumpkins, the landscape bisected arbitrarily by train tracks. I was dazzled by a sign for SIAM: maybe it was the effect of all that corn, but it looked like MAIS spelled backwards. On entering Chatfield, I was gratified by a typo on a reader board: “Chatfield Canvas & Upholstrey.” Outside Delaware, Ohio, there was a cemetery advertising “? Price Graves.” I passed a turnoff for Gender Road. Maybe it was named for a guy name Gender, or maybe it was the road to a theme park where everything was masculine, feminine, or neuter.
The Paul A. Johnson Pencil Sharpener Museum is at the Hocking Hills Welcome Center. The museum is a freestanding prefab cabin decorated with a clutch of oversized colored pencils. Admission is free. I entered reverently. A plaque at the entrance commemorates the Reverend Johnson (1925–2010), and framed newspaper clippings document the collection, of more than 3,400 pencil sharpeners, and its move from Carbon Hill, in nearby Nelsonville, to the welcome center, where it officially reopened in 2011. Johnson started the collection after he retired from the ministry, in 1988. His wife, Charlotte, knowing he would need something to occupy him in retirement, gave him two pencil sharpeners in the shape of metal cars for Christmas. He spent the next eleven years searching “for unique designs and models.” One of his principal sources of pencil sharpeners was hospital gift shops.
Rees would approve of one of the rules governing Johnson’s acquisitions: the museum accepts no electric pencil sharpeners. (Johnson made an exception for a gorilla that one of his grandchildren gave him; its eyes glow red when the pencil is sharpened.) Johnson never used his pencil sharpeners. When asked why he collected them, he said, “Nobody else does it.”