
Inside One of America’s Last Pencil Factories - uptown
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/12/magazine/inside-one-of-americas-last-pencil-factories.html
======
Stratoscope
One really charming bit: They make one color of pastel pencils each week to
keep the colors from cross contaminating. Maria, who works on the pastel
pencil line, does her nails to match the color they will be making and picks
shirts to match too. There's a picture of her hands and that week's pastel
extrusions in the article.

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jeffwass
My daughter just quoted this Spike Milligan poem to me last night :

    
    
      “Said Hamlet to Ophelia,
      I'll draw a sketch of thee.
      What kind of pencil shall I use?
      2B or not 2B?”

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jakecopp
I couldn't help but think of the wonderful essay "I, Pencil" [1], and how no
one person knows how to make a pencil.

[1]:
[http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html](http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html)

~~~
dekhn
that's a nicely written story but none of it is really true. You can make a
straightforward pencil manually with a little effort. It's all documented,
because this stuff was figured out and documented hundreds of years ago.
Having a degree in chemistry or physics helps, but it's not necessary.

~~~
jasode
_> You can make a straightforward pencil manually_

You're inadvertently moving the goal posts. A "straightforward pencil" isn't
what that 1958 essay is about. It's talking about the modern manufactured
pencils[1] commonly used in schools.

It's very unlikely that a single person on Earth knows how to make such
pencils from raw materials. The person who knows where to find graphite and
how to mine for it will not be the same person who knows how to formulate the
paint. Neither of them knows how to chop down raw trees and make small hexagon
shaped tubes to hold the pencil lead. Then there's the steel or brass ring
coupling the eraser to the the wood. There's also the chemistry and materials
science to make the synthetic rubber for the eraser. No single person on the
planet knows how to make that type of pencil.

[1]
[https://www.google.com/search?q=no+2+school+pencil&source=ln...](https://www.google.com/search?q=no+2+school+pencil&source=lnms&tbm=isch)

~~~
dekhn
I take a very different view (similar to the guy who made a toaster from
materials mined from the earth): as a maker, with a PhD in biophysics, I can
learn how to do all those things and, through an incredibly tedious process,
reproduce what they've done. For pencils, that's pretty easy. Graphite mining,
paint formulation, wood sourcing and processing, ferrule production and
application, rubber polymer manufacture and application- those are all
straightforward industrial things that a well-educated person can learn to do
with a combination of the Internet and a good university library.

A much harder thing woudl be to reproduce a modern quantum physics lab- I
don't think any one person could master all the techniques required to do that
from raw materials. Too much tech stack to walk u.

~~~
jasode
_> I take a very different view (similar to the guy who made a toaster from
materials mined from the earth)_

Sure, you _can_ take a different view but that doesn't change the truth of the
essay. Citing an experimental toaster is repeating the same
mischaracterization in your previous comment. The essay is not about making
"any usable pencil" or "any toaster".

It seems like you want the _" I, Pencil"_ essay to be something other than
what it is. You want a MacGyver[1] themed essay but instead, got an unwanted
essay about the cooperation required to make a simple _manufactured_ object.

 _> I can learn [...] a well-educated person can learn [...]_

The essay isn't about what a single person can _learn_. Instead, it highlights
the counterintuitive point that no single person with the complete knowledge
_exists_.

 _> A much harder thing woudl be to reproduce a modern quantum physics lab_

Yes, things like silicon computer chips, communications satellites orbiting
Earth, and particle accelerators are much harder but it misses the poetry of
the essay. We already have intuitive sense that no single person knows how to
build advanced technology projects. The author deliberately chose something
that looked deceptively "simple" and dissected how much coordination in
society it takes to make it. The "hidden" complexity is high enough to exceed
the knowledge of a single person.

Take just the wood of the pencil. I'd have to chop trees. I don't even know
how to make an ax tool to chop the tree. Sure, I guess I could learn how to
make an ax -- which means I guess I could learn how to smelt steel... which
means I have to learn... and so on. The groove channel in the wood to hold the
lead?!? Another series of rabbit holes of learning to manufacture that cut.
Glue? Again, the learning is not impossible (given enough time). It still
doesn't change the fact that no single person knows it all. I suppose I could
make _a_ thing that people might call a "a pencil" in a few days... but to
replicate _that_ specific "Number 2 hexagon painted pencil with a synthetic
rubber eraser"?!? That would take me a lifetime of learning. Most of the
learning time is spent learning how to reinvent tools that make other tools
that are several steps removed from the final assembly of the pencil.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacGyver#Plot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacGyver#Plot)

------
GeorgeRichard
Great photographs: it's really difficult to make a good photo of a black
subject against a black background. The first three images in the photo essay
---in particular the third---show that, with skill, it can be done.

~~~
sillysaurus3
Most of this comes down to putting the camera on a tripod, then using a button
that keeps the shutter open for a long period of time. Drop the ISO way down
and then hold it open for 0.5s. Features like that aren't really available in
smartphone form, and it felt like a loss.

Lighting is just as important, of course, but you can achieve some interesting
effects just by giving light more time to enter a physically stable camera.

EDIT: I changed my mind. If you look at the photos carefully, you can see most
of the effect is from a fill light behind the camera. If that light source
doesn't exist, no amount of holding the shutter open will make it seem like it
does.

~~~
munificent
> If you look at the photos carefully, you can see most of the effect is from
> a fill light behind the camera.

Yeah, I was going to say what's really going on here is the photographer has a
nice big soft box behind the camera (or maybe even just a diffuser on an on-
camera flash). That way all of the flat surfaces facing the camera show
pleasant highlights and then the dark areas define the edges of those.

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saagarjha
> Ferrules — the metal bands that cinch around the bases of erasers — are
> loaded onto a conveyor and sent to a tipping machine.

I always wondered what these were called.

~~~
Broken_Hippo
Just to give you another use for the word:

The metal bit that holds paintbrush bristles to the handle holds the same
name.

~~~
dboreham
Um, that's not "another use for the word" : it is in fact the exact same use
as all the other examples. Perhaps you meant "another place where a ferrule is
used".

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beisner
It’s weird, just mentioning non-mechanical pencils brings me back to how
coveted Dixon Ticonderoga pencils were when I was in grade school. The Crayola
of pencils, standing out in a sea of Roseart.

~~~
jeffwass
On a slightly different note - does anyone have any suggestions for a good
pencil _sharpener_?

The screwed-into-a-tabletop ones we used to have at school in the 80’s and
90’s were great, with the crank and rotating blades. Was easy to make razor-
sharp pencil points.

At home, with my kids, we only have those common cheapo sharpeners with a
single angled razor blade. They sort-of work, poorly.

With those it’s too easy for the pencil point to break off, often the planed
curl of wood will snap at the boundary between the two wooden halves of the
pencil. It’s not smooth, and very hard to get a nice sharp point with them.

~~~
LeifCarrotson
> _The screwed-into-a-tabletop ones we used to have at school in the 80’s and
> 90’s were great, with the crank and rotating blades. Was easy to make razor-
> sharp pencil points._

Then get one of those?

X-ACTO KS Manual Pencil Sharpener:
[https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00006IEDY/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_zPGw...](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00006IEDY/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_zPGwAbBA2SXPX)

$7.91.

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ezequiel-garzon
Dear native English speakers: Does the following excerpt make sense to you?
“Packing graphite, which is the consistency of sand, ...” I would have
expected “which _has_ the consistency of sand”. Thanks!

~~~
mturmon
This native speaker thinks you have a point. The “consistency” is a property
possessed by the graphite, thus “has”. The “is” suggests that graphite is to
be directly equated with consistency.

Comparatives are always tricky in English, but consider:

“Ball bearings, which have the smoothness of plate glass, ...”

You would not put “are” for “have” in the above. You can generate a lot of
similar examples.

~~~
_delirium
I agree with your smoothness example, but with consistency both "has" and "is"
are common. Usage seems to vary by specific object and context.

One example where almost all authors go with "is": there are thousands of
recipes saying to heat butter until it "is" a particular consistency, versus
only a handful saying to heat it until it "has" a particular consistency.
Compare
[https://www.google.com/search?q=%22until+the+butter+is+the+c...](https://www.google.com/search?q=%22until+the+butter+is+the+consistency%22)
vs.
[https://www.google.com/search?q=%22until+the+butter+has+the+...](https://www.google.com/search?q=%22until+the+butter+has+the+consistency%22).

~~~
mturmon
Nice examples. It would take more of a grammar nut than I am (and I read
Garner's book cover to cover) to untangle it. I'm not able to detect any
relevant search terms, either.

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mrob
Is there any real use for high quality wooden pencils beyond nostalgia? A
leadholder (a.k.a. clutch pencil) gives you the same flexibility and control
with more consistent balance as you sharpen it. Cheap wooden pencils still
have some use because they're the cheapest erasable writing implement, but the
cost is unlikely to be competitive if they're made in America.

~~~
yeukhon
Not really. I don't know anyone who use clutch pencil so I am not sure how it
compared to wooden /mechanical pencils. Regardless, pen seems more dominant
now in school.

I was born in the early 90s, so both wooden pencils and mechanical pencils
meant a lot to me. I still have two pencil lead left in my right palm because
I accidentally stabbed my hands when I was a kid - pretty sure most of us who
have used pencils regularly back then had experienced this.

Eraser was also a big deal to me and my classmates. I owned regular plain
erasers, fruit-flavor erasers, and animal-shape erasers before. But I
preferred the slightly expensive Japanese brand called "Sakurafoam eraser"
[1].

I am not sure when our future generations will stop writing by hand
completely, but eventually pen and pencil will see the fate as scribe and
Chinese brush pen which are uncommon now.

[1]: [https://imgur.com/a/g30c9](https://imgur.com/a/g30c9)

~~~
cultofmetatron
... did you say fruit _flavoured_ eraser???

~~~
Stratoscope
Fruit _scented_ anyway. You weren't really supposed to eat them, although I
can't speak for GP. (I used to eat match heads when I was a kid, so I can
hardly criticize anyone's eating habits.)

You can still get them, for example the Lil Juicies:

[https://www.ooly.com/lil-juicies-fruit-scented-erasers-
set-o...](https://www.ooly.com/lil-juicies-fruit-scented-erasers-set-of-6/)

------
lunchladydoris
For anyone interested in rekindling a passion for pencils, I would highly
recommend checking out the Erasable podcast [0]. A podcast about pencils
sounds impossibly dull but somehow it works.

[0]: [http://www.erasable.us/](http://www.erasable.us/)

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Finbarr
Totally fascinating. Reminds me of this NYT piece about an artisanal pencil
shop: [https://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/05/21/fashion/a-pencil-
shop-...](https://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/05/21/fashion/a-pencil-shop-for-
texting-the-old-fashioned-way.html)

~~~
goldenkey
Damn, now I want that IBM pencil!

[https://i.imgur.com/BFUL4I6.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/BFUL4I6.jpg)

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kenbolton
Too funny, this article was written by Sam Anderson, the comedy partner of
David Rees, author of How to Sharpen Pencils,
[http://www.artisanalpencilsharpening.com/](http://www.artisanalpencilsharpening.com/).

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danmaz74
> Pastel extrusions, used for colored pencils, are laid by hand onto grooved
> wooden boards, where they will dry before being placed in pencil slats.

It blows my mind that they do this manually... I wonder how often, if at all,
they update their production line.

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exikyut
As soon as I remembered pencils had graphite in them (duh) I was reminded of
this video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YBwDNfOaxU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YBwDNfOaxU)

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owenversteeg
Those photos are absolutely gorgeous. If anyone's hoping for TLDR, the article
is mostly incredible photos: go take a look.

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jhoechtl
If you ever wondered how to sharpen a pencil?

[https://www.mhpbooks.com/books/how-to-sharpen-
pencils/](https://www.mhpbooks.com/books/how-to-sharpen-pencils/)

~~~
kenbolton
The author of the article and this book write and perform comedy together.

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jimnotgym
I am intrigued that they are made of cedar. I thought pencils were made of
tulipwood which is poplar. Maybe just in Europe. I wonder what kind of cedar,
guessing it's western red cedar?

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SubiculumCode
I bought 2 packs of their cedar pencils. Very nice quality pencil that don't
disintergrate in your sharpener.

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b0rsuk
What will happen to pen plotters and other cool geekery once all pencils are
gone ?!

