Pencil

Often overlooked, tucked into a drawer or stuffed into a case, the pencil is a tool whose simplicity belies its usefulness and indeed, as a work of design and technology that endures around the globe, its greatness.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

A cylinder of baked graphite and clay in a wood case, the pencil creates as it is being destroyed. To love a pencil is to use it, to sharpen it, and to essentially destroy it.

Pencils were used to sketch civilization’s greatest works of art. Pencils were there marking the choices in the earliest democratic elections. Even when used haphazardly to mark out where a saw’s blade should make a cut, a pencil is creating. Pencil offers a deep look at this common, almost ubiquitous, object.

Pencils are a simple device that are deceptively difficult to manufacture. At a time when many use cellphones as banking branches and instructors reach students online throughout the world, pencil use has not waned, with tens of millions being made and used annually. Carol Beggy sketches out how the lowly pencil is still a mighty useful tool.

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

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