Confessions of a pencil geek

Sunday Times Lifestyle - February 9

TELFORD VICE, Johannesburg

The future is a vein of graphite snug in a sleeve of wood. It needs neither charging nor batteries, works at any altitude, comes standard with a rubbery delete button, is effortlessly portable, cannot leak, smells good, and gives ample warning of the end of its usefulness.

It doubles as a chewable thought provoker, an impromptu drumstick and a bookmark. It could, if needs be, inflict the same kind of damage on an assailant as a pocket knife.

It’s a pencil and it rocks.

I own green and purple numbers with “The Championships Wimbledon” on their shafts, another that proclaims “Lord’s, the Home of Cricket”. Others, hunted and gathered from the Eiffel Tower, say “Paris”, and one, weighty and serious in its only just bearable greyness of being, made entirely of graphite.

Like the place it came from, a shop in Barcelona in Antonio Gaudi’s La Pedrera, less a building than a pile of bleached brontosaurus bones re-imagined by Salvador Dali and Yuri Gellar, this pencil is a magical thing. Just like, in another way, my mamba - austerely black, from point to eraser - inscribed “I write what I like”. What else would Steve say?

None of these pencils do anything so common as click. But not all of them are created equal. If they are cheap they will be nasty and brutish, and soon they will be short. The one from Lord’s, for instance, cost a pretty penny but is a lot less lordly in action than the splendid splinter emblazoned “Derbyshire County Cricket Club” I was happy to accept for free in the county ground’s pressbox almost two years ago. It’s still going strong and smooth, but all I got from Lord’s were less than splendid splinters and brittle lead.

I was happy in my graphite haphazardness until, in June, 2012, in Pedlars, a shop off Portobello Road in London, I discovered the past and with it the future. To wit, the Blackwing has been the world’s finest pencil for decades and it will be for many more.

It’s wood is Californian cedar. It’s lead takes to the page like ice-cream that shall not melt. It sharpens as surely and keenly as the edge of a scalpel. It describes curves on the page as if it has intimate knowledge of Sophia Loren’s hips. If I didn’t know better, I would say this wondrous thing has a heart and a soul. I bought a dozen, and I will need many more.

Of the Palomino Blackwing, that is. I owned up to my passion too late to know the joy of writing with the famous Eberhard Faber Blackwing. The last of them rolled into the retail sunset in 1998. The Blackwing had survived being sold to Faber-Castell in 1988 and to Sanford Corp. in 1994. But, four years later, it was rubbed out, seemingly for good.

The reason for its demise made geeks go gaga. The machine used to make the centremetre-long aluminum clips that held the removable eraser in place inside the ferrule - the outer part of aluminum bit that housed the eraser - and which enabled us to flip the eraser 180 degrees to get more rub for our Rand, up and broke. So it was, it seemed, bye-bye Blackwing, bye-bye.

Not quite. Five vintage EF Blackwing 602s could set you back US$365. A mere US$31 could get you used seven stubs. Ridiculous? Yes. But we are not dealing with any old vein of graphite snug in a sleeve of wood. Wands just like them were wielded by John Steinbeck, Truman Capote, Stephen Sondheim, Vladimir Nabokov and Quincy Jones. They are conduits of genius.

For all this, and more, I blame Robert Lipsyte, formerly of the New York Times. In his book, “An Accidental Sportswriter” - part memoir, part instruction manual for those of us who make our living scribbling on sport - Lipsyte hands down the sensible advice that journalists should compile their contact books in pencil. When details change, all that’s needed to keep things relevant is a swipe of an eraser. Store them on a SIM card instead? Are you young, mad or both?

Who could be bothered to switch from pen to pencil to take down a telephone number? Soon, pens were out of my writing life, then out of my life. I keep one around for that flavour of fascists who insists on forms being completed in black ink.

Sadly, there are altitudes at which my pen balks, there is no deleting its mis-strokes, it is entirely likely to leak, it is soullessly smelless, and will give up the inky ghost at the worst possible moment, like under the gaze of a JFK immigration officer.

But, hey, it’s a mere pen. It can roll, but it can’t rock.