Tuesday Recommended: The Pencil

[To make up for missed weeks, please accept this first installment in what I intend to be an ongoing and occasional series of brief recommendations.]

I’ve been a pen guy my whole adult life, and a particular pen guy at that. The Muji 0.38 gauge black gel roller suits me for most engagements, but the 0.5 version is a chaotic mess of ink that renders my script illegible. Every now and again I enjoy the drier, muted ink of a traditional Bic Clic pen, or the Space Pen’s weighty insistence, but that’s really it.

I will not even acknowledge blue ink.

The only exceptions to this use are instances of notation: in books and on baseball scorecards, I use a pencil. When I was reading Finnegans Wake, I developed a system that used several different colors of highlighter, but hated it by the end, so I developed another system of lines, brackets, underlines, and their doubles to differentiate textual through-lines and important passages.

When I took notes in a notebook, however, I still used a pen. This meant switching between pen and pencil in some college classes, an affectation I insisted was actually a critical part of my conscious computational and organizational process. I may have somehow developed the belief that this was the sort of thing that impressed girls.

What I was missing, however, was the joy of writing in pencil. In the last few weeks, I’ve tried a series of pencils, both hard and soft leaded, and am flirting with the idea of spending an inordinate amount of money to purchase a set of cedar Blackfeet Indian Pencils, which were produced on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in Browning, Montana between 1972 and 1997.

Writing in pencil is a tactile experience that is very different from writing in ink. The aural quality is more organic, and I’ve come to enjoy the different forms of “scratching” that soft or hard leads produce. I have discovered benefits and drawbacks to both the cylindrical and the octagonal pencil design, and noticed that sometimes I cross things out, and other times I erase, though I’m not sure what exactly makes me do one or the other.

Ink certainly has not lost its appeal for me, but I am pleased the pencil has expanded its market share in my personal economy of scribbling. If you are not typically a pencil person, I recommend trying it.