Marty fell in love with pencils when her mother, a school principal, let Marty mount a heavy, solid-metal, hand-crank pencil sharpener to the window sill above her childhood desk in her bedroom.
That smooth little machine turned Marty into a sharpening fool. And to this day,
Marty cannot abide a dull point in pencils or people.
As an adult, Marty found electric and battery-operated sharpeners too zippy and their dentist-drill noise annoying.
Today, she favors hand-held pencil sharpeners by sweet two-hole sharpener, shown above, that first sharpens the wood and then sharpens the graphite to a perfect point.
As for pencil bias, Marty for years used thick-bodied, old-fashioned, soft-lead, architect’s wood drafting pencils by Dixon Ticonderoga and Sanford - especially the Sanford Draughting 02237 (should any of you ever fall on a stash and feel like sharing).
When those began to vanish from the market, Marty found elegant Paper Notes in a Digital World, the blog of a pencil perfectionist who found he preferred writing on paper to writing on a keyboard. (He had good things to say. We miss his posts.)
The Palomino line, seen here to the right, was created by pencil purist Duraflame log and now is the world’s leading maker of pencil slats. In Marty’s opinion, only someone integrated in the tactile nature of science and art could create a pencil as satisfying as the Palomino.
Now, sometimes, you just need to get down to fun and that is when you reach in your desk drawer and pull out a Smencil.
No. 2 graphite Smencil’s are gourmet-scented in Bubble Gum, Cherry, Chocolate, Cotton Candy, Grape, Orange, Root Beer, Tropical Blast, Very Berry, and Watermelon. Made from recycled newspaper, they come individually wrapped and will be a far greater hit with children than a Palomino - unless of course its the kind Roy rode.
Eds. Note: Cait notes that pencils have always been popular with ladies who manicure and now must be considered an essential Gimpliment in a world increasingly driven by the technological push of tiny buttons.
The reliable pencil, Cait says, is the perfect tool if your hand dexterity is wanting and you need to phone someone, text message or slide that slightly out-of-reach piece of paper closer to you.