8B 10B 12B

Sophie admires Beatrix’s drawing…

...

Sophie: What did you use to draw that?

Beatrix: An 8B.

Sophie: No! Really? An 8B? I thought they only went up to 6B. What’s it write like? Draw like?

Beatrix: Too soft for writing. Good for dark parts. Very soft so my arm gets black. I start with a 2B for the outline, and move up to 4B, then 6B for the darker areas. 8B is like using crayon, or chalk.

Sophie: For shadows?

Beatrix: 8B. But they go way higher. 10B, 12B even I’ve heard of.

Sophie: How black do you need?

Beatrix: And then there’s an E grade. Really, really black.

...

Forensic Linguistics

Pencillist struck again.

Struck?

Leaving a comment on the pencil case blog, July 6. Every time I write something about pencils, out he pops. Leaves a comment signing himself only as “Pencillist.”

Is it someone you know?

Narrowed it down to two people. One is an elderly Brit living in Cumberland who never seems to know where he is, the other is a Paraguayan financier who never seems sure of who he is. Oddly, they both write in the same style.

And those stylistic features are…?

Sort of a cross between the forthright haughtiness of the Economist and the sprawling sentences of Bulwer-Lytton. Pithy aphorisms punctuating extended post-nominal modifications.

A lot write like that.

Sure. However, the last comment made me quite sure it was either the Brit or the Paraguayan. It opens with an ironic evaluation “At last…” and moves towards a disapproving “Disappointingly…” I know strong feelings drive both of these characters through their lives and this pervades their prose. Then there’s the three word closing. “Good goat though.” They both have a particular penchant for this pattern. I often find in their emails three word sentences like “Obvious from context,” or “Depends on perspective.”

And is the goat a red herring?

Like a wild sheep chase? Puzzle. In the end, it's still a toss-up between the Leicester in the Lake District or the Perendale in Paraguay.

What Pencillist said...

"At last a posting about something serious. Most people take pencils and what to put them in far too lightly. Then there is the question of what to put in pencils. Recently I was intrigued by the heading "Goat in pencil" and rushed off into cyberspace to find out if this was anything like passing a camel through the eye of a needle. Disappointingly it turned out to be some watercolourist called Tracy drawing a goat in pencil. Good goat though."

...

Marketing pencils

I read about this pencil maker, a count, who threw 144 pencils out a window to show they were stronger and better than other pencils.

Were they?

Apparently not one broke. Amazing, huh. Anyway, I wanted one of these pencils for myself. I can’t afford luxury goods but I thought I could stretch to a good quality pencil. I found one in Yuzawaya. Only 80 yen.

That much? You get a whole dozen Chinese 2Bs for only a hundred yen at the one coin store. Does yours write well?

You bet. Look. I proved that the German pencil writes much better than the Chinese pencil. I ran a scientific test. I wrote a word using a 2B Chinese pencil and the same word using a 2B Faber-Castell. Controlled all the variables. Temperature, lighting, humidity, speed of writing. Even wrote the words at the same time.

Yourself?

Of course. What’s the point of using two different people? I used the Chinese pencil in my left hand and the German pencil in my right hand.

A somewhat skewed test, wouldn’t you say? So how does it handle? What will the German instrument do that a Chinese one won’t?

All right. Not a lot in it. But you get this feeling of power, that you are using something that costs ten times the price of anyone else’s pencil.

2B or not 2B?

mm 01 by Kimiyo
Originally uploaded by mapmakr.

Appropriate, sustainable technology = a pencil. Marvellous things. There's actually more to them than meets the eye. From the technical point of view see The Pencil Pages, The Pencil Museum in Cumberland, aptly in Beatrix Potter country, or The Pencil Place for collectors. And people even blog about pencils. See the indefatigable Paper and Pencil.

Beyond the technical, some become lyrical about the joys of pencils. "A #2 pencil and a dream can take you anywhere." Joyce Myers. Get down what you see and then redraw or edit as Truman Capote put it: "I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil." And when you don't have a pencil? "One must always draw, draw with the eyes, when one cannot draw with a pencil." Balthus