From the Archives: A Brief History of the Pencil

In yesterday’s newsletter (1),  I went down a research rabbit hole, looking for the difference, if any, between using blue pencils and red pencils as an editing tool.  (Plus the pencil’s use by military and authoritarian censors, which is the place where I leaped into the rabbit hole.)  In the process, I went back to…

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A Brief History of the Pencil

One of the unexpected things I learned during our visit to Nuremberg over the holidays is that the city was the home to the first mass-produced graphite lead pencils, beginning in 1662. Before we visited Nuremberg, I hadn’t given the history of pencils much thought.* In fact, the only piece of pencil history that I…

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