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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Road Trip Through History, Nuremberg, Pt. 3: Merchant Houses

My Own True Love and I spent three afternoons touring museums in three merchant houses from slightly different periods: the Albrecht Dürer house from the early sixteenth century,(1) the Tucher house from the mid-16h century and the Stadtmuseum in the Fembo house, which dates from the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Together they tell…

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