Blackwing: Bogus?

There is an art display space next door to my office building, and today I decided to go in for the first time. Through the window, I spotted some interesting looking pencils, seemingly up for grabs, and decided to go see if I could score a free one. Little did I know I was about to learn volumes about a part of our culture I knew nothing about, nor knew even existed when I woke up this morning.

The show was being sponsored by a company called Palomino, which has taken over production of the Cadillac of pencils, the Blackwing. Blackwing, according to many, is the best pencil that has ever been made. It claims to require just half the pressure and therefore to allow one to write or draw at twice the speed they would with an ordinary pencil. (This claim is actually printed on the pencil in gold letters.) I had no idea there was even a difference between pencils - though I'd noticed that some had sort of crappy erasers - and so the notion that these were selling for $40 a piece for a while was pretty shocking. The brochure I collected as I entered the exhibit informed me that Duke Ellington, E.B. White, Eugene O'Neill, J.D. Salinger, Leonard Bernstein, Faye Dunaway, Steven King, Stephen Sondheim, Thomas Wolfe, Truman Capote, and Vladmir Nabokov, among others, would use nothing else. Apparently John Steinbeck went through 60 of them a day. (This was before they were $40 a pop.) The pencils have a unique, cramped metal eraser bracket at the top, and this was apparently the cause of their downfall; the machine that made this part broke, and so few of the pencils were being sold that the company's owner deemed the cost of repair an unwise expenditure. So the company couldn't make any more pencils and went belly up, and the pencils became scarce enough to be marked up to astronomical heights on eBay. Palomino, however, has taken over, and pencils.com is selling 12-pencil boxes of Blackwings again, this time for $19.95. As I wandered around the exhibit, I wondered whether even this was too much. That's $1.66 per pencil. On Amazon, a box of 12 Dixon Ticonderogas goes for $4.09, ($0.34 per pencil). After enjoying some cool drawings and a 40 foot timeline of the Blackwing, done, obviously, all in pencil, I headed back to my office to do some very unscientific testing of my own.

First, a physical examination. The paint was thick and smooth, and the wood felt almost satiny. No splinter risk here. The eraser was a flat, thin, black rectangle instead of the pink cylinder I was used to. Interesting. It was certainly more stylish than a Dixon, and felt really good in my hand. It was the difference between holding a plastic fork and a freshly polished silver one.

I then wrote a sentence with the Blackwing, then one with the Dixon. Hmmm. Not too much of a difference, really. I guess I did have to press a bit harder with the Dixon to make my letters as dark as those that came out of the Blackwing, but the difference wasn't really noticeable.

I decided I needed numbers. Setting a timer for one minute, I wrote my name with the Blackwing as many times as I could. The result: 31.25 times. After giving my arm a rest for a few minutes, I repeated this exercise with the Dixon. That's when I began to notice some differences. First, I found myself pressing harder almost immediately to get the same kind of letters. I should state that this was a completely subconscious move, but one I noticed after my experience with the Blackwing. By the end of the minute, my forearm felt downright fatigued. Second, the lead wasn't wearing evenly. After every few names, I found myself rotating the pencil slightly to access the sharper edge of the lead as I wore away the other side. I hadn't had to do this once with the Blackwing, but it didn't occur to me until I started doing it with the Dixon. Very interesting. The most interesting thing of all, though, is that despite these two handicaps, I actually wrote my name more times (33) with the Dixon. Part of me wants to write this off as practice effects, but since I chose to write my name, I don't think an extra minute of practice is likely to have improved my speed at shaping the letters I've written more times than any others throughout my life.

Despite these mixed results, I find myself drawn to the Blackwing. Maybe it's because I'd love to consider myself in league with E.B. White and company, but it certainly is an elegant writing utensil. Maybe I should invest in a box. At the rate at which I go through pencils in our age of computers, my $20 investment may end up lasting me the rest of my life.