I was honored to write about pencils for The Pen Company’s company blog. They’re a burgeoning pen shop in Hertfordshire, England, and asked me to write about why their audience, generally fountain pen users, might be interested in a pencil:

[C]hances are, you use a fountain pen as a tribute to days and technologies gone by. Like those who drive with a manual transmission or shave with a straight razor, fountain pens are a simpler, purer, more beautiful way to accomplish your task. There are no springs or roller balls. You just use a reserve of ink, an irrigation duct, and gravity to get ink to paper. Pencils are participating in that grand tradition, and in fact, is an even simpler, purer way to accomplish that goal. While the craft of pencil production has been honed over the decades, it’s fundamentally the same concept of writing as ancient cave drawings by human ancestors — you pick up a piece of carbon, rub it on a surface in a certain pattern, and flecks of that carbon stick to the surface in that pattern. [Link]