It’s all been said before, but there is a certain pleasure to using a simple, wooden pencil. We live in a world with email access 24/7, blog subscriptions, online calendars, e-books, word processors, laser printers, and other forms of written content with no physical contact with the letters that form as a product of our brain.

Pencils are different. You grip a strong, wooden barrel. Part of the instrument you hold rubs off on the paper. Because of the temporal nature of the pencil, you feel more connected to the letters or image you are laying down on the page, and it seems to be as much a labor of the hand as it is a labor of the mind.

Andy lives and works in San Francisco, California — he moved to the Barbary Coast in 2014 from Fort Wayne, Indiana, his hometown for a job on a design team at a large software company that makes large design software apps.

Formerly the chief contributor to the PencilThings.com blog (now, sadly, defunct), Andy is no stranger to the blogosphere. He prefers triangular pencils, but doesn’t often use one because he hasn’t yet encountered a sharpener that can carve a perfect point on the tip. This may be attributed to the awkward hold he has on the sharpener, as he is left-handed, but he’s still looking.

Nowadays, this blog is quiet because he spends most of his time podcasting with Johnny Gamber and Tim Wasem at The Erasable Podcast, a bi-weekly show about, well, the same stuff this blog is about.

You can read more of Andy’s writing at Andy.coffee.

To contact Andy, or to suggest a product for review, please email him at andy@woodclinched.com, or use this form below: