Thoreau’s pencils

In his recent novel Woodsburner, John Pipkin writes about the lives of Thoreau and other residents of Concord, the story centering around the day in 1844 when Thoreau and his young friend Edward Hoar accidentally burned down more than 300 acres of woodland.

What I found most interesting, though, was the detailed description of Thoreau’s contribution to the family pencil business. I knew that Thoreau pencils were renowned for their quality, and I once had the chance to see some of them at an art museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts—they were a beautiful shade of dark blue—but I never knew all this.

Henry experimented with new blends of plumbago paste in search of a better filling. He mixed plumbago with boot polish. He stirred in ash and tallow and spit. He added silt from the bottom of the Sudbury River. He sprinkled in manure. And then he mixed the graphite with Bavarian clay and found that, by carefully varying the ratio of the two, he could control the hardness and darkness of the resulting paste. He designated pencils of varying hardness by SS or S or H or HH. He made pencils in Carpenter’s Large, Round, and Oval sizes, black or red....

He invented a machine to slice the hardened lead cakes into thin rods. He invented another machine for drilling holes in pencil wood. To better grind the plumbago into the finest possible dust, he built a churnlike device that operated on its own once his sisters, Helen and Sophia, wound the clever spring. He devised a method for tamping the hardened lead rods into the hollowed wooden shafts. The shop overflowed with cords of pencils piled high, like a miniature forest laid low; Henry and his father walked among the little fallen trees like gargantuan lumberjacks.