![]() Prior to that, lead was used for writing and marking, beginning with the Romans and their lead styluses which …something something lead poisoning something (while you can’t pin something as complex as the collapse of a civilization solely on a metal, lead poisoning did plague many Romans). People didn’t really start using it for writing and drawing until 19 th century. Even then, it was used for marking sheep and, under Queen Elizabeth I, to line cannonball molds. While graphite had been used in pottery as early as 4,000 BCE, it wasn’t really used in many other way-at least, not in the western world-until the modern age in Europe, when a graphite mine was discovered in Cumbria, England. So, today, for National Pencil Day, I want to take some time to put some love on this seemingly omnipresent implement of magic!įirst, let’s look at some vintage, graphite-laden magic. It was arguably as much a love poem to my pencil as it was to my sweetheart. Though lost to time and probably having biodegraded in a landfill in Texas, those briefly tangible words stuck with me longer than they would have otherwise and I was able to use the best ones and craft them into a much better poem a decade later.Īll that is to say that I once did a very meta thing by writing a poem with my pencil about the words that were brimming with life in my pencil. 2 pencil-and gave those words a tangibility that they hadn’t had inside my head. But still, I wrote it down-with a good old-fashioned No. Before I could speak them into the air, my pencil tenderly, if impatiently, expressed the words “I love you.” I never showed that poem to anyone and I have long since lost the page it was written on, probably for the better: it was very lovesick and pretty cringe. A long time ago, in a youthhood far, far away, I wrote a love poem about all of the words stored inside my pencil and how they spilled and tumbled out onto the page in a rush to put those three words of longing and hope and joy and trepidation into the physical world. ![]()
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