"the humble pencil"

16 May 2026: After sitting on my bedside table for nearly ten years (!), I am finally digging into Laura Dassow Walls' biography of Thoreau. I am still in the early chapters and really loved this little excerpt about his family's pencil business, something that I have always wanted to know more about:

"Thanks to Henry's improvements, for a time Thoreau pencils were the best in America, sought by artists, engineers, surveyors, architects, carpenters, and writers--everyone who depended on a good pencil. Thoreau's own working method coevolved with the family pencils. Quite literally, Thoreau's writing career rested on the humble pencil, so much a part of him that, when he drew up a list of travel essentials, he forgot to mention a pencil, the same way he forgot to mention air to breathe or water to drink" (40).

Thinking about how lost I feel sometimes when I don't have a pen or pencil on hand...

(Also thinking about setting a goal of moving a certain number of books from that beside table--and the other one--this summer. We'll see. Right now I am working on two.)

Work Cited

Walls, Laura Dassow. Henry David Thoreau: A Life. The U of Chicago P, 2017.