On Topic: Pencil geeks

I had to look up the word “ferrule.” It comes from the Old French, and today it refers to that metal ring you find on the business end of a tool or walking cane that adds support and keeps the thing from wearing down or splitting before its sell-by date.

A ferrule also is one of the more noticeable oddities you'll find on a Blackwing 602 pencil. The tube-like, not-quite-gold-colored metal band is fixed on the end and has clipped to it a flat, replaceable eraser.

Flat as opposed to round as most erasers are, so as to cleverly keep it from rolling away on a desk or drawing table, or so rumor has it.

I first heard about this novel specimen of the most ubiquitous of office supplies from Mike Wagner, KCRG-TV assignment desk manager. He'd read about the pencil online and was enchanted - so he bought a box of them for a friend's birthday and another box for himself.

The allure of the Blackwing 602, he'd learned, was its soft lead, which made it easier to use for writing and drawing. The slogan: “Half the pressure, twice the speed.”

The other thing Mike discovered was the price. Back in its heyday, when the original manufacturer, Eberhard Faber, made them, the going rate was 50 cents a pencil.

That was always a lot for one pencil.

In 1861, Johann Eberhard Faber - of the Bavarian pencil-making family - debuted the first lead-pencil factory in America, along the East River in New York City.

The company he founded started making the Blackwing 602 (with its funky eraser that was not all that unusual back in those more idiosyncratic times) in the mid-1940s. That's according to David Seah on his DavidSeah/Gear website - one of scads of sites that have devoted space to the most famous pencil most of us never heard of.

But the company gave up production in 1998 due to lack of demand - surely in part due to the price tag and, according to Seah, when metal for the ferrule became harder to acquire.

And, too, it could just be we've come to prefer our erasers round.

Today, following one of the basic laws of economic supply and demand, a Blackwing 602 can be purchased on eBay in the vicinity of $30 to $40. Each.

In his online research, Mike Wagner luckily found pencil-maker Palomino had brought out its own “tribute” line of Blackwing 602s - at a more reasonable price point.

One of the other unique features of the Blackwing 602 - and here's what's truly charming about this whole tale - is that it has a fan base.

Just as with “Star Wars,” “Doctor Who” or curling, there are people who adore this pencil. They rave online about its “visual appeal.”

Among those who've stood up to proclaim their devotion to this stick of wood through the years have been novelist John Steinbeck, Warner Bros. animator Chuck Jones and composer Stephen Sondheim.

So I was intrigued by Mike's generous offer to give me one of the pencils from his own newly purchased box.

He cautioned that one drawback he'd discovered early on to the soft lead was that, for a sharp point, you needed to devote plenty of time with a sharpener. That in turn implied a short life span for the pencil itself.

What I first noticed when I began using it was the texture of the line it laid down - its “look” was softer and more gray, rather than a solid black. Kind of calming.

One commenter on a Blackwing 602-homage blog actually deemed the effect “magical.”

Less soothing was its balance. Most pencils - those yellow No. 2s you pilfer from the office supply room in great handfuls - tend to be weighted toward the front, the end you put to paper.

The Blackwing 602's ballast, on the other hand, is at the back, toward where the eraser clamps on. That likely contributes to its advertised less-pressure, more-speed characteristic.

For writing, when holding the pencil on an angle, I found I could compensate by cradling its heft in the valley between my thumb and first finger.

Drawing was a different matter. For illustrations, I tend to hold the pencil more vertically, and the Blackwing 602's weight distribution was more of an annoyance.

Plenty of pencils made specifically for drawing feel nearly weightless. As you roll one around with your fingertips, you suspect that if you let go, it would remain where it is, floating in air.

It could be that after all these years I've just never learned how to hold a pencil properly. (I seem to recall elementary school teachers making similar sinister remarks.)

Or it could be they're just pencils.

Some people love them and write odes in their honor. And some people use them to scratch inside their ears, then scribble out tomorrow's grocery list.