The Pencil King

On March 2, 1879, John Eberhard Faber, German-American pencil manufacturer who built the first large-scale pencil factory in the United States, died at the age of 56. From the article:

"The Pencil King

Green-Wood Cemetery is up the hill of Twenty-fifth Street off Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn and through a grand stone entrance, like something out of medieval times. On a recent Sunday, in the chapel, in front of a stained-glass window depicting the Resurrection, two young women stood at a table on which were arranged two dozen different kinds of pencils for sale, along with a few quality handheld sharpeners, erasers, and black pencil cases embossed with “CWPE2015”: Caroline Weaver Pencil Enterprise 2015. After a feeding frenzy by the crowd of pencil enthusiasts—artists, writers, history buffs, Brooklyn boosters, grave-rubbers, schoolgirls, and fans of David Rees, the author of “How to Sharpen Pencils”—Caroline Weaver, serious-looking, with straight black eyebrows, offered a brief history of the pencil, concentrating on the pencil business in nineteenth-century New York, one of whose leading figures was Eberhard Faber, an occupant of Green-Wood Cemetery since 1879.

Weaver had brought with her a few boxes of vintage pencils: Dixon’s “Ticonderoga” Pencils, made by the Joseph Dixon Crucible Company, in Jersey City, with graphite mined in Ticonderoga; Blu-Blak Noblot Indelible Pencils, which struck fear into the heart of anyone who accidentally tattooed herself in childhood; and original Eberhard Faber Black Wings (“Feathery Smooth Pencils”), bearing an image of a boat with a black sail skimming over a line of evenly spaced waves.

Weaver had prepared a PowerPoint presentation, which she embarked on somewhat tentatively. A shot of the world’s oldest surviving pencil (it is a tool that tends to get used up before anyone thinks to put it in a museum) and one of the graphite mine in Borrowdale brought us, via Nuremberg, to New York, where John Eberhard Faber, a fourth-generation German pencil-maker, opened a stationery store in 1850. The United States had homegrown pencil-makers in John Thoreau (the father of Henry David), who developed the graphite-grading system, and Joseph Dixon, but Eberhard Faber, who opened a pencil factory in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, came to dominate the market. He advertised the Mongol—a yellow pencil named for his favorite soup, purée Mongole—by highlighting its silence, of all things. A vintage ad in Weaver’s collection shows a girl writing with a Mongol while a boy next to her cups his ear so that he can hear her scratching.

Faber had a machine that produced a special flat ferrule—the metal band at the top of the pencil—and a clip that made it possible to extend the eraser. (The eraser had been improved by adding pumice to the rubber, to give it grit.) When that machine broke, the Black Wing went out of production. A few years ago, Cal Cedar, a California pencil-maker, revived these quality pencils, which are now manufactured in Japan.

Weaver took questions. Someone asked about the tattoo of a pencil on the inside of her left forearm. She said it was her “gateway pencil”: a matte black Ticonderoga, now discontinued, that her mother had favored. A pencil achieves its ideal length, according to Weaver, when it has been sharpened three times.

“Are you opposed to pens?” a man asked. Weaver said she was not. There are probably more fountain-pen fetishists than pencil fanciers, she added. Ink lovers need not feel threatened by the graphite crowd.

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It was time to visit the Faber monument, where Weaver was going to do a grave-rubbing with an original Eberhard Faber Black Wing. The office-supply nerds followed, on a path alongside a pond. Two women accompanying their young daughter said that her school, P.S. 10 in Brooklyn, required every student to have “two dozen pre-sharpened pencils.” Of a brand of pencils manufactured in Mexico, someone muttered, “They break a lot.” A filmmaker wearing a “JODOROWSKY” T-shirt said that he likes to make notes in the margins of books and needs a pencil that won’t smudge. He was carrying a Mitsubishi Uni HB.

The monument is granite, tall and tasteful, with an urn on top. Izzy Natale, one of three pencil ladies who help Weaver in the shop (there are no pencil dudes), had carved a Black Wing down to a long rich graphite rod that could be wielded broadside against the stone. Weaver tore two sheets from a pad of special grave-rubbing paper, taped them to the base of the monument, and rubbed. The block letters emerged:

EBERHARD FABER

Died March 2d 1879

Aged

56 Years 2 Mos & 24 Days

His obituary ran in the Times on March 4th of that year. He died mysteriously. Doctors ordered him to go to Europe for his health, but it did not improve, and in the end they were completely baffled by the cause of death. “Lead poisoning,” someone said. ♦"