The pencil ledger

At the start of January I put a jar on my desk and decided to count the pencils I finished. A pencil counts as finished when I can no longer hold it without my fingers hurting, which is a real standard that I will defend.

By the end of November the numbers were in.

Pencil	Finished	Notes
Soft, round barrel	9	Good for margins, smudges everything
Medium, hex	14	The workhorse
Hard, hex	3	Too thin a line, I lose it on the page
Red	1	Bought for a single task, never again

Twenty-seven pencils in eleven months. Almost exactly one every twelve days. I expected fewer, and I also expected to feel something, and what I felt mostly was surprise that the medium hex had won so cleanly.¹

1 The soft one is the one I like, but I use the medium. This is a habit I have noticed in other parts of my life.

The pencils I kept for the last stub, the one I can no longer hold, are in a jar. There are eleven of them now, ranging from a finger’s width to the size of a thumbnail. I have no plan for them. I just cannot throw out something I have used completely.

The red one was a mistake. I bought it to mark corrections on a printed draft. By the third page I had decided that red ink makes me feel like I am being graded, which is the opposite of the point.

I keep a sharpener in the desk drawer, a small brass one, and I sharpen on Sunday evenings. It takes under two minutes and is, I have decided, the best part of the week.