For nearly 500 years, the pencil has remained unchanged. Okay, there have been pretenders to the throne – mechanical pencils (lose £5 every time you misplace one, spend £5 every time you refill it); ink pens (for those who arrogantly believe their every written thought should be indelible); computers (a broken computer destroys your life’s work; a broken pencil requires sharpening) – but still the pencil lives on. It is a design classic, a perfect marriage of simple form and endless function – the Swiss Army Knife of stationery.
Ask yourself what it is you want to do, and then pick up a pencil. Writers, artists, engineers, students, carpenters, composers – anyone who’s trying to make anything needs a pencil. Stuck for ideas? Set your mind free and doodle in the margins; get a second pencil and start drumming on the table; or just tilt your head back and try balancing the thing on your nose. You’ll soon think of something.
Like Frank Lloyd Wright sketching Fallingwater. Like Ernest Hemmingway’s first draft of A Farewell To Arms. Like Jack drawing Rose on the Titanic. Show me an iconic moment in history, art or design and I’ll show you how a pencil was involved; they are enmeshed in the DNA of civilisation and have driven our progress for centuries – as a tool, a medium and a style.
In an age when we increasingly submit to the digital and the intangible, the pencil is one of the last bastions of engaging creatively with the real world. You can feel what you write and draw, the soft sweep of graphite on paper fibres as comforting as it always has been, allowing thoughts to materialise the way you think them – flowing and constant. We were not meant to dream disjointedly through plastic keys, our grand ideas punctuated by arrhythmic tapping. We should dream ceaselessly, gracefully and immediately, the curve of every line and letter saying more about us than Times New Roman ever will.
And for just fifty pence. For the price of… well… nothing, really. What else costs fifty pence? For the uniquely low price of half of any item in a pound shop, you can invest in the gateway to other worlds filled with shapes and language and music. For just under the cost of a bunch of bananas, you can buy the key to infinite invention – the only limit to your imagination the length of the pencil as it satisfyingly decreases in direct proportion to your productivity, thoughtful bite marks appearing under the eraser until you are left with nothing more than a nub that is unmistakably and forensically yours, its lead point worn down to a distinctive slant by the grip and movement of your hand and no one else’s. Which is more than you can say for a bunch of bananas.
So go on. Treat yourself. Buy a pencil or ten. It’s the only 7.5 inches of pure pleasure you won’t get arrested for taking out in public.