My Favorite Pencil
Writing with Blackwing is like wetting warm toast with butter. He slips. Palomino Blackwing 602 is my favorite pencil.
This is not a controversial position, and this name is familiar to anyone who is even slightly familiar with the pencil community.
These pencils have experienced a renaissance – they were popular with some artists in the sixties, most notably the cartoonists Chuck Jones and Disney Ollie Johnston. Unfortunately, the pencil line was discontinued in 1998 and vintage Blackwings were available on eBay for $ 50 a pencil. But I don’t really care if the original pencil was better. Pencils were revived in 2010 by California Cedar Products , making Blackwings cheap and affordable even for casual pencil users. Relatively cheap – a dozen pencils cost about twenty dollars. Is it worth much more than a regular pencil that you can buy at an office supply store? Probably no. I don’t know your heart. But it’s worth it for me.
The leash is soft, but not too soft. The silly slogan embossed on the side of the pencil is quite true: “The pressure is half, the speed is twice as high.” This roughly matches the writing experience with Blackwing. In your experience of using a pencil, the # 2 commonality has probably prevailed; Blackwing graphite is softer, which means it leaves a mark on paper with less pressure. And yet, nicely, it doesn’t seem too bland. It doesn’t smear very much like a charcoal pencil. This, like me, is the right amount of softness.
And because lead is softer, the point dulls faster than regular # 2, so you need to have a sharpener handy. Sharpening a pencil with a knife is a primitive business, but it will also work.
If you are one of those who decide to use a pencil, you will have to make a choice: wooden or mechanical? Throughout my studies, I have always preferred mechanical pencils for science and mathematics due to their tiny accuracy when writing equations. If consistency and minuscule precision are your top priorities, you should definitely opt for a mechanical pencil. Blackwing isn’t for tiny marks. This is for the generalities that we annotate everyday life with.
The light bronze paint on the Blackwing is a nice, satisfying glossy finish, allowing for an absent-minded twirl of the pencil when I’m not writing. When I play with it, I enjoy feeling it between my fingers. As far as pencils go, it seems luxurious.
The eraser is fine. After years of writing with pens, I found that I rarely erase anything. Maybe this is the trick: don’t erase your mistakes. (Interestingly aside: it’s a predominantly American tradition to cover pencils with erasers .) The eraser is interesting looking, flat rather than round. It can be imagined that the flat shape was designed to prevent the pencil from rolling, which would be especially useful on inclined drafting tables. The hexagonal shape of the pencil shaft also prevents rolling.
But the obvious question is not really “which pencil is the best?” It’s “why use a pencil at all?”
Satisfactory tactile bond to paper that most pens lack. A ballpoint gel pen, for example, allows you to write without friction; you hardly need to touch the paper. Writing with a gel pen is almost the same as swiping your finger across the glass screen of a tablet. With a pencil, especially Blackwing, I can feel the fine grain of the paper and the particles of graphite drifting away like the stone steps of an old church slowly crumbling under a century-old foot traffic. (There may be some nostalgia involved.) It seems to matter. And while I may be writing a mundane shopping list, the tiny pleasure of using the right tool is an unconscious pleasure, while some find it difficult.
I prefer to write with Palomino Blackwing 602 . This is my favorite pencil.