Happy Pencil Day!
by 
Lisa
Lisa
Each year, March 30th is National Pencil Day. Now, we don’t exactly celebrate this day in my home country Denmark but I think it’s a pretty decent excuse to celebrate one of my all-time favourite tools.
The story behind the day is that Stationer Hymen L. Lipman received the first patent for attaching an eraser to the end of a pencil on this day in 1858.
Notable pencil users
- Thomas Edison had his pencils specially made by Eagle Pencil. Each pencil was three inches long, was thicker than standard pencils and had softer graphite than was typically available.
- Vladimir Nabokov rewrote everything he had ever published, usually several times, by pencil.
- John Steinbeck was an obsessive pencil user and is said to have used as many as 60 a day. His novel East of Eden took more than 300 pencils to write.
- Vincent van Gogh used only Faber pencils as they were “superior to Carpenters pencils, a capital black and most agreeable.”
- Johnny Carson regularly played with pencils at his Tonight Show desk. These pencils were specially made with erasers at both ends to avoid on-set accidents.
- Roald Dahl used only pencils with yellow casing to write his books. He had six sharpened pencils ready at the beginning of each day and only when all six became unusable did he resharpen them.
Pick up some new pencils and use #NationalPencilDay to share your drawings online. In the gallery above you can see some of my recent pencil drawings.
Source: Wikipedia
Tags: #NationalPencilDaydrawingpencilsketches