“Heavy, black pencils”

The tools of a copy editor, as described by Lincoln Grahlfs, a New York Times copy editor for forty years:

a handful of heavy, black pencils; a sheaf of copy paper; a pot of paste; a pair of scissors; a spike; and in the back of his head, a nice big fund of pertinent (and possibly impertinent) information.

Like the pastepot, the Times copy desk itself will soon be a thing of the past.

[“His head”: there’s no date for this description. The Times first employed a woman at the copy desk in 1958. The generic he would have been in use well after that. Lincoln Grahlfs died in 1968.]