Henry Petroski, engineer, teacher, and writer, has died at the age of eighty-one. The New York Times has an obituary. And there’s one from Duke University.
I’ve read and own several of Henry Petroski’s books. The one closest to my heart: The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance (1990). I wrote Professor Petroski a fan letter after reading that book, and for a while we had a correspondence. His letters, always, were in pencil.
Thursday, June 22, 2023
Henry Petroski (1942–2023)
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I saw the designer of the cover of The Pencil speak at a conference not long after it came out. Petroski didn't like the design and attempted to have some say in changing it. The designer — Chip Kidd... who was newly famous in the design field at the point I saw him speak — was scornful of his input, and described that in his speech.
An audience member, who was the editor of a design magazine, took him to task about it during the Q&A. I remember him saying something about how long a person puts into writing a book like The Pencil (maybe he said he knew Petroski, I'm not sure)... it's one of the few things I remember from the conference.
Kidd was, I think, at least somewhat chastened by the interaction.
I know that name, and some of his covers, and I really like the Nabokov ones. But I lean to the audience member’s point of view. It was Henry Petroski’s book. Given its unusual size (roughly 9 1/2 × 5 1/2), Kidd might have come up with a design that included a full-length pencil.
I love that he wrote to you in pencil. Print or cursive?
I had to look to make sure: a very casual blend of print and cursive.
Looking back at the letters, I was reminded that I sent him all sorts of pencil bits that he added to his files: something from Archibald MacLeish referencing Blackwings (in a letter, I think) a passage from Nabokov’s Pnin, a Man Ray drawing (no idea what that was), and so on. At one point he was trying to figure out where he had read Roland Barthes’s essay about Japanese stationery stores, and I was happy that I could tell him that it’s in Empire of Signs. He was a good guy of many, many interests.
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