The new Blackwing pencil

[Blackwings: a new Palomino and an old Eberhard Faber. Click for a much larger view.]

[Note: The “pre-production” Blackwing, it turns out, is the new Blackwing. See below for an explanation.]

While waiting for two pre-production Blackwing pencils to arrive in the mail, I began thinking about an old song: “(I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons.” Sentimental reasons are reason enough to like the Blackwing: the sheer dowdiness of the design, the roster of distinguished users — Archibald MacLeish, Nelson Riddle, Stephen Sondheim, and John Steinbeck among them. Somewhere — where? — I’ve seen a photograph of Duke Ellington with Blackwing in hand. The Blackwing even boasts a slogan — “Half the Pressure, Twice the Speed” — as if this pencil were a personal brand, like a cigarette. Sentiment aside, the Blackwing is a pencil whose smooth lead makes writing a simple pleasure. I’d walk a mile for a Blackwing.

California Cedar Products’ choice to revive the Blackwing cannot be explained by profit motive alone. It’s a labor of love, evident most obviously in the recreation of the Blackwing’s distinctive ferrule. (The breakage of expensive-to-repair ferrule-making machinery helped bring production of the original Blackwing to an end.) The care that has gone into the new Blackwing’s manufacture is considerable: I immediately noticed that each pencil’s ferrule and imprint are in alignment, so that the Blackwing name is visible when the pencil lies flat (that’s not the case with every old Blackwing). My new sample Blackwings are not perfect: one has minute specks of gold paint on the barrel; the other has thin black streaks across the imprint. (The streaks are visible in the photograph above.) As Henry Petroski notes in The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance (1992), few pencils, if any, turn out to be perfect when subject to close inspection.


[The new Blackwing makes a noticeably darker line, no?]

Writing with the new Blackwing is a pleasure. The lead is soft and smooth and doesn’t smear, though now and then a tiny crumb breaks off. The new Blackwing’s point wears more quickly than that of the old Blackwing, and the new pencil’s line is noticeably darker. (An older California Cedar HB Palomino pencil in my possession is, to my surprise, darker and softer still.) The new Blackwing’s eraser works well but not perfectly, leaving a slight trace of lead on a yellow legal pad and a slight sheen on a Moleskine calendar page. But this eraser doesn’t destroy paper, as the erasers on my old Blackwings do, and did, even when new.


[Old imprint.]


[New imprint.]

The differences in appearance between the old and new Blackwings are many, and likely — for sentimental reasons — to be significant to the dedicated user. The brand name appears in larger and more eccentric lettering on the old Blackwing (note especially the C, K and G). The imprint on the new Blackwing is not nearly as crisp, though the lettering does have the advantage of being readable in any light. The Blackwing slogan is missing from the new pencil: perhaps the cost of printing on two sides of the barrel is prohibitive. Most important though, I think, is the change in color. The old Blackwing has been described as charcoal-grey or smoke-grey, but I prefer to think of it as graphite-grey: the Blackwing has the shiny grey look of pencil lead itself. The black, gold, and white design of the new Blackwing is not nearly as attractive. To my eyes, it suggests a now-dated idea of luxury, reminiscent of hair-tonic bottles and whitewall tires. Yipes.

My suggestion to California Cedar: the visual appeal of this pencil is likely to be as important to potential customers as the quality of the lead. Witness the speculation that just brewed about whether the Blackwing slogan would appear on the barrel. Change the color of the barrel to graphite-grey, drop the gold band, and enlarge the Blackwing imprint. Stamp the Blackwing slogan on each pencil if that can be done at a reasonable cost. A pink — or grey? or black? — eraser would be a significant improvement. Appearances aside though, the new Blackwing offers a writing experience that will be a pleasure in any color scheme.

[I refer in this post to “the old” and “the new” Blackwing, but I am, of course, evaluating tokens, not types.]


[All photographs by Michael Leddy.]

September 13, 2010: Production Blackwings are now en route to the States from Japan. It’s not clear whether they differ in any respect from the pre-production samples.

September 15, 2010: California Cedar has been, I think, misleading — at best — in describing these pencils as “pre-production” samples. I evaluated the new Blackwing with the understanding that my comments (and those of other Blackwing fanciers) would help to shape the finished pencil. The very short turnaround time between the distribution of samples and the shipping of finished pencils to the States now makes clear that changes in design based on users’ evaluations were never in the offing. The “pre-production” Blackwing, it turns out, is the new Blackwing. So why send out “pre-production” pencils? You can read Cal Cedar’s explanation here. There’s more discussion (and a bit of subterfuge) in the comments on this post.

I for one won’t be buying — not because of the new Blackwing’s design but because of what I consider to have been a misleading marketing effort.

Other Blackwing posts
All Blackwing posts (Pinboard)
Duke Ellington, Blackwing pencils, and aspirational branding
The Palomino Blackwing pencil and truth in advertising
Palomino Blackwing non-users
Nelson Riddle on the Blackwing pencil
Stephen Sondheim on pencils, paper
John Steinbeck on the Blackwing pencil

Other reviews
Blackwing, Reborn. (The Blackwing Pages)
Mark Frauenfelder, First impression of the new Blackwing pencil (Boing Boing)
Palomino Blackwing pencil (Pencil Talk)
Wiedergeburt eines Klassikers [Rebirth of a Classic] (Lexikaliker)

August 28, 1963

[“Leaders of March on Washington for Jobs & Freedom marching w. signs (R-L): Matthew Ahmann, Floyd McKissick, Martin Luther King Jr., Rev. Eugene Carson Blake and unident.” August 28, 1963. Photograph by Robert W. Kelley. Via the Life photo archive. Click for a larger view.]

Audio, text, and video of King’s “I Have a Dream,” speech (American Rhetoric)

Timothy Egan and Leonard Pitts, Jr. on American ignorance

Timothy Egan on twenty-first-century know-nothingism:

A growing segment of the party poised to take control of Congress has bought into denial of the basic truths of Barack Obama’s life. What’s more, this astonishing level of willful ignorance has come about largely by design, and has been aided by a press afraid to call out the primary architects of the lies.

Building a Nation of Know-Nothings (New York Times)

Leonard Pitts, Jr. on Glenn Beck’s march on Washington:

The fatuous and dishonorable attempt to posit conservatives as the prime engine of civil rights depends for success on the ignorance of the American people.

This is who “we” really is, Glenn (Miami Herald)

(Thanks, Daughter Number Three, for pointing your readers to Pitts’s column.)

Word of the day: namby-pamby

You probably know what namby-pamby means. As an adjective: “Of literary or artistic style, a composition, etc.: weakly sentimental, insipidly pretty, affectedly or childishly ”; “Of a person or group of people: inclined to weak sentimentality, affectedly dainty; lacking vigour or drive; effeminate in expression or behaviour.” As a noun: “Weakly sentimental insipid style or writing; an example of this”; “A weak, fussy, or affected person.” But did you know where the word comes from? The Oxford English Dictionary, source of these definitions, explains:

Namby Pamby, a disparaging alteration (a reduplication with variation of initial consonant and suffixation … in imitation of childish speech) of the name of Ambrose Philips (1675-1749), author of sentimental poems (especially concerning children).

Philips’s poems were ridiculed in print by Henry Carey, John Gay, Alexander Pope, and Jonathan Swift; the nickname Namby Pamby was used by Carey as the title of his parody of Philips’s verse, and subsequently by Pope in the Dunciad.

I have Ambrose Philips on my mind this week, having used his namby-pamby translation of a Sappho fragment alongside other (better) translations as a way into thinking about reading ancient poets. (’m teaching Backgrounds of Western Literature, or Backwards in Western Lit.) Here is Philips (1711):

In sharp contrast, Mary Barnard (1958):

From galloping couplets to William Carlos Williams-like enjambment (“he // who,” “of / your”), from a glowing bosom and “dewy Damps” to flame and dripping sweat. Note too that Philips’s translation is far from clear on the direction of the speaker’s desire, which is not for the youth/godlike man but for the woman speaking to that man. That Sappho was a woman who wrote of love between women always surprises some students, who assume that the poem presents a heterosexual love triangle. (Not that there’d be anything wrong with that!) Such a triangle is the scenario in Catullus’s Latin adaptation of this poem, which “straightens” Sappho’s lyric into an expression of male heterosexual desire.

There’s nothing namby-pamby about Sappho, or Catullus, or Mary Barnard.

Old and unimproved

In late August and early September, my January 2005 post How to e-mail a professor begins to account for many, many visits to Orange Crate Art — right now, about half of all visits. HackCollege recently called this post “the golden standard” for advice about “asking things of professors.” (Thanks!)

At one time this post had little competition. Now there are several pages online offering similar guidelines. At least three are remarkably similar to my post in their content and sequencing. (Remarkably, remarkably, remarkably similar.) Two appear at eHow as the work of unnamed contributors. One appears at StudentStuff as the work of an ex-English major. She should know better.

I have no idea what kind of traffic these other pages get. But I’m happy to see that a Google search for how to e-mail a professor still finds my post at the top of the heap — old and unimproved, and using only original parts.

Update, September 2, 2010: I’ve received no reply to my e-mail, but eHow, to its credit, has removed the two anonymous items from its website. The piece at StudentStuff still stands. I’ve e-mailed again, requesting that it be removed.

Update, September 2, 2010: The writer at StudentStuff has removed the borrowings from her post. Case closed.

Blackwing 2: The Return

I can’t help thinking of it as heroic narrative: the late, great Blackwing pencil has returned, thanks to California Cedar Products.

I’m one of the fortunate people chosen to receive pre-production pencils. I’ll have a review in the near future. For now, The Blackwing Pages has photographs and a short review of the new Blackwing.

[Here’s the review: The new Blackwing pencil.]

Other Blackwing posts
Nelson Riddle on the Blackwing pencil
Stephen Sondheim on pencils, paper
John Steinbeck on the Blackwing pencil

Odysseus’s palace discovered (?)

Archaeologists claim to have discovered the remains of Odysseus’s palace on Ithaca. Five years ago, an archaeologist claimed Cephalonia, not Ithaca, as Odysseus’s home. Perhaps Odysseus, like Rod Blagojevich, commuted to work?

Related posts
Blagojevich and “Ulysses”
Recreating Aeneas’s journey

Edward Kean (1924–2010)

Edward Kean, “chief writer, philosopher, and theoretician” of The Howdy Doody Show, has died. He gave our language cowabunga.

Rap taxonomy

It’s a poster: Grand Taxonomy of Rap Names.

Seeing professors clearly

[Advice for students]

As a college freshman in 1975, I took up the now-vanished practice of turning in postcards with final exams so that my professors could send me my course grades before university grade-reports were compiled and mailed. One postcard came back with a semester grade (A) and the words “With a little help from my inability to do higher mathematics!”

That postcard confirmed my sense that my professor was a nasty, sarcastic man. He was after all the same professor who had criticized my writing all semester, pointing out my dangling participles, my pointless rhetorical questions, and my constant use of the word this to begin sentences. And now he was intent on somehow souring my A for the semester.

But I couldn’t have been more wrong in my thinking. As a junior, I took two more courses with Jim Doyle, James P. Doyle, and began to realize that he was the most generous, most inspiring teacher I would ever know. When I was a freshman though, hugely insecure about my ability to negotiate academic life — and hugely insecure about everything else — I couldn’t see what now seems plain: my professor was making a joke when he wrote that postcard. He was an English teacher, joking about his own inadequacies, and trusting that I was smart enough to get the joke. I wasn’t.

Now that I get to think about these matters from the front of the classroom, I count five misconceptions that often make it difficult, even impossible, for college students to see their professors clearly:

1. “Professors have you figured out from your first grade.”

Most professors are happy to recognize improvement in a student’s work. I sometimes see students go from Fs and Ds to Bs and As in the work of a semester. Seeing a student begin to take interest in a class and improve her or his work makes almost any professor feel a bit happier and a bit more successful. The student who feels categorized by a first grade might be the victim of a self-fulfilling prophecy: if you feel that you’re never going to do better than, say, a C+, there might be little reason to try to do better.

2. “Professors give grades based on whether they agree with you.”

Most professors are more than willing to acknowledge that multiple interpretations or points of view are possible and plausible. Professors are much more interested in your ability to develop and support an argument than in agreeing with that argument. They are likely to admire an effort to develop a position that gives them something to think about and, perhaps, argue with. And by the way, professors don’t “give” grades. Your work is what earns them.

3. “Every professor wants something different.”

Most professors value clear, cogent, well-informed reasoning and writing. Different expectations are often a matter of different disciplines, not different professors. The wordplay that wins respect in Creative Non-Fiction might not go over well in Business Communication. The single-sentence paragraphs appropriate in Intro to Journalism won’t work in Intro to Literary Criticism. But that’s because different standards apply in each field, not because professors are insisting on their own idiosyncratic recipes for good writing. And while different professors might place more or less emphasis on various writing errors, that doesn’t mean that comma splices are sometimes okay and sometimes not, only that some professors might be paying more attention to your writing than others.

When professors do want things their way, it’s likely to be about relatively modest matters — paper clips rather than staples, serif rather than sans serif fonts. If you were reading hundreds of essays, you’d probably get a little particular too.

4. “Professors don’t care whether you come to class.”

Some don’t. Most do. But professors recognize that it’s a student’s choice to show up or not, to take notes or not, to follow a discussion or lecture or drift away in inner space. It’s unlikely that a professor will extend a favor to a student who has frequent unexplained absences or whose presence in class does nothing to help the cause of learning.

5. “Professors are obstacles on the way to a diploma.”

This misconception, unlike the first four, is rarely articulated. It’s pervasive nonetheless among students who practice various forms of educational gamesmanship — reading plot summaries instead of novels, plagiarizing essays, cheating on exams, concocting phony excuses for late work and absences. Students who see their professors as obstacles would do well to consider that their own attitudes are the real obstacles to graduation, impeding any possibility of genuine learning.

You may encounter a professor who will confirm every misconception I’ve described: someone who does decide semester grades early on, who allows no disagreement, who is arbitrary and idiosyncratic and oblivious, and who really does make life miserable. When you encounter such a professor, run — if that’s possible. Such professors betray not only their students but the very idea of learning. Most professors are better than that though — if your eyes are open enough to see them.

[I wrote “Seeing professors clearly” in January 2008 for Tim Milburn’s College Students Rule. The site appears to have folded, so I’ve made a home for this piece here.]