David Thomas Rees

Please up-point-vote this response, guys, as it will answer a lot of people's questions: In 2010 I was broke (I had quit cartooning) so I got a job working for the U.S. Census. On the first day of staff training, we were told to sharpen our #2 pencils using a government-issued single-blade pocket sharpener. While sharpening my pencil, I thought, "I wonder if I could get paid to sharpen pencils?" So I started ArtisanalPencilSharpening.com with the help of some friends (web designer, photographer, etc.) The whole thing was kind of a challenge to myself: Take something you enjoy doing and convince people they should pay you to do it. In order for this project to work, it had to take the form of an ACTUAL pencil sharpening business, not just a silly web site for a non-existent business.

Burn your house to the ground, collect the insurance money, move to a new state, and fail to tell your mother.

I don't fuck with those pencils. Throw them in a can, for they are garbage.

Yes! In fact, the Pencil Museum in Cumberland (UK) has the oldest known pencil in its collection; you can see its similarity to a carpenter pencil: https://uwaterloo.ca/earth-sciences-museum/sites/ca.earth-sciences-museum/files/uploads/images/aelteste.jpg

I'm not a fan of mechanical pencils.

I like pens. I rarely use pencils, actually -- as a left-handed person, they smudge the side of my writing hand.

Yes, I agree. I was trying to make a "LOL," as the obfuscatory properties of English sometimes result in unexpected delights.

Listen to yourself. C'mon.

One of the pleasures of a hand-sharpened pencil (that is to say, a knife-sharpened pencil) is that there's no mistaking it for an electrically sharpened pencil. HOWEVER I recently taught a pencil-sharpening workshop at MaxFunCon and one of my students produced a hand-sharpened point that was so fine, so flawless, that it could have passed for machine-sharpened in low light. I was flabbergasted. And enraged.

Interestingly, the contemporary carpenter pencil is actually the closest thing we have to the original pencil -- that is to say, a flat (rather than hexagonal or cylindrical) mark-making tool. The earliest pencils were simply pieces of graphite sandwiched between two pieces of wood. (We're talking about the mid-16th century here, which is when the first deposit of graphite was discovered in England -- the birthplace of the modern pencil.)