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inside-one-of-americas-last-pencil-factories.html

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[14mag-pencil25-articleLarge]
Blue pencils -- sharpened, finished and ready for packaging and sale.
Credit...Christopher Payne

Feature

Inside One of America's Last Pencil Factories

A photographer captures a colorful world of craft and complexity.

Blue pencils -- sharpened, finished and ready for packaging and sale.
Credit...Christopher Payne

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By Christopher Payne and Sam Anderson

  * Jan. 12, 2018

A pencil is a little wonder-wand: a stick of wood that traces the
tiniest motions of your hand as it moves across a surface. I am using
one now, making weird little loops and slashes to write these words.
As a tool, it is admirably sensitive. The lines it makes can be fat
or thin, screams or whispers, blocks of concrete or blades of grass,
all depending on changes of pressure so subtle that we would hardly
notice them in any other context. (The difference in force between a
bold line and nothing at all would hardly tip a domino.) And while a
pencil is sophisticated enough to track every gradation of the human
hand, it is also simple enough for a toddler to use.

Such radical simplicity is surprisingly complicated to produce. Since
1889, the General Pencil Company has been converting huge quantities
of raw materials (wax, paint, cedar planks, graphite) into products
you can find, neatly boxed and labeled, in art and office-supply
stores across the nation: watercolor pencils, editing pencils, sticks
of charcoal, pastel chalks. Even as other factories have chased
higher profit margins overseas, General Pencil has stayed put,
cranking out thousands upon thousands of writing instruments in the
middle of Jersey City.

Story continues after the photo essay.

Image[14mag-14pencil-t_CA2-articleLarge]
Extrusions of graphite are collected for recycling.Credit...
Christopher Payne
Image
Packing graphite, which is the consistency of sand, is used to
distribute the oven's heat evenly around the graphite cores.
Afterward, the packing material will be poured out and recycled.
Credit...Christopher Payne
Image
Graphite cores cooling after being dipped in heated wax.Credit...
Christopher Payne
Image
These graphite cores were heated in an oven to remove moisture and
harden the material.Credit...Christopher Payne

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