The Pencil Perfect The Untold Story of a Cultural Icon

The Pencil Perfect is the tangible tale of the pencil: a utensil that crafts its own story as humans use its sharpened point to write their own.

The Pencil Perfect takes its namesake’s four simple ingredients – wood, graphite, clay, and water – and narrates a tale of worldwide influence and innovation. Caroline Weaver, pencil connoisseur and CW Pencil Enterprise Shop owner, composes texts that extol the nuanced influence of her beloved and humble implement. Illustrations exclusively drawn for The Pencil Perfect by Oriana Fenwick, an artist from Zimbabwe who works with fine details and intense realism, pair with Weaver’s words to present a story that is both endearing and enlightening.

Through profiles of pencil makers, anecdotes about famous writers’ favorite pencils, and essays about the surprising role of pencils in world history and culture, the chronicle of a modest but mighty tool unfolds. Follow the charming contrivance as it guides the course of early communication in the Scientific Revolution, the American Revolutionary War, the Anglo-French War, and the French Revolution: it is a historical journey and a captivating memoir. See how its past contemporarily compares with its use and appearance today – from the Blackwing 602 to novelty ferrules. The development of cultures and communities is laid bare within the timeline of this slender entity. The Pencil Perfect immortalizes the biography of an inanimate object within its pages for a future cast of historians, writers, and curious minds.

Caroline Weaver is a life-long pencil obsessive who owns a shop dedicated solely to wood-cased pencils, new and old, from all over the world in New York City. As a child she coveted a set of Caran d’Ache Prismalo colored pencils and proudly sharpened six early-2000s-era black Ticonderogas before school each day. From there, her love of the pencil and knowledge of the subject flourished. After traveling the world in search of the finest pencils still in production, she opened her shop in 2015. Caroline lives in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan and has a tattoo of a pencil on her forearm.