Name: Why Blackwing Pencils—Favorites of Steinbeck and Sondheim—Gained Cult Status
Uploaded: 2024-01-09T05:01:00Z
Duration: 8 min 12 s
Description: John Steinbeck used one to write “The Grapes of Wrath” and a Disney animator was buried with one. Blackwing pencils gained a coveted status among creatives for their speed and smoothness. Here’s why they almost went extinct and what it took to bring them back. Photo: Adam Falk

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John Steinbeck used one to write “The Grapes of Wrath” and a Disney animator was buried with one. Blackwing pencils gained a coveted status among creatives for their speed and smoothness. Here’s why they almost went extinct and what it took to bring them back. Photo: Adam Falk

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Why Blackwing Pencils—Favorites of Steinbeck and Sondheim—Gained Cult Status

I can give you what I call the story of the $40 pencil. It felt so smooth and it kind of glided across the paper. John Steinbeck wrote, "The Grapes of Wrath." with a Blackwing. There was a Disney animator that was buried with his Blackwing pencil.

It was a lot faster to write with, which is where the motto, "Half the pressure, twice the speed" comes from, and it quickly became very popular.

Chuck Jones and Quincy Jones and Stephen Sondheim, when you're watching "Jaws," you can see a Blackwing clinched in Richard Dreyfuss' teeth. It built this cult status and then got discontinued.

The Blackwing went off the market in like, 1998, and then the resale market for it just went crazy.

They could go for anything from $40 to more than 200 a piece.

Daniel: Then a different company out of California decided to try to resurrect the brand.

We discovered that the Blackwing name had lapsed, we were able to simply claim it for 300 bucks.

Daniel: There was just one problem.

Unfortunately, the formula didn't come with it.

So the company had to work backwards to turn this object that they knew people liked and wanted into an actual functional business model.

It's an extremely difficult product to make, there's a reason that it got discontinued, there's a reason that nobody brought it back sooner. One thing about bringing back a product that had a cult following, there were no shortage of opinions.

People really loved the Blackwing 602 because it was such a smooth writer. It was one of the first, if not the first, commercial pencil made with wax in its core.

We knew that if we got the graphite right, to feel like the old Blackwing, that was it. It was literally getting bags of graphite sticks and just testing them, testing 'em, for darkness, smoothness, point retention, eraseability, smudgyness.

The company had to do a lot of things to kind of make sure that their version met the expectation of all those people who'd held the original.

The challenge is that the old Blackwing changed a lot during its time too. Some additions of it were a little bit firmer than others, and some were a little bit softer, and so we went with the kind of heart, which was the 40s, 50s, 60s, that was when it really built its cult status, and that's the one that we kind of used as our inspiration.

The formula of the graphite is secret, the company doesn't tell anyone.

The graphite's your pigment, the wax is your smoothness and the clay is giving you structure.

You can know what the ingredients are, but you won't ever know the combination.

I could count the number of people who know our graphite formula on one hand. I know the formula.

The wood in the Blackwing is California incense-cedar,

California incense-cedar is the industry standard for a high quality pencil.

Grant: It's soft and it has a smooth straight grain.

You can tell the quality of the wood of a pencil by how tight the wood grain is. You can especially tell when you sharpen it, how cleanly it sharpens.

Daniel: Then they ship it out to Japan for most of the main manufacturing.

That starts with two pieces of wood, you groove them out, place your graphite and you sandwich 'em together. Once you have this little sandwich, you run it through what's known as the shaping machine, and that drags a cutter across the top of the sandwich and shapes it into a half a pencil, and then it flips that sandwich over and you drag it through again, and that's what spits out the finished shaped pencils. Most pencils would have one, two, maybe three layers. Blackwing 602 has 11 or 12 layers of lacquer that we apply to it. The base coat for a Blackwing 602 is actually black. We layer that on and then we start to layer on this pearlescent finish that gives it that kind of smoky gray that it's been known for.

I think the main aesthetic choice that they've made, that is very unique is the Flat Eraser.

The Blackwing ferrule is its calling card.

The ferrule, which is the piece that holds the eraser in, it kind of looks like a paintbrush.

Alex: And its shape makes it so that it doesn't roll off a desk, and that's one of the reasons why it became so popular with animators in the 40s, 50s, 60s.

The shape of a Blackwing eraser doesn't really allow you to do heavy erasing, which for that reason I would say it's not great for children. However, you can erase a lot more deliberately with a Blackwing eraser.

Having a wide face and then a really narrow face lets you either get very, very precise with your erasing or very, very broad. We glue the ferrule onto the pencil, and we want the transition from the wood to the ferrule to be seamless, so we shave the end of the pencil down so that the ferrule can just slip over in this shaved end and be even with the barrel of the pencil.

So when Cal Cedar tried to kind of re-bring it to market, they didn't actually have a machine that could attach the ferrules to their pencils, so they kind of had to figure out how to do those things on their own.

We were tipping pencils by hand.

To solve this problem, they had to just build a machine. They've told us it costs like $250,000. The funny thing about the ferrule is that it is the thing that gives the pencil its distinctive look, but it was also kind of its downfall.

So when the Blackwings discontinued in the 90s, the main reason why they stopped making it is because the tooling to make the clip and ferrule broke.

As the story goes, when Faber-Castell acquired Eberhard Faber, the machine that makes the little aluminum clip to hold in the eraser was broken and couldn't be repaired, and then in the late 90s they quietly discontinued the pencil entirely.

The company who owned the brand at the time just didn't think it was worth investing in the tooling.

It was such a small part of a corporate business, they didn't see it fit to try and solve the problem of how to fix the machine, so they just discontinued.

If we're comparing the original 602 to the current 602, the current one is smoother, it's darker, it has slightly less point retention. The original Blackwing, I would say, is a little bit firmer and a little bit lighter, frankly, just a little bit harder than the current Blackwings. A lot of pencil purists were kind of upset about the way that it was marketed as a reproduction of something else. They didn't think it was close enough to the actual original pencil. I wouldn't call it a reproduction, I would call it a tribute.

Blackwing is definitely not going to be ever as scalable as like a mechanical pencil from BIC. You're probably not gonna see them in Walmart anytime soon.

We like to say we're in the business of slowing down. In a typical day at our factory, we're producing 14, 15, maybe 16,000 pencils, and other pencil factories are putting out hundreds of thousands of pencils in a day.

Caroline: If we boil it down, what makes the Blackwing different from other high quality pencils is the story and the design. The pencil itself is about as good as it gets, but it's definitely not the only one.

Daniel: So when they're first released, the company says they sold 100,000 of these pencils, that was around 2010.

And now it's not uncommon to sell 100,000 pencils in a day.

The pencils are still expensive, you have to pay $30 to get a box of 12. For a point of comparison, you can get a box of number two pencils for 99 cents at Target.

Grant: When we started, everybody thought we were crazy for trying to sell pencils at $30 a box, some people still do think we're crazy.

Interviewer: And what do you say back?

That's a good question. We are crazy, but we're here.