The wooden lead pencil is one of the most simple yet intricate and carefully refined tools we as humans have at our disposal. Its unmatched ability to leave smooth, visible, erasable and varied lines on a surface has benefited students, writers, artists , architects and many others for the past 300 years and continuing. Basic in its composition and design while remaining elegant, efficient and easy for any age to use due to its long life span full of adjustments and enhancements , perfecting every aspect in order to create the quintessential writing and drawing medium .
However mundane or minimal a pencil may seem in appearance, the acquirement, production and transportation of such a product and its components is far from simple . Between the lumberjack in the forests of North California all the way to the packet of pencils at your nearest store, a pencil has been harvested, mined, mixed, cut, painted, driven, sailed, inspected, sold, with each step in the process reaching hundreds of different people and places all around the world. As you make your way through this website you will learn the elaborate connections between all these aspects of a pencil's life and how they all come to form the wonderful 18 cm long wooden object you are so familiar with.
I hope that just as I have during the creation of this website you too can see the amazing items that surround us every day no longer for just what they are but for why, where, who and what made them be.
Adam Iacobaccio
However mundane or minimal a pencil may seem in appearance, the acquirement, production and transportation of such a product and its components is far from simple . Between the lumberjack in the forests of North California all the way to the packet of pencils at your nearest store, a pencil has been harvested, mined, mixed, cut, painted, driven, sailed, inspected, sold, with each step in the process reaching hundreds of different people and places all around the world. As you make your way through this website you will learn the elaborate connections between all these aspects of a pencil's life and how they all come to form the wonderful 18 cm long wooden object you are so familiar with.
I hope that just as I have during the creation of this website you too can see the amazing items that surround us every day no longer for just what they are but for why, where, who and what made them be.
Adam Iacobaccio