The Pencil : A History of Design and Circumstance (Paperback)

from JBD1

This line gets overused, but this book really does have (just about) everything you could ever want to know about pencils. For me it began to drag after a while, but your mileage will vary; I ended up taking it a few chapters at a time while I read other things, and that worked better.

from NielsenGW

I'm quite convinced that Henry Petroski could write about the engineering or manufacturing of anything and it would an order of magnitude better than expected. He's authored books about bookshelves, the toothpick, and engineering projects that I would have expected to be ho-hum or dryasdust, but ...

from stretch

The pencil is such a simple piece of technology that it is often ignored. No one gives it a second thought to lose a pencil or throw one away. In fact, it's the only piece of property that we lend to perfect strangers with little or no expectations of it being returned. The pencil is just everyda...

from DonSiano

Every once in a while everyone should take a look around the room and think about how the stuff in it came to be there, and about the people who invented them. If, like me, you are in an office, one of the objects your eye will encounter will be the lowly pencil. So who invented it? Why is it yel...

from joeldinda

The best parts of this book are really excellent, five-star material. But it's too long, and occasionally unfocused. Recommended, all the same. The Pencil's a not entirely successful effort to describe the engineering process by focusing on what's known, and what's not known, about the developmen...