Odd Jobs (147 page)

Beneath this long “Ahem” may be heard the hum of a theme—the nature of engineering, with the pencil as a paradigm of the process whereby men invent, manufacture, and improve things. Pencils, so lowly and common that antique dealers chuck them out with the shavings when they acquire a box of old tools, are yet put together with a hard-won precision. The two halves of the pencil case must fit tightly enough against each other and around the centered lead to form a bond that withstands warpage and the spasmodic pressure of writing; the woodworking machinery of pencil-making operates “to perhaps the highest tolerance of any woodworking equipment”—a tolerance as small as five ten-thousandths of an inch. The leads, extruded through sapphire or diamond dies to similarly strict tolerances, are composed of graphite and clay particles of a marvellous fineness; a sifting process through a series of tubs, usually six in number, is followed by a grinding together that, in the case of Koh-I-Noor leads, lasts for an average of two weeks. The proportions of clay and graphite and lesser, waxy constituents derive from formulae as jealously guarded as the secrets of alchemy. A pencil lead that writes smoothly, with a consistent darkness, soft enough to leave a mark yet tough enough not to break, is a mundane miracle that readers of
The Pencil
will never again take casually for granted.

Mr. Petroski’s attempted dramatization of engineers as cultural heroes suffers from their professional habit of taciturnity; they figure and sketch with their pencils but rarely confide autobiography to paper. Like the heroes of old-fashioned Westerns, they solve the problem and ride on. Conté is the central figure in Mr. Petroski’s posse of engineers, yet he scarcely leaps off the page. A portrait painter driven by the Revolution into science, he was said to have “every science in his head and every art in his hands.” This paragon “promoted the military use of balloons, and he was apparently working on some experiments with hydrogen when an explosion injured his left eye.”
He was familiar with the use of graphite
to make crucibles in which to melt metals, and from this experience, presumably, he reasoned and experimented his way to the baked, part-clay pencil lead that was his great innovation. Yet, oddly, his breakthrough was not soon disseminated through the pencil industry:

The designation of Henry David Thoreau (who was, we are told in one of Mr. Petroski’s flourishes of fact, named David Henry up through his Harvard degree) as a significant pencil engineer will surprise those who know him only as a monument of American literature and libertarian thought. His father, John Thoreau, had been invited by his brother-in-law, Charles Dunbar, to join in the exploitation of a lode of graphite that Dunbar, his family’s black sheep, had stumbled upon in Bristol, New Hampshire, in 1821. The senior Thoreau may have learned the rudiments of pencil manufacture from one of the first Americans in the business, Joseph Dixon, of Marblehead. Ceylonese graphite was brought back as ballast in New England sailing vessels and dumped; Dixon, the son of a shipowner, learned to utilize the graphite in crucibles, shoe polish, and pencils—the last so gritty and brittle that merchants told him “he would have to put foreign labels on them if he expected to make sales.” Long after Conté, American pencil-makers “continued to mix their inadequately purified and ground graphite with such substances as glue, adding a little bayberry wax or spermaceti.” Nevertheless, John Thoreau’s pencils were superior to those of rival companies, and were sold under his own label—a photograph of a wrapped bundle of them appears in
The Pencil
. When David Henry graduated from Harvard in 1837, he began to teach at the Center School in Concord, but his resistance to applying corporal punishment led to his rapid resignation, which, “coupled with his insistence on reversing his names,” earned him a local reputation for eccentricity. Like many another young individualist,
he found refuge in the family business; at the Harvard library he set about a course of research to improve the product.

Mr. Petroski delves deeply into what was then available about pencil-making in existing reference works, and concludes that the
Encyclopaedia Perthensis
, published in Edinburgh, may have furnished the crucial hint at the concoction of ceramic lead. According to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau was enough of a pencil man to be able to pick up twelve at a grab (a trick common in the trade, since they were sold in packages of a dozen), and according to Emerson’s son, Edward, it was Thoreau who invented and worked out the details of a machine for producing finer graphite, by means of encasing the grinder in a seven-foot-high box and trapping the finest dust at the top, to which only it would rise. Certainly Thoreau was capable of what we now call mechanical drawing, and the sensibility behind
Walden
relishes construction and quantification. Yet in the two million words of the journal that he began at the same time as entering his father’s business Thoreau almost never mentions pencil-making. There is no mention of it in
Walden
, and pencils were so little on his mind that he left them off a list he prepared of everything needed for an excursion to the Maine woods. The humanistic poetry of invention and technology, though apparent to Benjamin Franklin and the French Encyclopedists, has waited until our century for its full due; the century of Romanticism may have sketched and made notes with pencils, but it reserved its odes for nightingales and untransmuted Nature. However, a fresh pointedness and a cedarish pungence characterize
Walden
, and by the time Thoreau retired to his cabin (where he purportedly invented raisin bread), his father’s company was making the best pencils in America. Emerson sent some to a friend in Boston, and she replied, “The pencils are excellent,—worthy of Concord art & artists and indeed one of the best productions I ever saw from there—something substantial & useful about it.” As opposed to, the implication is, most Transcendentalist productions.

The failure or refusal of a passionate self-describer like Thoreau to commit to paper anything about his own genuine engineering achievements is symptomatic of the elusive transparency of engineering in general. We see around us, as modest as pencils and as grand as bridges, the work of engineers, but their language is largely beyond us; it is like those sacred languages addressed to gods who respond only in the thumping vocabulary of earthquakes and thunderstorms. A popularization like Mr.
Petroski’s, taking as its field of interest the furtive advances of applied chemistry and the tidal shifts of competitive capitalism (one of his most charming episodes describes the American Armand Hammer’s successful importation of an entire German pencil factory to Soviet Russia), is more of a tour de force than, say, a popularization of contemporary cosmology. Investigations of Nature fascinate us with their possibility of displaying, at the last peel of the onion, the Creator. “To see a World in a Grain of Sand, / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower” remains our romantic, quasi-theological ambition. An annual fourteen billion is the closest the pencil will bring us to infinity, and instead of Heaven we see, peering closely in, the rackety gray hell of the assembly line.
Homo faber
knows himself too well. Microcosms of which man is the creator rather repel our gaze, even as we hold them in our fingers. The green plastic garbage bag, for instance, is nothing but deplored these days, though hardly a household can manage without it.
The Pencil
, with its airy prose contortions—

—asks us to face ourselves.

F
REDERIC
G
OUDY
, by D. J. R. Bruckner. 144 pp. Harry N. Abrams, for Documents of American Design, 1990.

Typography presents a volatile, rapidly changing technology combined with a highly conservative aesthetic. In the last hundred years,
typesetting has gone from painstaking hand distribution to Linotype and other metal-manipulators to today’s computer-setting, a process of pure imaging whose virtually infinite resources have as yet done little to change the look of the printed page. The letters that are still used are closely based upon prototypes of roman and italic faces developed in the Renaissance by printers imitating the calligraphy of manuscripts. Daniel Berkeley Updike, a leading American printer and the author of the classic
Printing Types: Their History, Forms, and Use
(1922), saw no advance beyond the fonts that the French-born printer Nicolas Jenson developed in Venice over five hundred years ago: “Jenson’s roman types have been the accepted models for roman letters ever since he made them, and, repeatedly copied in our own day, have never been equalled.”

In the narrow, nice, and conservative shop of typography Frederic Goudy was something of a bull—big, boisterous, and overproductive. Born in Bloomington, Illinois, the year the Civil War ended, and transplanted to the Dakota territory as a teen-ager, he was a roving businessman who dabbled in the design of advertising layouts. By 1890 he was pushing real estate in Chicago, then the largest printing center in the United States and in 1893 the site of the Columbian Exposition; the ideas of John Ruskin and William Morris, rejuvenating the arts and crafts, were in the air. The year after the Exposition, Goudy founded, with C. Lauren Hooper, his own press, the Booklet Press, which became the Camelot Press. His first type font, cut in 1896, was an alphabet of capitals called Camelot; but another fifteen years went by before he (now transplanted to New York and running, with his competent wife, Bertha, the Village Press) became in his own eyes a professional type designer. Having set the proof sheets of an H. G. Wells volume in Caslon, he became dissatisfied enough to design, in a week’s time, a face he called Kennerly, as well as an elegant capital face called Forum. His early types were taken up enthusiastically in England: the British typographer Sir Bernard Newdigate wrote of Kennerly that, “since the first Caslon began casting type about the year 1724, no such excellent letter has been put within the reach of English printers.”

Goudy was off and running. Before his death in 1947 he designed a hundred fonts, counting the italic and roman faces as separate. He also was a prolific speaker and self-advertiser; in 1937, D. B. Updike wrote with a fastidious shudder to the British printer Stanley Morison, “You have put your finger on what ought to be the merit of many types and is
the merit of very few, that is that it does not ‘look as if it has been designed by somebody in particular’ and you add that Mr. Goudy ‘has designed a whole century of very peculiar looking types.’ He certainly has. Poor man, I have never seen anybody with such an
itch
for publicity, or who blew his own trumpet so artlessly and constantly.”

Even now, in this handsome volume (printed in Japan in a digitized version of Bodoni, a face Goudy despised) meant to be a tribute, D. J. R. Bruckner allows a mysterious note of cavil and reservation to sound when praise is called for. By way of tribute, he cites the barbed compliment with which George W. Jones gave Goudy a gold medal in 1921: “Fred Goudy never did any harm to typography.” Mr. Bruckner, an editor of
The New York Times Book Review
, himself confides, “Goudy’s printing and typography, his design of pages and magazines and books, would never have earned him a place in the history of design or printing.” On the remaining matter of type design he asks, “Was Goudy the greatest American type designer or the most prolific?” and then after paragraphs of waffling says that “it seems merely silly to deny” that he was the former. On individual letter-forms Mr. Bruckner can be quite acerb (“incongruous,” “hodgepodge, “open and rolling to the point of annoyance”) and he relays what was the prevailing complaint about Goudy: “Critics of Goudy are fond of saying that all his types are advertising faces.”

Bluff and entrepreneurial though he was, Goudy was aesthetically conservative. He favored a hand-drawn, relatively irregular and rounded look to his letters—in this he was loyal to the crafts tradition propounded by William Morris. He hit his full stride as a designer when he imported a German matrix-cutter that enabled him to translate his own drawings directly into metal. His most successful and widely used faces tend to be “old style.” He disliked the look of “modern,” regularized faces like Bodoni, and in his design of Goudy Modern “bravely [his word] increased … the weight of the hairlines, bracketed the serifs slightly, and carried my curves more generously toward the stems.” In an age when computers can not only set but design type, Goudy’s bravely emphasized hairlines and curves, possessing what Mr. Bruckner calls “marked pen qualities,” are worth prizing. He was not afraid of new technology, and one of his pet goals, a tighter fit of the letters, has become, with computer setting, all too easy to achieve. To withstand the pressure of the gracelessly computer-squeezed line, and the inhuman regularity of post-hot-metal type, the rounded, hand-wrought letter-forms he favored still serve.

T
HE
C
REATIVE
E
XPLOSION:
An Inquiry into the Origins of Art and Religion
, by John E. Pfeiffer. 270 pp. Harper & Row, 1982.