Pencil Day!

According to various sites that track wacky holidays that seem to come from nowhere, today is National Pencil Day. National Day Calendar says that it falls on March 30 because "Hymen Lipman received the first patent for attaching an eraser to the end of a pencil on this day in 1858." Haaretz notes that the patent was later overturned by court order, but that Lipman, a stationery giant, contributed many things to the American office, including gummed envelope flaps. So he was inadvertently complicit in killing George Costanza's fiancee, Susan Ross.

But never mind about all that. The pencil is the thing we're celebrating today, and yay, pencils!

I have always preferred writing with pens, I have to admit. Most pens can't erase, but in my experience, most pencils suck at erasing too, at least if your office manager is buying cheap. I like drawing with pencils, though, partly because good colored pencils are a smooth and supple joy to put to paper.

But can I get worked up about pencils?

I can if I think about what they can represent -- language, literacy, learning, productivity, art. And economics.

Leonard A. Read published his famous essay "I, Pencil" in 1958, and it remains a masterful expression of the production of wealth in free capitalism. You can read it here. In short, his narrator, the ordinary pencil, explains that while everyone sees the common object, not a single person in the world can make one alone; in fact "not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me." But many people working independently for their own self-interest produce this handheld miracle for the world almost as a magical wonder. And a pencil is nothing compared to more complex miracles like computers or dishwashers or shampoo or lunch. It's a great essay and should be required reading in school to take some of the pinko poison out of our colleges.

Today might be a good day to celebrate the pencil, after all. In fact, you can get a really huge pencil from Archie McPhee if you want to make a big deal of it. I'll bet the Commies never had those!