I swear I cannot find a good, reliable pencil sharpener any more. We run through them so quickly at work that the secretary has to order a new one almost as soon as we purchase one to plan for the quick demise of the new one we just bought. We have lots of those little hand sharpeners to cover for the time between the demise of the current sharpener and the receipt of a new one (it takes about a week from order to receipt) and, of course, the hand helps are crappy, too. We have gone through several plug in types this past year- perhaps four.
I thought the sharpeners were just victims of public use and abuse at first. But now I’m watching my kids trying to sharpen pencils for school this morning.
At home, I have two wall mounted sharpeners. Both just chew pencils to pointless, fuzzy nubs. The electrical one is such a delicate flower that it won’t sharpen a pencil unless you hold everything from the pencil to the desk to your left foot in perfect balance. This may be my third electric sharpener in a little over a year.
So both kids are using the little hand held sharpeners this morning and leaving piles of shavings everywhere.
Wow. That takes me back about 40 years to real chalk chalkboards, wooden desks with lids and an inkwell, and those heavenly-smelling photocopied worksheets with the purple ink (what were they called, Gestetner???)
On topic though, I do remember that they worked really well.
You bring back fond memories. Those purple copies were made with a spirit duplicator. I have only known Gestetner as the name of a manufacturer of office paraphernalia, but when I checked things I noted that a duplicator they made was nicknamed Gestetner as well. It’s not the same method, though.
Is it a joke, or at least started as one. The guy was one of the performers on last year’s Jonathan Coulton fan cruise (nerd entertainment on a cruise ship, pretty great stuff), and he read from his book and demonstrated fancy sharpening techniques on stage (the video isn’t great but you can see/hear what’s happening). It was pretty funny, and it was obvious the whole thing is tongue-in-cheek, making fun of how there’s an expert for everything.
I’m not sure how it got so far as to become a lucrative pencil sharpening business. I follow him on Twitter, and he’s already got more orders than he can handle for Christmas and is making a decent amount of money.
So I spazzed and bought the brass sharpener Surok recommended, the mechanical one dataguy recommended (but from Amazon- it’s a Carl brand there) and some Blackwing 602 pencils Little Bird recommended.
All are very nice items and I got a couple of each and spread the pencil joy this Christmas.
I’m not entirely clear on the operation of the mechanical pencil sharpener- it came without directions and I’m pretty sure I’m wasting quite a bit of pencil when using it, but it does produce one beautifully sharpened pencil- as does the brass hand-operated one.