Ripley's Believe It or Not by Ripley’s Believe It or Not! for November 07, 2023

I want to chew on those pencils, haven’t had one in years

Did Hawkins also create a steam punkcil?

Sometimes in class, I would carve squares on my pencil with my pocketknife.

Before 1770 the erasers were crummy. ;-}

Fantastic panel of historic facts for writers and bibliophiles of all classes!! Wow-zowie!! Thank you so much!!

Mr. Bartholmy’s kin are beside themselves. Somebody’s gonna have to drag all that trash out of his house someday. That’s going to be as hard as those old erasers!

We got to get the lead out.

Way to pencil it in – makes you feel like #2

We’ve been relying on rubber things since the 1770’s.

We used bread as erasers in one of my art classes. Bread is much softer on the paper and thus the paper does not tend to tear as with a regular eraser (or rubber as it’s know to our brit friends).

Therefore, edible bread was before durable, abrasive bread.

I used to live within 50 miles of Colfax, Iowa. There’s not much to do there besides collect pencils.

I never really thought about if there were pencils prior to the 1770s. All I’ve heard/read were that they used quills and pots of ink, and they used sand to absorb extra ink, to make it dry faster.

Those pencils probably mentioned places that went out of business long ago.History lesson coming up.