Petroski takes the history of an everyday tool as a case-study in what engineers actually do in the real world. Some artisan in the sixteenth century noticed the useful properties of Borrowdale graphite and various other people, in multiple steps and by analogy with existing writing tools, found a convenient way to hold thin sticks of this natural material in protective wooden sleeves. Later advances in the design were driven by numerous factors including geopolitical restrictions on the supply of the raw materials (cedar and pure graphite), exhaustion of natural resources, shifts from cottage-industry to industrial manufacture, foreign competition, and much more. The people involved in the story of the pencil (Petroski treats them as engineers because of the way they were working, but of course few of them would have been qualified engineers in the modern sense of the term) were never on some ideal trajectory towards the perfect pencil, they were solving specific, local problems to enable them to produce something that was good enough to sell for more than what it cost to make. In the ideal case, marginally better or marginally cheaper than what the competitors were making.

It’s an interesting idea, and it brings out some useful insights into the way technology works, and quite a few interesting little anecdotes as well — I enjoyed learning about Henry David Thoreau’s day-job in his father’s pencil firm, for instance — but I didn’t enjoy this as much as I have some of Petroski‘s more recent books about engineering. He makes it all a little bit too slow and ponderous here, and he seems to be far too convinced that American-style free market capitalism is the way to solve all the world’s problems. ( )

This has to be the most boring book I have ever read. 400 pages on the history of the pencil. Each chapter had a paragraph or two about the pencil (and that was interesting) and then page after page of theories of engineering. I had this book checked out for 9 weeks. I just couldn't take it any longer. I made it to page 254. I'm going to consider this book READ so it wasn't an entire waste of my time! I think I made it to the early 1900's for pencil history. . . I could have skimmed it to find the rest, but I didn't. I just couldn't. ( )

I really tried to like this book. The topic sounded very interesting, and as a writer who still does write by hand, I figured it would be interesting. However, Petroski simply does not know how to write or make an engaging narrative. Every time you think he is going to get to the history of the pencil, he goes off on some generic tangent--whether it be how wonderful engineering (as a field) is, or where I finally dropped off, some stuff about storytellers. That the prose is dense and dry certainly does not help things neither. I have read a good number of microhistory books (histories of just one topic) that were pretty good. This is not one of them. Avoid this book. I am sure if you want to learn more about pencils and their history, there are better sources out there.

I just basically followed the Nancy Pearl Rule of 50 on this one. ( )

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. ( )

The author has found a lot of interesting information about pencils, but is actually really interesting in engineering in general. It shows. ( )