Pencil Sharpening is Not a Joke

Last year at this time, the Library Circulation desk was briefly without an adequately functioning pencil sharpener. An electric sharpener had just stopped working, while another, older one was still in a drawer, broken. But with students constantly looking to sharpen their pencils, we quickly discovered that the demand for pencil sharpening in the Library at Delgado is simply too great to ignore.

The pencil sharpener at  the City Park Library

We immediately made moves to acquire and install a new, manual sharpener on the side of the circulation desk, next to a pile of scrap paper we like to keep handy. Additional pocket sharpeners were also acquired and left in desk drawers at all public service points, in case of an emergency. Luckily, these acquisitions were made just before the Library budget was frozen last year, whence it could have been too late to meet this recurring need of our patrons.


The recent publication and warm reception of the book How to Sharpen Pencils: A Practical and Theoretical Treatise on the Artisanal Craft of Pencil Sharpening is a reminder of how important pencil sharpening is in fact, both at Delgado and probably everywhere. It is exciting to see something so basic receiving such careful attention. The book's author, David Rees, keeps the Artisanal Pencil Sharpening website. Reviews of his new book have been published in such publications as The New Yorker and BusinessWeek.

Pencil shavings at the City Park Library

Delgado Library Circulation staff person Valerie Mesa-Vega reports that the manual sharpener is used often and needs to be emptied at least once per week. She also likes to point out that the manual sharpener is not friendly to left-handed individuals, who may find it difficult to coordinate the sharpener crank with their "wrong" hand.

A keyword search in the Library Catalog for "pencil" finds nearly 100 items. Some dealing with pencil drawing techniques, others dealing with world trade and manufacturing data pertaining to pencils, and one containing "letters, essays, cartoons, and commentary on how and why to live contraption free in a computer-crazed world" (see book here).


All of this is a welcome reminder, especially at a place like Delgado Community College - whose motto is "education that works" - that the economy is open to craft, creativity, and industriousness.

City Park Library Circulation Desk with Valerie Mesa-Vega. The pencil sharpener is on the far side by the windows.