An Ode to the Eraser

Care of Mary Norris in the New Yorker.

From the piece...

I find that it was in 1650, in Nuremberg, that lead was first glued to wood, creating the modern pencil. It was not until 1858, according to Henry Petroski’s authoritative book “The Pencil,” that an enterprising Yank named Hyman Lipman, of Philadelphia, patented a method of attaching an eraser to the pencil. Joseph Reckendorfer bought him out and patented a new, improved eraser-tipped pencil in 1862. In Europe, despite the fact that in 1864 an eight-foot-long rubber-tipped pencil was carried in a parade honoring Lothar Faber, the German pencil king, the eraser is more likely to be sold as a separate item. 

In England, erasers are called rubbers, after the material they were originally made from. (What we call rubbers the English call French letters.) Before rubber, the material most suited for erasing pencil marks was bread crumbs. A snob might say that the eraser-tipped pencil is like a sofa bed: it sounds like a good idea, but it often features neither the best possible sofa nor the best possible bed. Focussing on the eraser, unscrupulous pencil-makers sometimes stiffed consumers with inferior lead. Or maybe the lead was O.K., but the eraser smeared your mistakes around, making them more conspicuous. In short, the effort to combine two distinct things in a single product can lead to something distasteful; for instance, Guinness gelato, which, trust me, is not a good flavor. 

I do not pretend to be an eraser connoisseur. While I don’t mind being known in certain circles as the Pencil Lady, I’d rather not be called Bride of Gumby.