Color Drawing: Design Drawing Skills and Techniques for Architects, Landscape Architects, and Interior Designers, 2nd Edition
I was somewhat anxious to reassure myself that Henry Petroski was not a horrible writer after my experience with his autobiography, so I picked up his history of the pencil, called, appropriately, The Pencil.
It's a terrific read, and Mr. Petroski was definitely in his element. He used the history of pencils to guide a history and understanding of the process of engineering itself. This being particularly apt as engineers use a lot of pencils to engineer, in general. (Petroski teaches engineering.)
There were times when the book bogged down, and I felt like some portions of it could have been edited without any great loss of information. Petroski is given to long discussion of things that seem irrelevant, like the antitrust behaviour of pencil companies in the mid-20thc. (yawn). But despite the slow bits (which I admit to skimming), the book was an interesting, if not fast, read.
The best parts of the book were at the beginning, when there was less technical information, but what there was was more unexpected.
Like many people, I grew up on the myth that the pencils to be had in times as recent as my parents' childhood were made with lead. In fact, pencils have been made with graphite since it was discovered in the 1560's. It's just that they didn't know what it was, and because at the time they sometimes used lead styluses to make faint marks, they called it "black lead." As far as I can tell, there has never been any lead content in pencils, because even the paint used to make them yellow is lacquer, not lead paint.
Also, did you know Henry Thoreau, the transcendentalist, ran a pencil factory? He even invented a way of refining low-quality graphite to make better pencils, and eventually his company stopped making pencils for profit at all, and simply made ground graphite for printing.
After reading this book, I found myself examining all my drawing pencils and work pencils and comparing them to the ones mentioned in the book, and looking for the makers' marks described. It's definitely a geek's book.
# Posted by ayse