For many years I've been searching for a Pencil Of The Month Club, but eventually lost hope and came to terms with being a rare lead appreciator living in an ink and screen world. So when I heard of a pencil shop opening on the Lower East Side, the first thing I wanted to do was ask the owner, Caroline Weaver, if she'd be introducing such a club.
Weaver told me, "This is definitely in the works and will start in May or June. I'll send a really special pencil (old or new) each month along with its story. Stories are really important with pencils—aside from its physical characteristics which often vary rather subtly, it's what sets them apart from each other." This is my kind of pencil shop.
CW Pencils recently opened in a little storefront on Forsyth Street, and it's immediately clear upon entering that the proprietor is passionate about her product. She explained:
"My love for pencils stems from many things. I was definitely influenced by my mother's obsession with nice pencils but mostly I just grew to appreciate them on my own. In school it's cool to use a mechanical pencil, but most of them are cheap, the lead breaks and they're generally just truly awful. I made it a point to always have an arsenal of freshly sharpened pencils with me from a young age and grew to appreciate the feeling of writing with something so tactile. The smell of the wood, and the sensation of sharpening—nothing beats it, really."
The pencils in the store are both new and antique, with prices starting around .20-cents, and going up from there. Of course now you'll need an expert to sharpen them for you.
Photo by Sai Mokhtari/Gothamist
"There aren't very many pencil factories left, but most of them still maintain the quality and heritage of yesteryear. Some harder to find pencils have to be tracked down via a third party (friends in other countries) or collected while traveling," Weaver says of her inventory, "The old pencils are bit trickier, but most of mine come from collectors who have an excess of a certain pencil or from auctions."
The most interesting pencil Weaver has seen comes from long ago, "There are a lot of pencils from the 1920s to 1950s with really odd and elaborately shaped erasers attached to them. There's one that I have called the Dixon Inline which has really fine orange and white stripes on the barrel and a big, flat, square eraser on the end which is held by an elaborate gold ferrule. It's a really lovely and strange pencil."
There is an online store, but we highly recommend dropping by the shop. It's located at 100a Forsyth Street in Manhattan, and is open Tuesday-Saturday 11 a.m. to 7 p.m, and Sunday 12 to 7 p.m.
