A disappointment

About 25 years ago I read a very kind review of a book called 'The Pencil' and I was tempted to buy, but didn't. And then, all these years later, Epsom Library threw out one of their copies, so I snapped it up for £1.

The book was published in this country by Faber and was rather unattractively designed. A book rather high for its width, with narrow margins and footer. Cheap paper (now gone rather brown) and cheap illustrations. So not off to a great start.

The author, Henry Petroski, is or was a professor of engineering at Duke University, and I rather suspect that this book grew out of series of lectures about manufacturing, possibly the history of modern manufacturing, using the humble pencil as the case study, the thread to hold the lectures together. A perfectly reasonable idea as the pencil is a surprisingly complicated while familiar object and it took several hundred years to get it really right after the first modern pencil appeared in the seventeenth century. With one of the triggers being the very superior graphite then to be found in Borrowdale, thus providing one of the reasons for the unsightly spoil heaps littering the Lake District (illustration courtesy of Google). Apparently in those early days the stuff was sufficiently valuable for the owners of the mines to apply the same sort of control to the mines and the miners which I associate with gold and diamond mines (as a result of two or three thrillers featuring same). And there is plenty of material and there are plenty of anecdotes out there.

But I could not manage the book. Got through the first fifty pages of so, then started dipping and then abandoned ship. I think the trouble is that while the author has plenty of material, he is not a professional writer and could have done with the services of a good editor, an editor able enough to cut the thing down a bit without upsetting the chap too much. To get it down from 400 pages or so to 200. And perhaps to provide some higher grade illustrations. Perhaps Faber should take a peek at PHI (see 25th April) before they produce another book of this sort.

A book which, despite not amusing me as much as I had hoped, may have spawned the similar books about things like cod fishes, possibly, for example, 'Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World' by Mark Kurlansky. Which someone once lent me and suffered a bit, as I recall, from some of the same defects as the present pencil book. Reaktion are at it too at http://www.reaktionbooks.co.uk/ (click subject then animals), although they do not actually do a cod one. But they do appear to have addressed two of the pencil problems: the books are shorter at around 200 pages and they look to be both more and better illustrated.