In homage to the Martin guitar thread:

Now, of course, they are in a special cabinet of their own, with the humidity and the light regulated. I bring them out when I become moody, and seek in memory the roots of my genius, and want to handle the best -- the finest woods, the balance, the history. I set them out on the table, the tools of my craft, the extensions of my self. Somehow they have all become associated over time with the women I have loved and sometimes lost. I line them up accordingly.


Trish - HB - My first pencil, I can hold it up to the light and see her tender, girlish chew marks, how I used to watch her chewing away, like a beaver with those pre- braced teeth, and the day I stole it from her desk when she wasn't watching. It has no markings, so I do not know where it came from before that. Stubby, mysterious.

Katy - 2B - that is the question. From her father's golf bag, blue, short. She scribbled her telephone number on it, as we were necking in the tangled rough by the 3rd hole. We were so young.

Sandra - 3H - hard, blunt, but my first great love, and my first serious pencil. The long yellow shaft with the exotic words, "Caran d'Ache" all over it, redolent of the promises we made to always love each other, and go and live in Paris together, and be famous like Ernest and Hadley. I was 15.

Connie - F - I am sitting in a cafe on the Left Bank, and she sees me writing my first novel, and she says what are you doing, and I say, writing, and it was as beautiful then as it was then and it will always be. She leans over from the next table, and says where did you get that pencil, and I say, from Morley Callaghan, and it is Canadian, from the Venus company, strong pencils, good wood. Not the best, but good. Good to write with. Good to capture truth: good to look into the eyes of truth with and not blink. Connie is American. It is spring. And it was good, there in Paris, writing, with that pencil, for a while. Until it wore down to the nub.

Dominique -- Parker Pen, gold nib - I am writing my second novel, and nothing is working, and Connie has gone, and Dominique walks by and says, perhaps you should try something more permanent? And she hands me her Parker 51. A pen. Perhaps it is time at long last to grow up. And so I learn about ink.

Catherine -- goosequill -- I write through the evenings at the Bibliotheque Nationale, and at the next desk I can see that she is working on 15th century French plays, and one evening she turns to me and says, would you dip your quill in my inkwell?

Tammy -- Bic -- She says, hey man, can I flick your Bic? And I am flustered, since I do not smoke and have never used a ballpoint pen. I have come to New Orleans to study the settings for my new novel - Flaubert and Degas in Louisiana -- and Tammy introduces me to the Bic pen and to the electric guitar. For a time I am submerged in American subcultures, plastic, transparency, mass production, Tammy.

Antonia -- Toison D'Or -- 6B -- I am in New York Sohoat the launch of my book, and she hands me this and says: "Could you write in it: Love is like glass blowing." I take the pencil, a special drawing pencil. She says it is the best. From the Bohemia Works in Czechslovakia. As the Martin guitar is to the guitar, so the Toison d'Or pencil is to the pencil. Black lines, beautiful balance, cuts without tip breakage. Drawing pencils! We go back to her studio, and draw all night. I have never known such a range of pencils: some soft, some hard, some medium, all perfect in their own way. And in the end she is very soft, very 6B.

Jennifer - Rotring Techpen - She sizes me up, no nonsense. An engineer, with sliding rules. Swift, sure, calculating, we'll build that bridge when we come to it. Tragically killed by one of her own buildings falling on her. I pulled the pen free.

Now? The best pencil? Oh, there are contenders. Derwent Graphic. Berol. Canada Venus (such a redolent name), still makes good cheap pencils that are improving. But, you ask the pros, and 56 times out of 57, you will hear Toison d'Or. The Japanese have made copies, pretty good, but in the blind writings, it still comes out the same. And for this I have to thank my Antonia. Which is why, when I look up from my array of writing tools, it is her I see, beckoning me to the drawing room. I have tried all the rest, but pencil me in - Toison d'Or. Antonia.

In the next chapter I discuss the bitter world of erasers, the futile attempt to remove error and sin from our lives: and the women who I have vainly tried over and over to erase from my memory.