Few illustrious tourist attractions in Ohio rank higher than the Reverend Paul Johnson’s Pencil Sharpener Museum located in the middle of the State. The reverend’s wife donated it after he collected approximately 4,000 sharpeners from 1989-2010. He left her holding when he died in 2010. She had nobody to blame but herself as she bought him his first sharpener.
The good reverend collected pencil-sharpening Garfields, Mickeys, Tweetybirds, tractors, airplanes, trains, and US presidents who sharpened with their mouths. A panda bear sharpened pencils from the other end.
The museum grouped the display in relationship to his themes: food sharpeners, music, or travel themed. My attention turned to the historically-themed sharpeners. In my past our family owned a Boston Vacuum Mount Vintage Pencil Sharpener, circa 1950s. It belonged to Mom but lives in my kitchen now. It reminds me of the sound of Mom’s hand cranking as she sharpened pencils for my daily math lesson.
How I dreaded that sound.
Mom is a musical and math genius. I didn’t inherit a talent for numbers and experienced youthful problems learning to count. So the Boston sharpener, and what it represented, wasn’t my friend.
The pencil sharpener, given its due, ranks among the finest tools of the world. Mom’s Boston vacuum mounted sharpener came with an adjustable hole size and a twist off canister. Made in Mom’s home state of New Jersey, Camden precisely, when in 1957 X-Acto purchased the company. Elmer’s Glue then bought the company.
French scientist Nicolas-Jacques Conte, an officer in Napolean’s army, invented the pencil in 1795. Back in Concord, MA, in 1812, William Monroe made America’s first pencil. Another Concord native, Henry David Thoreau, the famous philosopher and author, made his own. Before the invention of the pencil, folks used messy graphite.
Aside from our family’s, a more “expensive” 1950s Boston vacuum mount pencil sharpener exists. That one contains a spring loaded grip at the front of the different sized holes to hold the pencil during sharpening. This very advanced model comes with only one hole because a special grip accommodates many pencil sizes. The Boston sharpener is a cylindrical planetary sharpener, using two conical gears, powered by a hand crank. A pair of helix cutters inside do the sharpening.
The hole size issue became important because Europe and Great Britain offered different sized pencils than the US. Boston exported sharpeners to England, where they called it a “pencil pointer.” In Ireland, they called it a Parer or Topper.
Before the Pencil Sharpener
Before the luxury of a tool called a pencil sharpener, a knives did the whittling. Until a Parisian mathematician applied for the world’s first pencil sharpener patent in 1828. England followed suit and patented a “Styloxynon” in 1833 with two sharp blades at right angles set in a block of wood with a hole. When the engineering of these tools developed to the point where the small block of wood held one blade at a tangent, called a prism pocket sharpener, fraught with difficulty for a left handed person. America ruled the sharpener market in the mid-19th century because one factory in Bangor Maine produced those small hand-held sharpeners we all know, and exported them widely throughout Europe.
Later American ingenuity led to the development of a huge mechanical communal office pencil sharpener from 1890-1917. The leading manufactory was the Automatic Pencil Sharpener Co., which dominated the market until the development of the electric pencil sharpener in 1917.
Other sharpeners serviced other types of pencils, such one for flat sided carpenter’s pencils.
Altas Obsura, which I love, tells us that if you visit the Reverend’s Pencil Sharpening Museum, you might make a detour to Springfield to see Mr Ben Hartman’s circa 1930s miniature rock garden of famous architectural structures, such as the White House in tiny pebbles. Or you might visit Eggshelland in Lyndhurst Ohio, begun in 1957 in the Manolio’s front yard at Easter, where the couple blew out 50,000 eggs and dyed the shells to create a giant Eater Bunny and a 50 foot Cross. The traditions are kept alive by neighbors and friends in Ohio today. Looks like we are in for a road trip.
The value of Mom’s Boston sharpener is $40.