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“Jimmie” Howard was 8 years old when he began sharing his love of pencils with the world outside Scranton. He was a collector with a cabinet to fill. His dad, James, built it to hold 4,000 pencils, ...

From woodworkers to Broadway legends, artists to Pulitzer Prize winners, one indispensable tool unites them all: a pencil known as the Blackwing 602. Created in the 1930s by Eberhard Faber, this ...

A class of fifth-graders from Green Acres Elementary in Lebanon, Ore., asked us to find out how pencil lead is made. That quest took us all the way back to the dawn of the universe and then all the ...

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James is a published author with multiple pop-history and science books to his name. He specializes in history, space, strange science, and anything out of the ordinary.View full profile James is a ...