[BEACON, NEW YORK]

My name is David Rees, and I have an artisinal pencil-sharpening business.

People pay me to sharpen their pencils.

[THE FINER POINTS OF DAVID REES]

[IN 2009, DAVID REES QUIT HIS JOB AS AN ACCLAIMED POLITICAL CARTOONIST. IN 2010, HE STARTED A ONE-MAN ARTISINAL PENCIL SHARPENING SERVICE.]

[HE CHARGES $15 PER PENCIL AND HAS RECENTLY PUBLISHED A GUIDE TO SHARPENING PENCILS CALLED HOW TO SHARPEN PENCILS.]

The oldest way to put a point on a pencil is using a straight blade.

Take the straight blade, and apply it to the edge of one of the

hexagonal sides of the shaft.

Your first couple rotations around the shaft, all you're trying to do is

expose the unfinished cedar wood.

This is basically a two stage process. The first stage,

is to remove enough cedar so that the graphite is exposed.

So, here you can see, and this is just really rough,

we're not doing this for aesthetics,

we're just doing this for functionality.

But I've exposed the graphite core in the middle of the pencil,

and now for the second stage,

we're gonna shape the graphite and create our pencil point.

I quit political cartooning and I got a job at the United States Census,

in the Spring of 2010, and on the first day of Census training,

they had us open our supply kits,

and inside there were a few pencils and a pencil sharpener,

because you fill out the forms with number 2 pencils,

for the Scan Tron machines,

and on the first day of staff training, the staff trainer was like,

"alright, now everybody sharpen your pencil."

So we were all standing around these trash cans, sharpening our pencils

with these little pocket sharpeners, and it was so satisfying and fun

that I thought, I want to figure out how to get paid to sharpen pencils.

So this used to be a paperclip factory, here in Beacon, NY.

And as you can tell, we have the ghost image of some paperclips

and some old rusted paperclips.

There's a lot of abandoned factories and warehouses here in Beacon,

and there's a lot of abandoned factories and warehouses

all over the country.

So there's something very different about an empty warehouse that's

been abandoned, as opposed to an empty warehouse that's about to kick into

production the next day.

The latter is kind of the same thing as unblemished office supplies,

there's just a lot of promise and potential

in a brand new empty ledger book.

Or a brand new, freshly sharpened pencil

that hasn't been applied to the page yet.

It just makes you think about the past of our country

and the future of our country and how we're probably all gonna die.

Starving to death and tearing each other apart in some kind of wasteland.

Why did you quit political cartooning?

I was always going to quit when George W Bush left office,

[GET YOUR WAR ON 2001-2009] because it was making me depressed,

and also I was getting kind of impatient,

I was ready to do different things, like different projects.

I remember when all the photos came out from the Abu Ghraib prison scandal

that was just kind of depressing and so dark,

but I knew that I had to make cartoons about it, and people were e-mailing me

saying, "when are you gonna make cartoons about this,"

"where are the cartoons about Abu Ghraib?"

And part of me was just like, you know what I really want to do, is just like

hide under the covers and eat cereal and not think for a couple months.

So I had to create kind of a taxonomy of terms

to describe different parts of the pencil point.

So I describe the pencil point as beginning where the unshaped

shaft of the pencil stops, and ending at the tip of the pencil.

I call this whole thing the point. The exposed cedar of the point,

I call the collar. So the collar bottom is where the unshaped

cedar shaft ends, and the exposed cedar cone begins.

That's the collar bottom.

The collar top is where the cedar ends and the graphite begins.

That I call the collar top.

So I'm going to read to you a passage from my new book,

"How to Sharpen Pencils."

Cutting into the shaft of a pencil and removing its point

can be an emotionally wrenching experience.

After all, as pencil sharpeners, we are taught to perfect and protect

the point at all costs,

and this amputation may feel perverse and unjust.

If the process feels you leaving bereft or ashamed,

rest assured your meloncholy will be replaced by satisfaction soon enough,

as the predestined arc of the pencil point in conjured anew by your hand.

I started my pencil sharpening business as my marriage was ending.

And so it's kind of like, I started this project and got obsessed with

pencils and pencil sharpeners at a time when I really was kind of adrift

in terms of my identity professionally,

because I quit cartooning, and then also personally,

because I was no longer a husband.

This is just rubber plumbing tubing that you can buy at any hardware store

and you can see that it fits over a pencil point.

So this is the first step of protecting the pencil point,

is to actually cut a length of rubber tubing,

that's long enough to fit entirely over the pencil point

so that it's not left exposed before you put it in the mail.

And this tubing is simply placed over the shaft of the pencil,

and around the tip of the pencil. So there you go. That's the first step.

If I'm sharpening pencils at a party or a convention,

and the person plans to use their pencil pretty quickly,

then I'll just hand it to them with this sheath, this protective sheath,

placed over the pencil point.

I kind of like being limited,

or having constraints when I'm being creative,

I get overwhelmed if you can do whatever you want,

I just get overwhelmed and shut down.

So, like making comics with clip art, that's a good limitation.

because you can't draw anything, so you just have to write around

whatever images you find.

And I guess the same is true of HTML.

Like, HTML is pretty bare-bones. I know maybe 5 different tags.

Like, center, bold, italicize, font size, font color.

So you just try to have as much fun with it as you can.

Like, I built this website for this fake advertising agency

called Joey the Midwife.

And I made all these online viral ads for Pepsi, and Toyota or whatever,

and Duracell batteries. I mean, I wasn't commissioned to make the ads,

I just made them for fun.

And it was just supposed to be really silly and goofy.

And that was all HTML,

and I think that made me laugh harder than anything I've ever made.

Not many people ever got into it, but for me it was like, really really

made me happy.

I think most of my clients don't actually use my pencils, they just

keep them as art objects,

or conversation pieces, or inspirational talismans.

So these display tubes work really well. I got a cap on each end,

and now you can see that the pencil point is protected twice.

First by that rubber sheating, and now by the shatter-proof plastic tube.

The pencil tip is unbroken!

You would never know that it had been thrown across an empty warehouse.

Again, that just speaks to the thoroughness of the research I did

when I started my business.

One of the appeals of starting the business, was I thought it would

be cool to use the internet to send people pencils in the mail.

Because pencils are really kind of the opposite of the internet, in many ways

so I thought it was cool to combine those two different technologies.

Like, a really old method of communication, the pencil,

and then a really new method of communication,

social networking and the internet.

You can see if you look closely

that the pencil is moving into the sharpener.

And now, the pencil has stopped moving into the sharpener.

So we will open the aperture, remove the pencil,

and you can see that we've put a lovely long point on this

Palomino Blackwing pencil.

Again, this is the difference between machine and man.

Machines are perfect and men are flawed.

Once I got into number 2 wooden pencils again,

it really made me kind of despise mechanical pencils

and the people who use mechanical pencils.

And the people who brag

about how their mechanical pencil never needs sharpening.

I mean, fuck you. Fuck you, you fucking cocksucker.

The shavings are part of the pencil, and so they should be returned

to the client along with the pencil.

And you can see that this pencil uses high quality red cedar,

because the color of the shavings is very nice, it looks like salmon.

I'll label these when I get back to the office.

It's a real business. Like, it's not a joke.

Like, I literally sharpen people's pencils for them.

And I do a good job. You know, I've done over 450 pencils,

I've never had one returned. I rarely get complaints about my handiwork.

I've met a lot of nice people sharpening pencils.

I got hired to sharpen pencils on a cruise ship in the Caribbean.

That was cool, you know?

I literally sharpened a pencil in a Jamaican waterfall.

So I guess insofar as it has increased my overall stockpile of happy memories

yeah, it has been therapeutic.

What I find interesting is how mad some people get about it.

When there's an article about it in the newspaper, sometimes the people

in the comments section are so furious.

And part of me is like, "guys, you don't need to overthink it."

It is what it is.

Like, people pay me money, and I send them a really sharp pencil.

And that's about it.