Jonathan A. Veley, winner of the award for Best Overall Design - Non Fiction in the 2020 Next Generation Indie Book Awards for his last book, A Century of Autopoint, returns to The Leadhead's Pencil Blog for a new series of articles written during the isolation of the Pandemic. He filled long hours at home with research, photographing new finds and writing original and groundbreaking historical accounts about the American pen and pencil industry. Included in this volume are in-depth histories of Crocker, Chilton, Century, Chicago Gold Pen Company, and the Chicago Safely Pen Company, among many others.

"I know they're just pencils," he writes, "workaday items that just don't matter that much in the grand scheme of human civilization. But as I tell these stories, I've come to appreciate that there are times when something passes into my hands that brings with it more than just the ability to make a dark line on a sheet of paper - it brings along with it the baggage of rich history." His stories about "pencils, the universe and everything" weave together the objects themselves, those who made them, and those who appreciate them today.