If you ever visit Keswick then you MUST visit the Pencil MuseumÂ….
Is surprisingly not the slogan of the Keswick Tourist Board.
I was alone in Keswick today and had some time on my hands. I noticed a lot of signs for the Pencil Museum and thought I had to go for three reasons;
1) I needed to see what was in it. And if it was more than just one pencil with a sign saying, “A Pencil”. I found it hard to imagine how it would be possible to devote an entire museum just to the pencil. Surely a fairly modern invention, not something that has greatly changed history. Would they include pens? Hopefully not. It is a pencil museum.
2) The last museum I visited was a Penis Museum. Perhaps it would be possible for me to visit all the museums that start with the letters “pen”. The Pen Museum, the Pen Museum (this time not the writing implement, but the female swan), the Penicillin Museum, the Pendant Museum, the Penultimate Museum ( a museum of all the second to last things in the world – that would be quite good actually, might open it myself)… you get the idea.
3) A visit to a Pencil Museum would be a no-brainer Warming Up entry. I am on holiday. I donÂ’t want to waste hours scratching my head thinking about things to write when I could be going out and having fun (and visiting other museums based on very specific and yet mundane everyday objects). I just needed to go to the Pencil Museum, have a nose around for five minutes, make a couple of fatuous observations which would provide fodder for a brief mockery of the poor tourist attraction and then I wouldnÂ’t have to worry about seeing something genuinely amusing.
The easily pleased readers of my web page would be pleased (as is their wont) and I could spend the rest of the day reading about Samuel Pepys and wondering if he ever did anything similar when he couldnÂ’t be arsed to write about the turbulent times of the 17th Century. Did they even have pencils in the 17th Century. I was about to find out.
Disappointingly the Pencil Museum was attached to a pencil factory. I was hoping it was run by a man who was just really interested in pencils, rather than it being some kind of commercial facility designed to make people buy pencils.
Things started well. The entrance fee was only £2.50 and for that you also got a free pencil. It would serve as a souvenir. I could look at that pencil in the future and remember my trip to the pencil museum. Perhaps if I kept the pencil long enough it would one day be an antique and might become an exhibit in this museum. You have to dream
I was also given a leaflet which opened with the words “The Derwent Pencil Museum is the only attraction in the world devoted exclusively to the rich and fascinating history of the pencil.”
I thought, “Yes, there is probably a reason why it’s the only one isn’t there? Because nobody else thinks the pencil is worth devoting an entire museum to. There are probably other museums which include a pencil or two, but they have realised they have to put some other stuff in the museum as well because pencils aren’t interesting enough to maintain a whole museum on its own. And “rich and fascinating history”? Well we’re about to see just how rich and fascinating it is. Is it rich and fascinating or is it just that a man invented a pencil and then some people used pencils for drawing and for putting things in their diaries that aren’t totally confirmed?”
Were my expectations to be subverted? Was the pencil museum going to be the best museum in the world and unexpectedly rich and fascinating?
No, of course it wasnÂ’t you idiot.
The museum started with a walk through a replica of the Borrowdale mine where graphite was first discovered. Sounds quite exciting, but in fact it mainly consisted of a dummy of a man with a hammer and chisel supposedly mining graphite. But his face was all crushed in because of all the visitors who had punched him on their way in and his legs looked like tights stuffed with old pants. I tried to work out who he reminded me of, and then I realises he looked very much like that bloke they found in the Alps who had been trapped in a glacier for 5000 years and who was all crushed and leathery.
Which would have been OK, but he had nothing to do with pencils. He never even saw one.
Because I later discovered pencils were invented in around about 1500AD after the discovery of graphite. In fact the person recognised as the first pencil maker was John Ladyman. I bet he got teased at school. Not for inventing pencils - he wouldn’t have invented them by then – but because he had a name that made it easy to question his masculinity. I wonder if he thought, “One day I’ll show them. I am going to invent the pencil. It’ll be a bit like a pen, but not quite as good.”
The person we should be celebrating is the man who invented the eraser. He gave the pencil a purpose.
But there was no mention of him in the Pencil Museum. Of course not. The eraser is the enemy of the pencil. The pencilÂ’s nemesis. So they wouldnÂ’t mention the eraser inventor. It was as if heÂ’d been rubbed out of history.
To be honest I couldn’t get up much enthusiasm for the rest of the museum. It wasn’t that it was bad, just that I’m not interested enough in pencils to spend more than five minutes looking at exhibits which mainly involve pencils. I was shown how pencils have changed over the last two centuries and concluded that they hadn’t changed very much. They also showed you how you get the “lead” in the pencil. But that exhibit had a lot of people standing in front of it and I couldn’t be bothered to wait. Because I’m not that interested in pencils.
You might think that thatÂ’s my own fault. That if I donÂ’t like pencils then I shouldnÂ’t go to a museum which is obviously dedicated to the pencil. But theyÂ’d drawn me in. IÂ’d been more interested to see how it was possible to make a museum about pencils which wasnÂ’t really boring. I had to find out. Of course what I discovered is that it wasnÂ’t possible. TheyÂ’d made a museum about pencils which was really boring (and incidentally also included some pen nibs to try and fill things out a bit which I think is cheating).
There was a thirteen minute film about pencils to watch. And they had made it more exciting by putting an excerpt from the cartoon “The Snowman” at the end. Because “The Snowman” had been drawn using pencils. That’s how tenuous it was becoming. (OK, I’ll be fair, it was drawn with pencils from the factory that we were next to, but still).
As far as I could see the only time a pencil had made any impact on history was during World War Two when the factory manufactured special pencils with maps and compasses hidden in them to assist escaping POWs. So when theyÂ’d made pencils that werenÂ’t actually meant to be used as pencils. And how many people escaped using these pencils. The museum doesnÂ’t know saying itÂ’s impossible to say because officially the pencils didnÂ’t exist.
Surely it would have been possible to ask any POWs who escaped whether they had used the pencils.
I think what happened is that the POWs received the pencils in their Red Cross packages, said “Oh great, they’ve sent us pencils” and then thrown the pencils away.
I saw the biggest working pencil ever made. It was 7ft high. I would argue that that is too big to be of any use.
I had been in the Pencil Museum for almost 8 minutes and I had learnt all I needed to know about pencils. I was down £2.50, but up one pencil.
But I think the crushed graphite miner/ice man figure was worth the entrance fee alone. I just hope they donÂ’t use any of the money IÂ’ve given them to repair it.
If you want to know more about the pencil museum or feel your knowledge of pencils is inadequate then please visit the Cumberland Pencil MuseumÂ’s website at
http://www.pencils.co.uk
YouÂ’d think the internet would also be the enemy of the pencil, but they have cleverly turned it into a friend of pencils. One day, be warned the machines will rise up and destroy their pencil overlords. Or people will just get bored of pencils.
I am thinking of trying to visit every museum to a specific but uninteresting thing in the world. Please email me if you know of one I might like to look at. I am then going to open a museum that is devoted only to these museums and call it “The Museum Museum”. I am taking bookings for the spring of 2004.
