Writing not on the wall for pencils
By Christopher South Cambridge Evening News Friday March 28th
2003
The editor may think me presumptuous but, risking his wrath, I have decided
to set up my own, rival, business awards.
True, the Cambridge Evening News Business Awards have been unassailably
successful and this week celebrate 10 glorious years. They are major force in
Mid-Anglia's prosperity. But I want my own. And I have a different agenda.
My awards will go to hopelessly outdated firms who triumph over technological
whizz-kids.
In a moment I shall announce the firs recipients of my business awards but
before that let us review the graveyard of innovation from which my ghostly
heroes walk to collect their prizes.
This very lively graveyard is the happy resting place of all those things
everyone said were dead or doomed to die. I'm thinking of housebricks, which
were supposed to have been replaced by concrete and plastic about 50 years ago.
I'm thinking of bicycles which, in the age of the motorcar and space shuttle,
are being made in their ever-increasing millions. On a cultural level, I'm
thinking of the cinema, the WI, Scouts and the novel, all of which were wrongly
consigned to the dustheap of history yet thrive ever stronger.
Our daily lives are full of things which ought to be dead by rights yet
stubbornly refuse to go away.
Today I add to that list of astonishing survivors the first winner of one of
my awards: the pencil. I award the first Look South industrial Award for 2003 to
the worldwide pencil manufacturing industry which, according to figures just
released, reached a record production total of 15 billion last year - and that's
just the black lead ones.
"Twenty years ago, 1 really worried about what would happen to the
wood-cased pencil," said Count Anton-Wolfgang von Faber-Castell, boss of
the world's biggest and oldest pencil firm. "Yet I still believe in
hand-held writing. If I had listened to my advisers 20 years ago, who talked
back then about computer-aided writing and whatever else, I would be
bankrupt."
The statistics say he was right to turn a deaf ear. Production of black-lead
pencils in Europe rose by 12 per cent between 2000 and 2001, says the European
Writing Instrument Manufacturers' Association.
Meanwhile, the electronic bubble burst, personal computer sales sagged and
achieved only an estimated 140 million in sales last year.
I ask him now to forgive my somewhat aggressive style, but when 1 happened to
bump into him this week I put these pencil facts to Graeme Minto,
Cambridge-based father of the vast ink-jet printing industry, one of the
greatest IT breakthroughs of our times.
Attempting to account for the astonishing survival and increasing popularity
of the pencil, Graeme's first thought was that the spread of literacy in
developing countries created a new demand. He could be right,
but why has pencil consumption gone up in America, too? The spread of literacy
may be part of it but could other reasons for the pencil's success even in the
gizmo-sated West be that it is cheap, never crashes or dries out, works
underwater or in outer space, needs no electricity and, above all, gives you
time to think while you write?
I am convinced cheapness is one of the chief reasons pencils hold their own
against palm-held gewgaws with twin carburettors and touch-screen integral sun
loungers.
And if you doubt me, consider the experience of the winner of my second Look
South Business Award for 2003, Kevin Cousins, manager of Cambridge Rubber
Stamps.
The mere mention of Cambridge Rubber Stamps makes people smile. Rubber stamps
in a city world famous for the highest of high tech? Rubber stamps in the cradle
of the world computer industry?
Well, they can wipe those smiles off their faces. From a modest shop in
Victoria Road, Cambridge Rubber Stamps survives decade after decade all attempts
to smudge it off the commercial map.
In fact Kevin tells me his boom times tend to be when recession bites.
"People start looking for something that can do the job perfectly well but
a whole lot cheaper than all that flash technology," he said.
So a technology that makes Guttenberg look like Bill Gates rules OK. Hooray.
My only regret in the triumph of despised technologies like the pencil and
the rubber stamp is that they tend to attract a rather nerdish enthusiast. Just
as we had to put up with those self-righteous enthusiasts of CAMRA who saved
British beer, we must tolerate a growing band of pencil fanatics who apparently
call themselves Leadites.
1 am not a Leadite but I think I may be a pencilover.
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