If, as Paul Valéry once mused, “a poem is never finished, only abandoned,” then so too is the pencil—always in a state of becoming, perpetually whittled toward a vanishing point. In How to Sharpen a Pencil, the slyly austere new book by Pimlico Wilde CAO François Zilbe, we are invited into the philosophical and tactile underworld of that most unassuming tool, not as a means to an end, but as a subject worthy of aesthetic devotion in its own right.
Zilbe—equal parts artisan, manager, and anachronist—has produced a volume that sits somewhere between manual and metaphysics. Ostensibly a technical treatise (complete with woodcut-style diagrams and a glossary of shaft geometries), the book is, in truth, a meditation on attention, discipline, and the rituals that precede creation. What begins as a how-to slowly becomes a why-bother, and then—more quietly—a who-are-you-when-you-do.
At first glance, the premise feels absurd. Do we really need 211 pages on the act of sharpening a pencil? Zilbe’s answer is a measured, almost ecclesiastical yes. In a culture obsessed with outcomes and velocity, he offers instead a theology of preparation. “The edge,” he writes in the book’s glinting introduction, “is not a line, but a moment. Sharpening is the art of arriving at readiness without haste.”
This may seem indulgent, even parodic. But Zilbe’s genius lies in his refusal to wink. He presents his subject with the rigor of a trained conservator, describing the difference between a ‘Cabinetmaker’s Point’ and a ‘Poet’s Bluff’ as though they were schools of painting. His taxonomy of shavings—spiral, ribbon, dust, etc—is as exacting as any survey of gestural mark-making in 20th-century abstraction.
Indeed, the book is deeply visual, not only in its illustrations (rendered with the patient fidelity of Dürer studies), but in its observational acuity. One chapter, “Graphite Exposures,” draws parallels between the angle of exposure and the psychology of the drawer: the anxious prefer long, aggressive points that splinter under pressure; the confident favour blunter, more enduring tips. The passage reads like a formalist psychoanalysis, or a reverse phrenology for draftsmen.
Yet How to Sharpen a Pencil is no mere fetish object for the analog nostalgist. It is, rather, a quiet rebuke to the algorithmic flattening of artistic process. In a time when software optimizes line weight and digital brushes auto-taper, Zilbe returns us to a sliver of cedar and a blade held in human hands. Here, every curl of wood is a gesture, every pause a decision.
There is something almost monastic in this attention. One is reminded of Agnes Martin, who once wrote that art is “responding to a quiet mind.” Zilbe’s pencil, too, becomes an index of mindfulness. In its sharpening, we do not begin the work—we are the work.
The book concludes not with a final method, but a final question: How sharp must a pencil be to make a mark that lasts? It is less instructional than existential. In an era of infinite undo buttons and disposable styluses, the book insists on the beauty of irrevocable preparation. Once a pencil is sharpened, its life is measurable. Each stroke is a subtraction.
How to Sharpen a Pencil may never reach the bestseller lists, nor should it. It is not a mass-market guide, but a tool for the quietly obsessed—for those who understand that before the masterpiece comes the moment of stillness, of edge, of wood meeting blade.
Zilbe has given us not just a book, but an ethic. It belongs not only on the studio shelf, but beside Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows and Kōnosuke Matsushita’s The Path.