Sharpen Your Knowledge! A Haberdashery Cryptid Preserve Celebration of National Pencil Day!

Here at the Haberdashery Cryptid Preserve, we celebrate all things strange and wonderful, and that includes the marvelous writing implement: the pencil! March 30th is National Pencil Day, a day to honor this ubiquitous tool that has served humankind for centuries. But did you know the pencil's history is as mysterious as some of the creatures we house here at the Preserve?

Pencils have been around since the 1500s, when graphite was first discovered in the English Lake District. This peculiar black rock could leave marks on paper, but it was messy and difficult to handle. Legend has it that a fierce but benevolent creature known as the Pencil Pixie first witnessed shepherds using graphite to mark their sheep. The Pencil Pixie, with its boundless curiosity and love for storytelling, took pity on the shepherds and gifted them with the first wooden casing for graphite, creating the world's first pencil!

While the Pencil Pixie may be the stuff of legend, the pencil's evolution is certainly fascinating. The familiar hexagonal shape of the pencil wasn't developed until the 1800s by a pencil manufacturer named Eberhard Faber. Why hexagonal? It turns out that round pencils kept rolling off tables, frustrating both writers and mythical creatures alike. The hexagonal shape prevented this from happening, making pencils more user-friendly and, some say, less attractive to mischievous imps who loved to steal them!

Pencils hold a special place here at the Haberdashery Cryptid Preserve. Many of our cryptids, from the scholarly Mothman to the artistically-inclined Jersey Devil, use pencils to communicate and create. The neatly sharpened pencils left outside their habitats are a sign of trust and a request for further interaction.

So, this National Pencil Day, we encourage you to celebrate the pencil! Sharpen your favorite pencil, write a story, create a work of art, or simply jot down your thoughts. You never know, you might just spark the creativity of a nearby cryptid!