I was very honored to be the guest last night of Andy, Johnny and Tim on their latest Erasable Podcast Episode 14: Incense Cedar House Rules . My guess, given my readership and frequency of posting, is that if you’ve found your way to Timberlines, you probably already know about Erasable. Though, just in case you’re a neophyte and into pencils, then you need to follow these guys, listen to their podcasts and potentially even jump into the Erasable Podcast Facebook Group where they’ve inspired pencil exchanges and a whole host of nefarious pencil related behavior, including a Pencil Army. When it comes to anything new and interesting in the world of pencils these guys have all the fresh dirt. Or is that fresh pencil shavings?

Typically I listen to podcasts while I’m walking the dog in the morning, but tonight just couldn’t wait to see how it all turned out. So I’m listening while I write this post up.

One of the fun parts of the show is when they cover their “Tools of the Trade” which represent the pencils, notebooks and beverage of choice for the evening. Unfortunately I didn’t get to participate in that part of the conversation so I shared mine in my post photo above. During the discussion I mentioned my great-grandfather Philip who had run for Congress in the 1920s. One of his platforms was the overturning of Prohibition so in his honor, so last night during the podcast I was drinking Brew Free or Die IPA from 21st Amendment Brewery which is just down the street from my residence in San Francisco. I was using one of our old California Republic Palomino HB blue end-dipped pencils in an early prototype of a pocket sized notebook we were evaluating earlier this year as we refined our design choices for our new Blackwing Slate journal.

My interview segment comes in at about 43 minutes into their broadcast and runs through the end.

Thanks guys for including me it was great fun and I appreciate your asking me to join in and all the great feedback and put from the members of your growing Community. Pencil is Forever!

Last week I was listening to Johnny, Andy and Tim’s Erasable podcast with guest Brad Dowdy. This was the 11th episode in their new endeavor which I find quite interesting, even if I don’t always have time to sit through an entire episode. When I can, I check in on the Erasable Facebook group and even participate with a comment and it’s great to see the level of engagement the members have with their wood cased pencils and their developing community. This is a direct tribute to the power of social media and the leadership of these individuals and other pencil, pen and stationery enthusiasts, and it got me thinking about the role these social media technologies have had on the analog pencil industry.

Today marks the 9th anniversary of Pencil Revolution’s first ever pencil review back in 2005, which featured our Forest Choice Graphite pencils. To my knowledge, as the first and original “pencil blogger” Johnny’s post was the first ever blog review of any pencil on the internet. At least for a blog specifically focused on pencils, pens or stationery. Perhaps more research is needed to validate this claim, but for now I’m making it, and congratulating and thanking John for this accomplishment.

In honor of this anniversary and his selection of our product for that review, Pencils.com is offering a special 1 day only 25% discount on all ForestChoice pencils and notebooks, here. As it turns out we’ve made reasonable progress since those days using ForestChoice to promote FSC certification for wooden pencils. We’ve used this item as a driver product in our focus on providing high quality green school supplies http://gogreenschoolpencils.com/, at Pencils.com, and have even placed ForestChoice pencils in over 60,000 school supply kits this year with one key customer.

More importantly, today the vast majority of the wooden slats CalCedar sells to pencil manufacturers around the world are either FSC or PEFC certified. I like to think that that first Revolutionary post, along with our continued focus on providing such materials (not to mention the growing impact and awareness of environmental and sustainability issues enabled through blogs and social media) has certainly had an impact on the commitment the industry has shown to utilizing certified woods in pencils.

Johnny’s launch of Pencil Revolution a few weeks earlier and his communication with us asking for pencil samples came at a time when I myself was in the process of exploring how we might use blogging to further promote wood-cased pencils and California Cedar Products Company. In a sense, John’s serendipitous selection of our ForestChoice product, the first ever FSC certified pencil brand, provided the inspiration for me to initiate the Timberlines blog. The subsequent orders received and his response to trying out our original California Republic Palomino lead to me moving forward to launch online sales of our Palomino, GoldenBear, and Prospector range the following month. I’ve written about that previously here.

In checking in with Johnny this week about this anniversary and his role in influencing some of those early decisions he comments “I am very happy if I and/or my blog have/has had any impact at all on pencil making and marketing. But if Pencil Revolution played even a small part of the story that lead from the Palomino to the Blackwing, that’s fanfreakintastic!”

As it turns out, today also marks the 9th anniversary of my 1st post on this Timberlines blog. Though I have not been a very frequent publisher, I’ve used my posts over the years to share some of my personal thoughts on topics I have felt relevant to the wood cased pencil industry and other topics on forestry management, natural history, etc. (plus the occasional promotional pitch to support a new product introduction and our goals at California Cedar Products Company). There have been many good intentions to do more, but frankly the time I spend composing what I really want to say prohibits frequent posting given all my other commitments. Let’s just say I’ve never really developed the knack of brevity, but hope that my occasional in depth posts prove of interest to some readers.

Fortunately we have a great, committed team at CalCedar and, between our Pencils.com blog and our Blackwing602.com fan site, we’re producing some great creative content that supports the use and awareness of wood-cased pencils of all sorts as well as the creativity of end-users. And, it’s all promulgated with associated social media tools. In general I think we do good job and have been a leader within the pencil industry when it comes to internet marketing, communications and utilization of these tools to tell a story. There have been successes and mistakes along the way, but we’re always striving to improve and to make the most of these tools and honor the relationships and communities it allows us to develop and participate in with end consumers.

In fact I now describe CalCedar’s business as “enabling great pencil success stories from tree to final nub”. (Note: THe graphic above highlights some past successes and some in the works I used with our team to illustrate this updated vision of our business.) Fulfilling this objective requires operational excellence at many things, from technical and manufacturing knowhow to source raw materials, produce slats and support those industrial customers using our wood, to designing and sourcing unique and exciting products within our Palomino Brands unit that delight customers and dealers, to selecting the right products and improving customer service and e-commerce operations at Pencils.com that feature the wood-cased pencils and associated creative products. Ultimately many of these operational details cannot succeed without also telling these stories, engaging and listening to our customers and building new success stories. These social media tools have been the great enabler and have allowed our company to accomplish numerous successes so far with our Pencils.com store, and Palomino, Blackwing, and ForestChoice products, and to keep telling the great stories of our customers using our wood to make many of the best brands of pencils on the planet. Without a dedicated commitment to using these tools, and the ongoing support of people like Johnny, Andy, Tim, Brad and you, CalCedar would look like a much different (read older, more tired) company today. So, for us, these things have been a transformative process, yet we remain every bit as committed to our traditional slat customers today in providing great and competitive wooden slats.

Towards the end of the Erasable episode the crew talked about a recent article in the New York Times positing that pens and other writing instruments were dying product categories, given the continuing advancement of computing and communications technology. I was enthused to hear the gang vehemently disagree with the author and talk about subjects dear to my heart such as their feeling of connectedness to their writing tools and the textural, tactile sensation one gets when writing or drawing on paper with graphite, ink or other materials. It’s a sensory experience that just isn’t replicated well through all this new technology.

Perhaps this article was somewhat wishful thinking by the author, hoping for some company along the way, based on what’s been happening to newspaper circulation (which is an industry I’d suggest is much more clearly being disrupted by these technologies). While one may discount pencil bloggers and their followers by claiming that they are just small groups of obsessed people talking about their beloved pencils on the web, the reality is wood cased pencil production continues to grow globally at about the rate of world population growth. In my view, the wooden pencil remains the most affordable and efficient writing tool in the world and increasing levels of education in the developing world correlate with increased consumption. In more developed countries, yes new technology has some impact on use habits of writing instruments, but after a generation of commoditization and quality reduction by large mass retailers focused primarily on price, there are many people rediscovering the joys of writing and creating in graphite resulting from interesting product reviews and stories from the web. Frankly I think those are all some pretty good stories.

So what’s your pencil success story? We’re listening and hope to help you share it.

Each year Ginger and I take a road trip together in August. This year we’ve headed North to Oregon and I decided to try keeping a road trip journal using one of the beautiful prompted journals from the Journals Unlimited Range we stock on Pencils.com. This is a great series of Journals, each promoted with relevant data depending upon the topic. There are both mini and normal sizes in a number of topics. All the notebooks are “Made in the USA” and use soy based inks as well so they are environmentally friendly. Would be a nice pairing with our ForestChoice pencils as a gift, but on this trip I’m using my Blackwings and trying out a prototype pencil case.

For this trip I selected the Journal entitled, Adventures, My Road Trip Journal. Each day’s entry has prompts related to who you’re traveling with, departure and destination points and stops along the way. There is a technical data section for keeping track of odometer readings, MPG, gas prices, total distance travelled, and the route taken. Also sections for noting highlights, sights and memorable places visited, where you ate and things to remember for the next trip. The back page is open form for notes and journal thoughts about the day. I’m using it to make notes of interesting things Ginger and I talked about during the ride. Also each year we listen to one or two books on CD, usually picking an old classic. This year’s selection is Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and I’ve taken to writing down a few thoughts of interesting passages we listen to that day.

Overall the format seems pretty helpful, though on a down driving day like here in Sun River for a few days the technical sections are less useful, though I did use an app to track our bike ride and there is plenty of space for writing about our wilderness kayak trip today and my fishing trip tomorrow.

This post initiates an extended project I’ve given long consideration to pursue on Timberlines. That is, writing more extensively on my long running interest in the study of natural history and in particular the history of early naturalists as well as the development of various scientific disciplines within the broad field of natural history.

One of the major influences in this hobby was my grandfather and namesake, Charles P. Berolzheimer, whose broad intellectual curiosity in the sciences, including botany, forestry, wood-machining among many other fields of study as well as my exposure to his extensive library which he developed over a lifetime of scholarship. Both during his lifetime and after his death in 1995 I was quite fortunate to receive from his collection a number of books which focused on the natural history topics I find most interesting. He was a unique individual, equally comfortable giving a technical speech on wood sciences in several languages, discussing art and enlightenment thinking or walking through the woods collecting and assembling his personal herbaria. He was particularly fond of trees and fungi. My access to this collection of books has spurred my own further research into these topics, sometimes in specific technical fields, but more generally focusing on the human side of the story of those individuals who advanced knowledge in particular areas of interest, the early field naturalists, discoverers, catalogers or researchers.

My first post in this series covers Hough’s American Woods. I’ve selected this work as a first post not so much due to Hough being an early pioneer of natural history study, though the scope of his work and focus on documenting physical wood samples of American tree species was indeed pioneering in many respects, but rather as this work strikes a bit closer to home for me with respect to the influences of my Grandfather and his interest in area relative to wood processing and treatment.

Hough’s work is a multivolume collection of wood cuts including the Transverse, Radial and Tangential section to show physical specimens exhibiting the natural character of woods, both native and introduced to North America, that he considered import to the study of forestry. The series in total includes 14 volumes and 350 individual species. Each volume includes both the section samples of 25 species as well as a bound pamphlet describing the individual species general and technical information as well as general information covering a range of topics from taxonomy, botanical identification of parts of trees and on the geographic area specific to each volume. The author, Romeyn B. Hough, personally supervised the selection of living tree samples of each species to assure accurate identification and production of the physical sections. The final 14th and final volume was published posthumously in 1928 with his daughter writing the pamphlet.

Given the broad geographic distribution of species extensive work required to identify, harvest and prepare these samples it’s not surprising the publication of this multi-volume work spanned from 1888 to his death in 1924. The specific care to assure proper drying, cutting and preservation of actual wood samples that would stand up without degrade now over 100 years later relates specifically to the technical study of wood chemistry and machining that my grandfather dedicated his own professional career to given our company’s role in supply of wood to the Pencil Industry. American Woods is certainly a labor of love, which in his first Volume Hough dedicated to his own father, who in addition to his influence in Hough’s study of nature he also credits the original suggestion of the pursuit of the body of work covered in this entire series, officially titled, The American Woods, Exhibited by Actual Specimens and with Copious Explanatory Text.

Naturally of all the possible woods in these volumes I’ve chosen to feature sample number 141, Libocedrus Decurrens, or California Incense Cedar. This species is included in Part VI (published in 1895) which covers specifically woods of trees found growing in the Pacific Slope of the U.S. (a scan from my personal collection is shown) (today the Genus Calocedrus has commonly replaced the original taxonomy Libocedrus). Incense cedar first began to be investigated for pencil production around 1906 by our family members at the Eagle Pencil Company and produced commercially into slats at their Hudson Lumber Company mill. For more information on Incense cedar in pencil slat production, read here.

Originally, this collection sold for $5 per volume. Today a complete set including the 14th Edition sells for tens of thousands. You can see all the wood cuts from Hough’s American Woods on line here.