John’s love for pencils is well documented. The other half of his writing formula, however, has received considerably less attention. In addition to 24 freshly sharpened pencils, John would start each day with a stack of yellow legal pads, which he would rapidly fill with his signature diction. Once a pad was saturated with script, he would file it away, and immediately move on to the next glue-bound bundle of pages.

As I left Thom’s Santa Barbara home that day, the story of his father’s infatuation with legal pads left an impression on me. We launched the Blackwing 24 later that month, the Volumes program took off, and I found myself spending most of my time designing new pencils and telling new stories. But this story always stuck with me, and I knew that we had a new chapter to contribute to it.

Three years later, I’m stoked to finally introduce our interpretation of Steinbeck’s favorite writing vessel: the (Il)Legal Pad.

Each (Il)Legal Pad is made with high-quality 80 GSM, ivory paper. If you like the paper we use in our other notebooks, you’ll love this. It comes in a set of 2 and has three paper type options: dot-grid, ruled, and plain. The pages of each Pad are also sewn-bound and perforated, so they only tear away when you need to use them.

Get one here, and write your new chapter.

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Thom shared the details of “the Steinbeck length,” and how he used his father’s pencils once they had been passed on to him.

Full transcript of the conversation included below.

When the pencils were down about halfway, or when the pencil could no longer be supported by this part of the hand… So they were about this long.

If they got any shorter, he would discard them. And I was a kid, my hands were smaller, and I got them. So I had pencils all my life.

Drove him crazy because I drew in the blank pages of his books in the library. Because I wanted paper.

So I’d open something really valuable and, “oh,” there’s that blank page between. And I’d draw in there.

About this long with a point, that was it.

The post The Steinbeck Pencil Length appeared first on Blackwing.

Full transcript of the conversation included below.

The saddest thing was… to my father, as a writer… is the woman who had been doing his line editing, the woman who could actually read his handwriting, finally died.

At Viking, she was at Viking Press. And nobody else could read his handwriting.

And they sent him a letter saying, “John, we’re so sorry. We know you like to write by hand, but we can’t publish your handwriting. We can’t read it. You either have to find somebody who can type it up for you, or you’re going to have to get a typewriter.”

Well, this was a big drama in our house. Big drama. And he went out and he bought himself one of those gigantic IBMs. You know the kind that when you typed on it, all the paintings in the room moved.

Tunk, tunk, tunk, tunk, tunk. It was an unbelievable sound. 

He was a six finger typist. Tick, tick. Tick, tick, tick. And it was too slow, it would drive him crazy.

What he would do is… write by hand… finish his writing for the day and then he would have to spend the afternoon typing up what he’d hand-written. Because he knew what it said. 

So he went out and bought balls in every language. Remember they had the ball? And he got balls in Finnish, and balls in Russian. Just to see what they looked like, you know?

And just to get it back on his publishers, he one day wrote… sent them… three pages in Russian. Now he couldn’t speak or read Russian, he just used the Russian ball and made all these letters in Russian.

Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.

And shipped it off and said “How’s this?”

And they said, “You’re kidding.”

The post John Steinbeck’s Typewriter appeared first on Blackwing.

When we met with the Steinbecks at the outset of this project, we brainstormed what we could include as an exclusive gift for our subscribers. We asked Thom if his father had any letters or notes that had never been published, something the public had never seen before. What he had turned out to be even better.

He took us into his dining room, where there hung a painting. It measured roughly 18 x 24 inches and featured the elder Steinbeck in profile, realized in vibrant acrylic. “This is the greatest likeness of my father I’ve ever seen,” said Thom, “and it has never been seen outside of this room.”

The painting is by Kenny McKendry, an artist Thom and Gail met during their travels in Europe. Mr. McKendry, who calls County Antrim in Northern Ireland home, describes himself as a “contemporary traditionalist.” He is recognized around the world for his outstanding portraiture, and his portrait of John was a gift to Thom and Gail.

Thom, Gail and Mr. McKendry agreed to let us share the painting with the outside world for the first time. Every subscription contains a postcard-sized print of the portrait with a message from Thom on the back. 

In addition to the postcard, subscribers will also find a Blackwing pin, so you can show off your Blackwing flair wherever you go.

Blackwing Volumes subscriptions containing the Blackwing 24 are still available. Click the button below to subscribe. 

The post Inside the Blackwing 24 Subscription – An Unreleased Portrait of John Steinbeck appeared first on Blackwing.

Our Day with Steinbeck

– by Grant Christensen and Alexander Poirier

He entered the room with a presence befitting of his pedigree. His slicked-back hair and low-cropped beard had long since conceded their color, but his eyes were still piercing blue. His baritone was rugged but gentle: “I understand you’ve come here to talk about my father.”

John Steinbeck’s eldest and only living son, Thomas J. Steinbeck, wears 71 years with grace, despite decades of battling the after effects of Agent Orange and the Vietnam War. An accomplished author in his own right, Thom had agreed to meet with us to speak about his father, something he has rarely done in recent years. “He doesn’t usually do these types of things,” said his wife Gail, the matriarch of the household. “But your company does a wonderful job, and we want to support you any way we can.”

What we originally expected to be a casual business meeting quickly turned into something much more intimate. Thom’s health prevented him from leaving the house that day, so the Steinbecks invited us into their home where we spent the afternoon surrounded by congenial hospitality, creative spirit, and shelves lined with books.

“Before we get to that,” Thom began, “Have you ever heard the story about how Armand Hammer traded his pencils for the crown jewels of Russia?”

This was the first of many anecdotes and insights we would hear that day. We were even joined at one point by Thom and Gail’s nephew, touring musician Johnny Irion and his wife Sarah Lee Guthrie, whose family tree has creative roots as deep as any.

Thom recalled the first time his father met Sarah Lee’s grandfather, Woody Guthrie. “I wish I’d have heard ‘Do Re Mi’ three years sooner, you’d have saved me a novel,” the elder Steinbeck told the American folk hero. “It took me 400 pages to do what you did in two and a half minutes.”

Johnny then asked Thom “Did you ever hear the story about when Woody met Einstein? On a train…” Yes, it was that kind of day.

We asked Thom about the legend that his father used as many as 60 pencils in a single day. Thom answered with an emphatic “No.” After a short pause, his eyes lit up with a mischievous twinkle. “Sometimes is was 100. Sometimes even more.”

“My father’s handwriting was painfully small,” Thom continued. It was so small and difficult to decipher that for a large part of his career, there was only one editor in the world who could accurately translate his manuscripts. In order to write on such a small scale while maintaining some semblance of legibility, Steinbeck’s pencils needed to be extremely sharp. “Surgically sharp,” said Thom. “Sharp enough to kill an elk at 300 yards.”

The elder Steinbeck also believed sharpening a pencil was a terrible distraction that interrupted the flow of his writing. He developed a ritual to eliminate this distraction, and build confidence.

Each morning his father would sit down at his writing desk in front of two boxes. After reaching for his yellow legal pad, Steinbeck would gather 24 pencils and begin sharpening them, one at a time, in his prodigious electric pencil sharpener. “It weighed as much as a Chevy. And was just as loud,” remembered Thom.

After all 24 pencils were sharpened, Steinbeck would arrange them, point up, in one of the two boxes. He’d then tap them gently with his fingers to ensure they were all the same length. When satisfied with their uniformity, he would begin writing.

Each pencil would last roughly four to five lines. With every word, John would rotate the pencil ever so slightly, ensuring he was able to extract every thought before it had dulled to the point of dissatisfaction. He would then place the expended pencil in the second box, point side down, and pick up another pencil. He repeated this process until all 24 pencils had dulled, at which point he would sharpen them all again, and begin the routine anew.

We went on to talk briefly about why Blackwing appealed so much to his father. “The wood. And the graphite. The quality more than anything.” Thom also noted that his dad hated erasers on the ends of pencils and the ability to remove erasers from Blackwings might have contributed to his satisfaction. “He thought erasers were the ultimate lack of courage.”

The afternoon continued with tales from Thom’s childhood, including the time he spent in Mexico with his pistolero nanny. He even told us what his father’s perfect pencil would look like.

Thom’s way with words, and striking resemblance to his father, made us feel like the Nobel Laureate himself was in the room. We left our visit feeling energized and empowered, not only by the stories, but by the man who told them. Hopefully the Blackwing 24 will bring others as much inspiration as we felt after our day with Steinbeck.

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The Blackwing 24, a tribute to John Steinbeck, is available now. Read more here. 

The post Our Day with Steinbeck appeared first on Blackwing.