Along For The Ride
Funny how some things accompany a person for decades, somehow surviving the moves from state-to-state, apartment-to-apartment, house-to-house, and so on. The humble Koh-I-Noor case above is an example. It and its contents: a few stubby color pencils, a slim green dowel from who-knows-what, and a dried something or other — have been with me for close to half a century.
My best guess as to when the case was folded into my “stuff” is in the years just before my New Yorker life began in 1977. When I was in high school (and began submitting to The New Yorker) I bought my first Rapidograph in a small shop on Main Street in Cape May NJ. The Koh-I-Noor connection is that Koh-I-Noor makes Rapidographs. I can almost convince myself that that store owner gave me this pencil case to hold extra Rapidograph points. Altho the box says “Koh-I-Noor Pencil Factory” I don’t remember ever buying (or even seeing) Koh-I-Noor pencils. The efficient little case became a handy place to keep favorite pencil stubs. Missing from the box are my blue and red Col-erase pencils. Maybe I wore them down to nothing.
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An end of the week listing of New Yorker artists whose work has appeared on newyorker.com features
Daily Cartoon: Ellis Rosen, Paul Noth, Ali Solomon, Julia Suits, Mads Horwath.
Daily Shouts: Ali Fitzgerald, Eddie Ward.
Barry Blitt’s Kvetchbook: “Yeezy’s Newest Models Revealed”
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