I recently had occasion to demonstrate the properties of the eraser that comes with the Palomino Blackwing. I don’t mean its actual efficiency but the fact that the eraser, which resembles an elongated Chiclet, pulls out of the distinctive flat ferrule by means of a tiny clamp (I’m sure there is a name for this piece of pencil hardware) and can be extended and slotted back into the ferrule for longer life—or, better yet, reversed, providing fresh edges for your precision erasure needs.

Not that I rely on the erasers that come crimped into the tops of pencils. I can always tell that a foreign pencil has entered my collection when the eraser is worn flat. I make a lot of mistakes, thus requiring an eraser at least as large as an ice cube. Our house eraser is the Magic Rub, which is of grayish-white vinyl in the shape of a domino. I use it to erase the screeds I sometimes feel compelled to write in the margins of proofs and then regret. Part of my routine is sweeping the eraser crumbs off my desk like foundry dust after every job. I used to take just one eraser at a time and wear it down to a nub—a nub that I’d then search for frantically, worried that the cleaning lady had thrown it out. Now I grab a whole box of twelve Magic Rubs. In fact, my current twelve-pack is down to the last layer of three. Time to visit the supply cabinet.

Eraser-tipped pencils have a contentious history. Consulting my notes from the pencil party that I recently attended in honor of the Blackwing, I find that it was in 1650, in Nuremberg, that lead was first glued to wood, creating the modern pencil. It was not until 1858, according to Henry Petroski’s authoritative book “The Pencil,” that an enterprising Yank named Hyman Lipman, of Philadelphia, patented a method of attaching an eraser to the pencil. Joseph Reckendorfer bought him out and patented a new, improved eraser-tipped pencil in 1862. In Europe, despite the fact that in 1864 an eight-foot-long rubber-tipped pencil was carried in a parade honoring Lothar Faber, the German pencil king, the eraser is more likely to be sold as a separate item.

In England, erasers are called rubbers, after the material they were originally made from. (What we call rubbers the English call French letters.) Before rubber, the material most suited for erasing pencil marks was bread crumbs. A snob might say that the eraser-tipped pencil is like a sofa bed: it sounds like a good idea, but it often features neither the best possible sofa nor the best possible bed. Focussing on the eraser, unscrupulous pencil-makers sometimes stiffed consumers with inferior lead. Or maybe the lead was O.K., but the eraser smeared your mistakes around, making them more conspicuous. In short, the effort to combine two distinct things in a single product can lead to something distasteful; for instance, Guinness gelato, which, trust me, is not a good flavor.

I do not pretend to be an eraser connoisseur. While I don’t mind being known in certain circles as the Pencil Lady, I’d rather not be called Bride of Gumby. Friends who are artists are particular about erasers; the traces left by an Art Gum or a Pink Pearl can give texture to their work. Stick erasers permit them to erase without laying the meat of their hand on the work. There are even electric erasers that look like the tool the dental hygienist uses to polish your teeth. A former colleague on the copy desk, the late Bill Walden (stiff-bristle hair, gritted-teeth grin, breast pocket full of writing instruments), had a prototype of a battery-operated eraser; it drilled holes in paper. I think he would have been more satisfied with a Koh-i-Noor eraser that I saw recently in a fountain-pen store, which was suitable for ink and said on its label “imbibed with eraser fluid.”

In a charming appendix about his pencil collection, Petroski records Nabokov’s remark that “his pencils outlasted their erasers.” John Steinbeck “could not use pencils once he felt their ferrules touch his hand.” I am in Steinbeck’s camp. That fancy ferrule on the Blackwing, once the pencil has reached half its length, digs into my hand and makes me sharpen a fresh pencil.

There is a wonderful reference to erasers in Ian Frazier’s “Travels in Siberia.” He and his guide are driving around Yekaterinburg, looking for the house where Tsar Nicholas II and his family were murdered during the Russian Revolution. This was not an incident that anyone in town particularly cared to commemorate, but finally someone showed them the spot: “The house, known as the Ipatiev House, was no longer standing, and the basement where the actual killings happened had been filled in. I found the blankness of the place sinister and dizzying. It reminded me of an erasure done so determinedly that it had worn a hole through the page.”

Illustration by Edel Rodriguez.