The arts-and-crafts Web site Etsy recently published an extract from David Rees’s new book, “How to Sharpen Pencils.” The extract—a meticulously detailed guide to the correct use of single-blade pocket sharpeners—was lavishly illustrated with monochrome photographs of Rees at work wearing an apron, a set of head-mounted magnifying goggles, and a craftman’s expression of sombre pride. The comment-thread reactions were unusually good-humored, although many readers felt the need to point out the date on which the extract was posted. “Nearly had me, lol—happy April 1st!!!,” wrote one. “Happy April Fool’s Day yourself, Mr. Rees,” wrote another. You couldn’t blame these cordial commenters for thinking the whole thing was a poker-faced hoax, and that the aproned gentleman in the photographs tweezering pencil shavings into a sealable plastic bag was gently mocking the whole neo-artisanal culture for which Etsy serves as an online fulcrum.

But Rees isn’t messing about—or, at least, “messing about” is an inadequate phrase for the kind of immersive seriocomic undertaking he’s involved in here. For the past three years or so (ever since he quit doing “Get Your War On,” his viciously funny satirical cartoon strip about the war on terror), Rees has been running a small pencil-sharpening business out of his home in Beacon, New York. Clients send him fifteen dollars and a blunt pencil, which he then sharpens by hand before sending it back to them complete with bagged shavings and a signed certificate of sharpening. (If fifteen dollars a pop seems a little steep, here’s how Rees explained his prices in an interview with Details magazine: “I’m sure there’s somebody in India who could sharpen your pencil for $8, but if you want authentic American craftsmanship … that’s how much quality costs these days.”) If this were merely a put-on, it would be an unusually elaborate and time-consuming one, and Rees would be a kind of Daniel Day-Lewis of the method prank.

The book is powerfully funny (the chapter on novelty pencil-sharpening methods, which includes a guide to a Hendrix-style behind-the-head technique, is particularly inspired), but it’s a more beguiling literary endeavor than its publisher’s “humor” classification might suggest. If booksellers had such things as “avant-garde reference” sections, Rees’s book would be as much at home there as in the “humor” section (which is, after all, probably the last place you’d expect to find something to make you laugh). The nature of the book’s appeal—the way in which it heaps perilous quantities of language and significance onto what is just about the most inconsequential activity imaginable—is summed up in the magisterial comprehensiveness of its full title: “How to Sharpen Pencils: A Practical and Theoretical Treatise on the Artisanal Craft of Pencil Sharpening, for Writers, Artists, Contractors, Flange Turners, Anglesmiths, and Civil Servants, with Illustrations Showing Current Practice.”

The book is an extended exercise in narrative tone. There’s a kind of punctilious courtliness to Rees’s instructional writing that seems both wildly counterintuitive and naggingly familiar (when I interviewed Rees, he mentioned that he’s an avid collector of early-to-mid-twentieth-century industrial manuals, and that the tone he cultivates here is partly a result of that obsession). His alertness to the subtle absurdity of the passive voice invests the chapter on the “Anatomy of the #2 Pencil” with a wonderful deadpan resonance. “It is assumed,” he begins, “the reader is already somewhat familiar with the #2 pencil. Let the remarks below serve only to further refine his or her understanding in the context of best sharpening practices.” Shortly after, we are informed that it “behooves” us to inspect foreign-made pencils “for any deficiencies that would render sharpening attempts futile.” It’s a stylistic high-wire act, and Rees never teeters, even when he shifts into full-on absurdist mode in later sections on celebrity-impression and telekinetic pencil sharpening, or the appendix on wines that taste like pencils. (Bordeaux reds are the way to go, if you’re interested.)

It’s a little ridiculous to invoke Melville when discussing what looks like the kind of book you might buy for the bathroom, but at points I couldn’t help thinking of “Moby-Dick.” Melville is forever describing, at near-preposterous length and detail, the arcane practices of whaling and seafaring and, through a kind of intellectual prestidigitation, making them signify larger philosophical and moral truths. He was a genius of transfigured triviality. Rees is occasionally capable of pulling off a similar feat, albeit on a much smaller scale. The tension between the desire for perfection and the need to live in a world in which perfection is impossible is a covert theme in the book, and Rees’s frequent allusions to the analogous relationship between an imperfect pencil tip and an imperfect life seem both goofily ironic and utterly sincere. In its unsharpened state, he writes, a pencil is like an ideal Platonic form. “Putting a point on a pencil—making it functional—is to lead it out of Plato’s cave and into the noonday sun of utility. Of course, life outside a cave runs the risk of imperfection and frustration. But we must learn to live with these risks if we want enough oxygen to survive.”

There are scattered references throughout the book to Rees’s own life, and these are often oddly jarring given the elaborately stylized context. In a list of supplies that every serious pencil sharpener should have in his “toolkit,” he includes tweezers for collecting shavings. “It’s not hard,” he remarks, “to come by a good pair of tweezers; I use the ones my wife left behind when she moved out.” In a later chapter entitled “Psychological Risks Associated with Pencil Sharpening: Assessment and Coping Strategies,” he counsels the reader on how to deal with situations in which the graphite tip breaks off in a sharpener, leaving a “hollow collar” of cedar (a phenomenon he tells us is referred to on the pro sharpening circuit as the “headless horseman”):

The unhappy absence where one was expecting abundance may well trigger unwanted associations with financial, intellectual, and romantic aspects of your life. Ignore them. Amputate the empty collar, clear the sharpener’s burrs of the forfeit point, and set course for the future abundances that are your due.

Rees has described his book as “basically an emotional memoir disguised as a how-to manual hidden inside a ‘humor’ book,” and as unlikely—and borderline-preposterous—as that might sound, the book really does lend itself to being read that way. The idea of a broken pencil tip bringing into focus all the unhappiness of a person’s life is, on one level, a richly comic one, but on another level—and particularly when you realize that Rees started writing this book in the aftermath of the breakup of his marriage—it’s a quietly poignant one.

The book also recalls, at times, the work of the Oulipo group, the fraternity of experimental Francophone writers who are especially fond of imposing odd restrictions on their work as a way of provoking creative ingenuity. Georges Perec’s novel “A Void” was written entirely without use of the letter “e”; Raymond Queneau’s “Exercises in Style” recounts the same insignificant incident ninety-nine times using ninety-nine different styles of narration. Those guys would have liked the idea of trying to write an emotional memoir as a guide to pencil sharpening composed in decorous, genteel prose. And they would have loved the idea of its being written by someone who actually worked, semi-professionally, as an artisanal pencil sharpener. “How to Sharpen Pencils” is very funny—it’s the work, let’s not forget, of the guy responsible for “Get Your War On”—but it’s no April Fools’ joke, and it’s no bathroom book. It’s a literary oddity that, even as it gleefully pursues the comic possibilities of its premise, subtly gestures towards its own secluded seriousness. And, for what it’s worth, it also marks the standard to which all future pencil-sharpening textbooks must now aspire.

Photograph by Meredith Heuer.