Sophia, a girl with pigtails and yellow ribbons, holds a yellow pencil up high in a meadow by a lake. Beside her, Grandpa Stephen, with a white beard, round glasses and a sailor’s cap, points upwards. From the tip of the pencil a sparkling trail runs across the sky, linking the things floating there: a little ship, a factory, a cedar tree, a grey stone, a leaf, a sprig of yellow flowers and a tiny golden ring.

Ages 7–11

Picture book

The Pencil Nobody Made Alone

Based on Leonard E. Read’s essay I, Pencil

The people in the story

Sophia, who is eight
Her grandpa Stephen, who was once a sailor
and the people they meet on their journey: Andrew the woodcutter, Michael at the sawmill, Daniel the miner, Katherine who makes the leads, Luke the farmer, Theodore who works with metal, Anna the farmer, James the captain, and Elizabeth and Constantine at the pencil factory

A pencil costs just a few coins. We pick it up without a second thought. And yet it hides a big secret. Leonard Read, an American writer, put it like this: in the whole world there is not a single person who knows how to make a pencil all alone!

We will travel with Sophia and her grandpa to forests and mines, fields, harbours and factories. It is a journey of the imagination, but the places and the jobs we will see are real.

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A bright kitchen in the morning. Sophia, with brown pigtails, yellow ribbons, a green dress and a yellow cardigan, sits at the table holding up a yellow pencil with a pink eraser; in front of her is a drawing of a little house and a sun. Grandpa Stephen, with a white beard, round glasses and a dark-blue sailor’s cap, unrolls a big old map of the world on the table. On the table are a glass of milk and a plate of biscuits, and outside the window there is a lemon tree.

At home

Who made my pencil?

Sophia is drawing at the kitchen table with a brand-new yellow pencil. Grandpa Stephen bought it for her yesterday at the little bookshop round the corner, for just a few coins. Suddenly Sophia stops and looks at it: “Grandpa, who made my pencil?”

Grandpa smiles: “Nobody on their own, but thousands of people together!” Sophia’s eyes open wide. Then Grandpa spreads his big old map on the table. “Let’s travel with our imagination and find out where every little bit of it came from!”

A sunny forest of tall cedars with reddish trunks and ferns. Sophia and Grandpa, in yellow safety helmets, stand behind a rope, well away from the work, and smile. Andrew the woodcutter, with a ginger beard, an orange helmet with ear protectors, a plaid shirt and an orange vest, has set his switched-off chainsaw down on a cut log and waves to them. Further back, a truck waits, loaded with logs.

A forest in Oregon, in America

In the cedar forest

First stop: a forest in Oregon, in America, full of tall cedars with straight trunks. Andrew the woodcutter has just cut down a cedar and waves to them from a safe distance. Cedar wood is soft, smells lovely and is easy to sharpen. It will become the wooden body of the pencil.

But to do his job, Andrew needs a saw, a helmet, ropes and a big truck. Other people made all of these. Even the coffee he drinks in the morning was picked by someone in a faraway country. “Andrew knows how to cut down trees,” says Grandpa, “but not how to make saws or grow coffee.”

A bright wooden sawmill. Sophia and Grandpa, in yellow helmets and safety glasses, watch from behind a yellow railing. Michael, tall, with a black moustache, blue overalls and ear protectors, shows them a thin cedar board. Many identical little boards move along a conveyor belt, and stacks of them wait beside a brick oven. Outside the big door stands a train with wagons full of logs.

A sawmill in California

From log to little boards

The logs travel by truck and by train to a sawmill in California. There Michael and his workmates cut them into small, thin boards, each as long as a pencil. Then they dry them in a warm oven, tint them gently so that they have a nice colour, and rub them with wax.

Who made the saws, the trains and the rails? Who brings the electricity that runs the machines? Other people, whom Michael has never met. “I don’t know how to make a whole pencil either,” Michael laughs. “All I know is how to cut little boards!”

The timber-framed entrance of a mine in a lush green hill in Sri Lanka, with palm trees and banana plants. Beside the tunnel stand a little mine cart full of shiny silver-grey graphite and a few paper sacks tied with string. Daniel the miner, with a white helmet with a lamp and a black moustache, holds a piece of graphite. Sophia, in a yellow helmet, holds a small piece in both hands and gazes at it in wonder. Grandpa leans on the cart, smiling.

A mine in Sri Lanka

The grey stone that writes

Now the map takes them far away, to a green island called Sri Lanka. Daniel the miner comes out of the tunnel with a cart full of graphite, a shiny grey stone. He gives Sophia a little piece, and her fingers turn grey. “This stone writes!” she cries.

The graphite goes into paper sacks tied with string, and travels by ship. Some people make the sacks, others the string, others Daniel’s tools. And here is something funny: we say a pencil has a “lead”, but there is no lead metal in it at all. Its tip is made of graphite!

A big, bright factory hall with pipes and skylights. Sophia and Grandpa, in yellow helmets and safety glasses, watch from behind a railing. Katherine, with curly red hair, freckles, a white work coat and blue gloves, stands beside a green machine that pushes out long, thin grey rods like spaghetti, and lifts one up. In front of her are two drums, one with grey graphite powder and one with pale clay. Further back, a big oven glows orange.

Where the leads are made

Graphite spaghetti

The graphite is ground into powder and mixed with clay from Mississippi, in America, and a little water. Katherine puts the mix into a machine that squeezes it out like long, thin spaghetti. The spaghetti is cut into short pieces and baked for hours in a very hot oven until they become hard leads.

At the end they are dipped in warm wax, some of which comes all the way from Mexico, so that they write smoothly. Katherine knows exactly how much clay makes a soft lead and how much makes a hard one. But she doesn’t know how to dig graphite or cut down cedars.

A field in India

A yellow coat

Sophia’s pencil wears a shiny yellow coat: six layers of varnish! In a field in India, Luke the farmer grows castor plants, tall plants with leaves like big open hands. Their seeds give an oil, castor oil, that goes into the varnish.

Luke has no idea that a little bit of his work will travel all the way to Sophia’s table. He works to bring up his children. And other people, whom we will never meet, make the yellow colour and the black paint for the letters on the pencil.

A hall with brick walls and big windows. On the left, stacks of reddish copper bars and silver-grey zinc bars. In the middle, a big machine with rollers turns out a gleaming golden sheet of metal. Theodore, with short grey hair, a leather apron, a yellow helmet and safety glasses, holds a tiny golden ring between his fingers; in front of him a wooden box is full of such rings. Sophia and Grandpa, in helmets, look on in wonder.

A metal works

The little golden ring

Look at the shiny little ring that holds the eraser! It is made of brass, a metal you get by melting copper and zinc together. Miners dig these two out of the ground, in other mines, in other countries.

Theodore runs the brass between big rollers until it becomes a thin, golden sheet. Thousands of little rings are cut from it. “Do you know what?” he tells Sophia. “I have never written with a pencil like this. I write with a pen!”

A wide field of bright yellow rapeseed flowers, with green hills, palm trees and blue mountains in the distance. Anna, in a woven straw hat, a green blouse and a colourful skirt, kneels among the flowers holding a small bottle of golden oil, with a few tiny seeds in her other palm. Sophia points to the pink eraser on her pencil and Grandpa laughs.

A field of yellow flowers

The eraser that rubs out mistakes

And the eraser? Read writes that it was made mostly from the oil of a plant with yellow flowers, rapeseed, which came from Indonesia. Anna gathers the tiny seeds, and from them comes a golden oil.

The eraser also gets a little rubber, the milky sap of a tree, to hold it together, and powdered pumice, a stone from Italy’s volcanoes, that helps it rub out. “So many places in the world fit into one tiny eraser!” says Sophia.

A sunny quay. A big cargo ship with a red hull and coloured containers, and a crane lifting a net full of sacks. In the distance, a red-and-white lighthouse on the rocks, a tugboat and seagulls. On the quay, trucks and freight wagons are waiting. James the captain, tall, with curly black hair, a short black beard and a dark-blue uniform, shakes Grandpa’s hand while Sophia waves.

A big harbour

Ships, trains and trucks

All these pieces have to travel. At the harbour, James the captain shakes Grandpa’s hand. “I was a sailor too!” says Grandpa proudly. A crane lifts sacks onto the ship, and on the quay, trucks and trains full of little boards are waiting.

James doesn’t know what is inside every sack. But he knows how to take his ship safely from harbour to harbour. He is helped by the pilots, who guide ships into harbour, and by the lighthouse keepers, who light the lighthouses at night. Without knowing it, they too helped to make Sophia’s pencil.

A bright pencil-factory hall with tall windows and green machines. Hundreds of slim yellow pencils with pink erasers move side by side along a long conveyor belt. Elizabeth, with short black hair, a blue work coat and safety glasses, hands a new pencil to Grandpa, while Sophia, in a yellow helmet, already holds hers. On the right, Constantine, the head of the factory, bald, in a grey suit and a red bow tie, spreads his hands with an awkward smile, and Grandpa laughs.

At the pencil factory

The pencil sandwich

At last, everything arrives at the pencil factory! One machine cuts eight grooves into each little board. Another lays the leads in them, spreads glue and covers them with a second board, like a sandwich. The sandwich is cut into eight pencils, which are painted yellow and get their ring and eraser. Elizabeth gives Sophia and Grandpa a brand-new one each.

Who knows how to do all of this? Constantine, the head of the factory, spreads his hands and laughs: “Me? Even I don’t know how to make a pencil on my own! I can’t cut down cedars, or dig graphite, or make brass. I only know my own small part.”

The kitchen in the afternoon, in golden light. The world map is pinned on the wall, with small drawings hanging around it: a cedar tree, a grey stone, a castor-plant leaf, yellow flowers, a golden ring, a cargo ship and a factory. Sophia, standing on a stool, stretches coloured strings that join the drawings across the map like a spider’s web. Grandpa, holding a cup of tea, smiles proudly.

Back home

A web around the world

Sophia pins the map on the wall and, with coloured strings, joins up all the places on their journey. Soon the map looks like a spider’s web! Andrew, Daniel, Anna, Luke and so many others live very far from one another. They speak different languages and have never met.

Nobody gave them orders. Nobody sat somewhere arranging everything for everyone. Each of them did their own job well, for their own reasons: Andrew to buy his son a bicycle, Anna to put a new roof on her house. And yet, all together, they made Sophia’s pencil!

The kitchen in the evening, lit by a lamp. Through the window can be seen the starry sky, a crescent moon, the sea, a little ship and a lighthouse. Sophia is writing a letter with her yellow pencil and has drawn a big red heart on it; beside it lies a pink eraser. Grandpa holds the map and, moved, wipes his eyes under his glasses.

That evening

A letter for everyone

That evening Sophia sits at the table and writes a letter: “Thank you, all of you who made my pencil: Andrew, Michael, Daniel, Katherine, Luke, Theodore, Anna, James, Elizabeth, Constantine… and everyone I don’t know!” She draws a big heart, too.

Grandpa reads the letter and secretly wipes away a tear. “And do you know who helped you write it?” he asks. Sophia looks at the pencil in her hand and laughs: “All of them!”

The End

The Lesson

A simple pencil was made by thousands of people, in many countries, who don’t know one another. Not one of them knows how to make it alone, not even the head of the factory. Each of them knows one small part well, and nobody had to give orders to all the others.

Most of them didn’t work because they wanted a pencil. They worked for their own lives and their families, and with the money from their work they got the things they needed. When people are free to do the work they know and to swap what they make in peace, together they achieve wonders that nobody could manage alone.

Next time you pick up a pencil, remember: you are holding the work of the whole world in your hands!

For grown-ups: sources and further reading

Where each page comes from

Page 1, “Who made my pencil?”: Leonard E. Read, I, Pencil, opening
Page 2, “In the cedar forest”: Leonard E. Read, I, Pencil, “Innumerable Antecedents”, ¶2
Page 3, “From log to little boards”: Leonard E. Read, I, Pencil, “Innumerable Antecedents”, ¶3–4
Page 4, “The grey stone that writes”: Leonard E. Read, I, Pencil, “Innumerable Antecedents”, ¶7
Page 5, “Graphite spaghetti”: Leonard E. Read, I, Pencil, “Innumerable Antecedents”, ¶8
Page 6, “A yellow coat”: Leonard E. Read, I, Pencil, “Innumerable Antecedents”, ¶9–10
Page 7, “The little golden ring”: Leonard E. Read, I, Pencil, “Innumerable Antecedents”, ¶11
Page 8, “The eraser that rubs out mistakes”: Leonard E. Read, I, Pencil, “Innumerable Antecedents”, ¶12
Page 9, “Ships, trains and trucks”: Leonard E. Read, I, Pencil, “Innumerable Antecedents”, ¶5 and ¶7
Page 10, “The pencil sandwich”: Leonard E. Read, I, Pencil, “Innumerable Antecedents”, ¶6 · “No One Knows”, ¶2
Page 11, “A web around the world”: Leonard E. Read, I, Pencil, “No One Knows”, ¶3 · “No Master Mind”, ¶1
Page 12, “A letter for everyone”: Leonard E. Read, I, Pencil, opening: “We are perishing for want of wonder…”