Paper Trail

On this day in 1822 John Eberhard builds the first large-scale pencil factory in the United States. It is also the birthday (1886) of Joyce Kilmer, an American poet whose poem Trees — perhaps written with an Eberhard Faber yellow pencil — was recited by generations of schoolchildren. And how many of those wooden writing implements would one tree yield? Or reams of paper? Today in 1768 the first edition of Encyclopædia Britannica is published in Scotland as a weekly installment. To cap our literary theme, on this date in 1933 Federal Judge John M. Woolsey rules that James Joyce's Ulysses is not obscene and the ban on the titillating tome is summarily lifted.

Appropriate wear for the day might be this READ BANNED BOOKS shirt, whose graphic looks like it was cranked out on a vintage vinyl label maker. A panoply of wares with the image can be browsed here amidst the department of Education stacks in CafePress.com's BigDogma Online Store.

[To purchase items click on the photograph or colored text links.]