On Schedule For Release At the Baltimore Show!

I am pleased to report that The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 8 is in the hands of the printer, who promises that I will have books in hand at the Baltimore Pen Show - March 6-8, 2026. For those who will be attending, the Baltimore Show website is here.

To preorder, visit the Legendary Pencil Company website here.

"It's a beauty!" reports Richard Keith, who as always helped with editing and reviewed the proof - the book has a lot of things you won't find here in Internetland.

For starters, I resolved the camera issues that plagued me as I posted the original versions of the articles. I reshot about half of the images from these articles for the print version, so images like this:

Now look like this:

It was a painful process, but well worth it - after all, print (unlike the Internet) is forever, and I really wanted the pictures to be as spectacular as possible. Here's a page from "The Case for Cases":

In previous volumes in this series, my goal was primarily to preserve these posts - just in case Google gets another wild hair and starts deleting images  (that's what happened to the articles in the first three volumes). This time, there was so much new information that came to me after the online articles were published that I included numerous updates not included in the original versions. As an example, check out this great blue Pearltex Carter's set that came in:

After I gave a talk for the Aldus Society a couple years ago about my books, one commenter wryly noted in his review that I do things backwards, posting articles online as the rough drafts to crowdsource added information for the print version. That process served me well, and several articles were substantially rewritten based on comments from the loyal peanut gallery. The best example of this was the "Striped" or "Wartime" Duofold article, which barely resembles the original version.

I've added something else to make Volume 8 easier to navigate than previous volumes: a Table of Contents.

As in  previous volumes, this includes a cumulative index for Volumes 1 through 8:

Finally, I included a "Stop Press" page at the end. A couple last-minute finds turned up after layout was complete, and I would have been remiss had I not included them.