PENCIL TALK

“If no one had seen pencils, and it came out today, it would blow everyone’s mind,” the cartoonist and pencil-sharpening mastermind David Rees told us. Rees rose in popularity with his controversial Bush-era comic strip, “Get Your War On,” in Rolling Stone but has recently become an outlier in the artisanal movement. How? By putting something we all take for granted under a microscope: the classic No. 2. With his book, How to Sharpen Pencils: A Practical and Theoretical Treatise on the Artisanal Craft of Pencil-Sharpening, Rees is taking his two-year-old “artisanal pencil-sharpening business,” in which he sharpens customers’ pencils on the road for a small fee. And the final stop is in our own backyard. At the tour’s finale in Williamsburg, he will be joined by the writer of the book’s foreword, comedian John Hodgman, best known as the hilariously stoic correspondent on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. Forget the paper and pen; just bring your pencil to class.

Fri., May 18, 7 p.m., 2012