Seven Years

WordPress informs me that Contrapuntalism has turned seven. And as it is with most anniversaries, I’m left wondering where the time has gone.

I started blogging slowly with a site called Pencils and Music, which like a lot of blogs ended up being more of a false start. That blog was rolled into BlackwingPages, which would end up having a much narrower focus.

I found that I missed posting about the historical aspects of pencil-making (and in diminishing frequency) the occasional music-related post, so I started Contrapuntalism.

Over the past seven years this blog has become an outlet for my interest in writing culture, but more specifically the histories of A.W. Faber and the Eberhard Faber Company. I could not have imagined some nine years ago that what started in my office as an online search for some “good” pencils, would eventually result in the privilege of meeting and spending time with both Anton Graf von Faber-Castell and Eberhard Faber IV, much less to have been given the opportunity to pore over the original photos and handwritten documents of their ancestors.

The work continues at a disparate pace, but I’ve taken the first steps toward having the Eberhard Faber Co. documents professionally conserved and collected into a preservation-class digital archive: about 600 pages have been scanned, including the handwritten minutes from the Board of Directors meetings from 1898 to 1911, as well as university documents belonging to Johann Eberhard Faber (1822-1879) dating back to the 1840s. Also, there have been some preliminary discussions concerning university hosting for the collection, which will ultimately result in making it available to the public.

I can’t predict if and when it might all be online, but I’m glad to say that all of this work and research is moving in the right direction.