From an 1843Magazine.com article by Ann Wroe:

Pencils are discarded, as lighters and umbrellas are, because at some crucial moment they fail in their purpose. They refuse to ignite, quail before a shower, or simply snap. But pencils have merely suspended their usefulness. Their potential still lies within them. They can go on setting down by the thousand the words by which the world works.

Yet the pencil’s marks are worryingly fragile. I have worked on Percy Bysshe Shelley’s notebooks, 200 years old, where the pencil-scrawled originals are forbidden to all but the most careful hands. Shelley used pens and ink-bottles both at his desk and out of doors, but he preferred pencils in the open air, and perhaps not just for practical reasons. To look on his pencilled drafts is almost to see the graphite dust sifting away before your eyes – blown by the wild West Wind, perhaps.

To read more click the following link: https://www.1843magazine.com/design/stranger-things/in-praise-of-the-pencil