The sharpeners are arrayed behind glass, on glass shelves, according to category: Transportation, Music (harp, gramophone, banjo, accordion, organ), Military, Space, History (the Colosseum, the Empire State Building—that’s the one I have!—the Golden Gate Bridge, Christ the Redeemer with arms outspread on that mountaintop in Rio), the Zodiac, Dogs, Cats, Christmas, Easter (what, no Passover sharpeners?), Hearts, Sports, Furniture/Household (bathtub, electric fan, sewing machine, cash register), and so on. There were a few technical categories, including dual-hole sharpeners (some in the shape of noses—ouch) and sharpeners for flat pencils, the kind carpenters use. I took as many pictures as I could. Only a sign warning that the museum is under surveillance twenty-four hours a day kept me from dancing.
Inside the welcome center, I examined a copy of the patent for the oldest sharpener in the collection and a small selection of sharpeners arrayed around it on the wall: a toilet, a submarine, a trumpet, a caboose. A beautiful cardinal’s head (a bird’s, not the prelate’s) made me wonder whether there was a series of ornithological pencil sharpeners and whether the Vatican carried an ecclesiastical line.
I spoke with Karen Raymore, a blond woman wearing black dotted swiss, who had come to Ohio from Wisconsin, where she was in destination marketing. It was she who had put the pencil-sharpener museum on the map. Driving out toward Nelsonville one day, she had spotted the sign that the Reverend Johnson had posted, inviting passersby to visit the pencil-sharpener museum—at the time, it was set up on his property, in Carbon Hill—and providing a phone number. She had arranged a tour for a group of travel writers. When Raymore heard that the Reverend Johnson had died, she worried: “What are they going to do with that collection?” She had known a couple who had a lunch-box museum. It was attached to their diner. If you told the man what kind of lunch box you had had as a child, he could tell you the year you were born. (I had a classic red plaid in first grade. Later, when we moved to the land of Blanks and Dashes, I had an Augie Doggie, which I regretted.) When the lunch-box connoisseur died, his widow could not cope, so she closed the diner, and the lunch-box museum was lost. Raymore was determined that the pencil-sharpener museum would not go the same way.
“It just so happened that the family didn’t know what to do with the museum,” she said, and they were happy to entrust it to the Hocking Hills Tourism Association. Susie McKinnon, the curator of the pencil-sharpener museum, photographed the exact setup, with the pencil sharpeners arranged in categories on open shelves, and wrapped each sharpener individually. Meanwhile, the welcome center prepared a foundation and moved the prefab building onto it. When the museum reopened, in the summer of 2011, “it just so happened that it was a slow news day,” Raymore went on, “and one hundred and thirty-two news outlets from around the world”—everywhere from Australia to Saudi Arabia—“picked up the story. So we had our fifteen seconds of fame.”
Fifty thousand people a year stop at the Hocking Hills Welcome Center. Perhaps not all of them take the opportunity to examine the pencil-sharpener collection, but certainly far more people see it now than when it was off a road in Carbon Hill. The Reverend Johnson’s daughter told Raymore, “Dad always said he hoped it would end up here.”
Susie McKinnon told me that there were 3,441 pencil sharpeners in the museum. The Reverend Johnson had a rule: each pencil sharpener had to be unique—no duplicates. McKinnon elaborated on Johnson’s definition of “unique”: it could mean that a sharpener was the same shape but a different color, or highly polished instead of dull. He would buy a package of a dozen to acquire one in a color he didn’t have, and give the rest away as gifts. I had noticed a series of bears straddling tree trunks marked variously “Drive-Thru Tree Park” and “California Redwoods.” The museum does accept contributions to the collection—if someone has what she thinks is a unique piece, she can e-mail McKinnon a photograph. Having taken pictures of the exhibit in situ and handled each pencil sharpener before moving the collection, McKinnon can tell right away whether a sharpener fits the unique qualification. She herself donated a wooden sharpener in the shape of a cat playing with a ball of yarn. A woman who was moving sent photos of fifty pencil sharpeners, which led to forty-eight new acquisitions. A year earlier, McKinnon had heard from a man in the Virgin Islands who was wondering whether the museum would be interested in a ten-pound cast-iron sharpener that had belonged to his father, who had died recently, at the age of eighty-four. She had not heard back from him, but had reason to hope for the bequest. “It would date to about 1904,” she said. “That would not make it the oldest in the collection but the largest of the oldest.” The oldest include some tiny clip-ons from the early 1900s, presumably for the nerd ancestors of men who keep pens in their shirt pockets, as well as one ancient sharpener still in its own leather pouch, and another in the shape of a diminutive, elegantly dressed lady. I had noticed these, on a shelf in a corner labeled Special. I asked, hopefully, “Is a catalogue in the works?”
“No, it is not,” McKinnon said decisively.