The opening of Seth Abramovitch’s Hollywood Reporter article about that town’s strange obsession with the Blackwing 602, a pencil that went out of production in 1998 and whose supply continues to dwindle:

“In the spring of 1960, Vladimir Nabokov was living in a rented villa in Los Angeles’ Mandeville Canyon, hard at work adapting his novel Lolita into a screenplay for Stanley Kubrick. He wrote in four-hour stretches, planted in a lawn chair ‘among the roses and mockingbirds,’ he later wrote, ‘using lined index cards and a Blackwing pencil for rubbing out and writing anew the scenes I had imagined in the morning.’ With more than 1,000 cards to work with, the scribe found that his pencil arguably became his most trusted collaborator.

Nabokov isn’t alone in his devotion to the Blackwing 602, without question among the most fetishized writing instruments of all time. It counts among its cultish fan base some of the greatest creative geniuses of the 20th century, from John Steinbeck (‘I have found a new kind of pencil — the best I have ever had!’ he wrote) to Quincy Jones (the Thriller producer says he carries one under his sweater when making ‘continual fixes’ to his music) and Truman Capote (who stocked his nightstands with fresh boxes) to Stephen Sondheim, who has composed exclusively with Blackwings since the early 1960s.

The pencil even made its way onto television’s most object-obsessive series, AMC’s Mad Men, put there by TV director Tim Hunter, who says, ‘I just had always felt that these folks would be using Blackwings.’ Animators, including artists who drew such iconic characters as Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse, remain its most die-hard devotees — and earliest hoarders: The Blackwing 602 is becoming increasingly rare as it fast approaches its 80th birthday, with ostensibly only a few thousand in existence among the 13,000 that comprised its last lot in 1998, when the line was phased out.”