The point of it all
Asa Briggs, 25 April 1991
The Pencil: A History
by Henry Petroski.
Faber, 434 pp., £14.99, November 1990,0 571 16182 0 Show More
by Henry Petroski.
Faber, 434 pp., £14.99, November 1990,
“... a research-based industry. The story has an economic rather than a religious moral. When Adam Smith talked of pens and the beauties of the division of labour, he might just as well have been talking about pencils; and following in his footsteps Milton Friedman, from a 20th-century vantage-point, considers the pencil to be ‘a neat lesson in free-market ... ”
