He also delivered a heartfelt eulogy for the pencil on social media.
“Being me means dropping a trusty longtime mechanical pencil, having it break (it doesn’t click anymore), and feeling like I lost an old friend,” he wrote on Bluesky.
He then immediately replaced it with another one of the exact same make and model.
Among competitive crossword solvers, such is the inimitable appeal of the Pentel Twist-Erase III.
Because sure, beating out hundreds of other solvers at the ACPT—the nation’s largest and oldest annual crossword contest, founded in 1978 by New York Times crossword editor Will Shortz—might mean memorizing the dictionary or spending countless hours practicing your cruciverbalist skills on increasingly complicated grids. But having the right tool to write with won’t hurt, either.
“I’m sure I’ve used mechanical pencils that are pretty close, like the other Twist-Erase models, but I always go back to my standby,” Hinman said in a phone interview. “You get your trusty pencil, work on your technique, just do a lot of puzzles—that will go a long way.”
Here’s why Hinman and loads of other crossword solvers rely exclusively on mechanical pencils and why the Pentel Twist-Erase III is so often their pencil of choice.
