Henry Petroski's excellent book The Pencil[1] uses the same subject to explore the history of the pencil's development into the common artifact we know today.

[1]http://www.amazon.com/The-Pencil-History-Design-Circumstance...

That is an excellent essay, probably why the "artist" used a pencil in the first place. And Henry Petroski did a whole book on the evolution of the design of the pencil in the early 1990s: http://www.amazon.com/Pencil-History-Design-Circumstance/dp/...