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Technology and Culture
Knopf
October 2007
On Sale: October 16, 2007
464 pages
ISBN: 0307266362
EAN: 9780307266361
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Like The Pencil, Henry Petroski’s The Toothpick is a
celebration of a humble yet elegant device. As old as
mankind and as universal as eating, this useful and
ubiquitous tool finally gets its due in this wide-ranging
and compulsively readable book. Here is the unexpected story
of the simplest of implements—whether made of grass, gold,
quill, or wood—a story of engineering and design, of culture
and class, and a lesson in how to discover the extraordinary
in the ordinary. Petroski takes us back to ancient Rome, where the emperor
Nero makes his entrance into a banquet hall with a silver
toothpick in his mouth; and to a more recent time in Spain,
where a young señorita uses the delicately pointed
instrument to protect her virtue from someone trying to
steal a kiss. He introduces us to Charles Forster, a
nineteenth-century Bostonian and father of the American
toothpick industry, who hires Harvard students to demand
toothpicks in area restaurants—thereby making their
availability in eating establishments as expected as condiments. And Petroski takes us inside the surprisingly secretive
toothpick-manufacturing industry, in which one small town’s
factories can turn out 200 million wooden toothpicks a day
using methods that, except for computer controls, haven’t
changed much in almost 150 years. He also explores a
treasure trove of the toothpick’s unintended uses and
perils, from sandwiches to martinis and beyond. With an engineer’s eye for detail and a poet’s flair for
language, Petroski has earned his reputation as a writer who
explains our world—from the tallest buildings to the
lowliest toothpick—to us.
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