Paul A. Johnson Pencil Sharpener Museum

Collecting pencil sharpeners and assembling them into a museum dedicated to pencil sharpeners is a kind of eccentric thing to do. Step inside the Paul A. Johnson Pencil Sharpener Museum in Logan, Ohio and it somehow seems perfectly admirable.

The Pencil Sharpener Museum is the result of over 20 years of collecting by Ohio local, Rev. Paul A. Johnson. His wife gave him a couple of car-shaped sharpeners in the late 1980s, and his zeal for collecting was born. The sharpeners lived in a pre-fab shed in Johnson’s backyard, growing over time to over 3400 at the time he passed away in 2010. His family was holding onto them when salvation for the whole collection – and the shed – came calling in 2011. It was the Hocking Hills Welcome Center, happy to take on the job of collection custodian, and everything was moved over to their site in South Logan.  

Just like any museum, the collection has been meticulously cataloged and preserved in protective cases. There are sharpening cars, toys, Garfields, Mickeys, Tweetybirds, tractors, airplanes, trains, U.S. presidents, panda bears. There are old ones and new ones, and some shelf-mounted classics you generally only see at the library. Try to be sharp on your puns though—the staff has heard them all.