Introducing Finishing School, in which Mary Norris, The New Yorker’s Comma Queen, asks the eternal questions—What’s that you’re shredding? How much do you pay the cleaning lady? Is it O.K. to have a “Moby-Dick” T-shirt for every day of the week?—and does her best to behave under increasingly alarming circumstances.

Mounting panic over the latest tariff reversals has created turmoil at home and at the office, and at the home office. Coffee, check; bananas, check. Bad news for cashews and Irish whiskey, not to mention pasta and olive oil. And what about the fine print? Will tariffs on “manufacturing inputs” drive up the price of pencils? The Blackwing 602, my favorite, is manufactured in California from native incense cedar, but its core consists of a proprietary blend of graphite imported from Japan.

Given the wild fluctuations in the market, I did what anyone with a crippling dependence on pencils would do: I took inventory. In addition to four twelve-packs of fresh Ticonderoga No. 1s and a cigar box of cheap, broken No. 2s rescued from the gutter, I have scores of pencils in cups distributed throughout the house—souvenirs of Melville’s Arrowhead and the T.W.A. Hotel at J.F.K., gifts from South Korea, even two complimentary pencils from a stateroom on the Queen Mary 2, sharpened to perfection by Cunard himself—but I was down to just six Blackwings.

I placed an order online, but it was cancelled; the item was “out of stock.” Not a good sign.

I made a special trip to a Japanese bookstore in midtown, usually a reliable source, with a whole lower floor dedicated to all things stationery: pens, pencils, sharpeners, erasers in the shape of sushi. An employee in an apron was down on her hands and knees, restocking the felt-tip pens from a drawer beneath the display. “Do you have any Blackwings?” I asked.

“Sold out,” she said.

I was getting nervous. I made an emergency visit to a mom-and-pop stationery shop downtown. Actually, it was more of a bro-and-bro shop. The only Blackwings I saw on the shelves were the original matte-black edition, which smudges easily. Nonetheless, I snapped them up—and a good thing, too, because in the film “Blue Moon” E. B. White is seen at Sardi’s making notes with an original Blackwing (sorry for the spoiler). This could drive up demand. “Do you have any Blackwing 602s?” I asked the man behind the counter.

He opened cabinets and searched through stacks of boxes, and then shrugged. Nothing.

Another man appeared in the doorway. “You want 602s?” He got out his phone, and after several bursts of speech in a language that may have belonged to the Finno-Ugric family, punctuated by interminable silences, he seemed to have tracked down a small cache. I pictured them on a dusty warehouse shelf in a remote hamlet up the Hudson.

“You live close?” he asked.

It was a trick question. If I said yes, meaning it would be easy for me to come back, I would feel pressured into placing an order. If I answered truthfully—which, unfortunately, is my habit—he could count on my not coming back. In either case, I was terrified that I might miss out on the last box of Blackwing 602s in the Western Hemisphere. “Kind of,” I murmured.

“Leave a deposit. Fifty dollars.”

My eyes bulged. Damn this Administration!

“Come back tomorrow.”

“Can I get a receipt?” I asked the man behind the counter, in a belated attempt to drive a hard bargain.

“Receipt?” He seemed genuinely puzzled. He grudgingly handed me one of those waxy slips of paper that when you’re itemizing your home-office expenses turn out to have been printed with disappearing ink.

I hadn’t gone five steps before I knew I had been scammed. I’d just blown close to eighty dollars on, like, five pencils. Soon the price of Blackwings would have risen enough to make the scammers’ deal seem almost reasonable, but I knew I would be too embarrassed ever to go back.

Then one afternoon I happened to stop for a padded envelope in one of those shipping-slash-mailing centers with a sideline in greeting cards, and there, on a table of closeouts, was a full box of twelve Blackwing 602s, at thirty per cent off! Someone must have put them there accidentally.

“This is your lucky day,” the cashier said. She had no idea. ♦