Looking at the pictures brought back the smell of sharpening a wooden pencel and resulted me in ordering a couple boxes of pencils. It has probably been 30 years since I have used a normal wooden pencil other than the odd usage here and there, have used the mechanical pencil I swiped from my mom back in 9th grade for all my pencil needs, I had a math teacher who required us to write in pencil and I only had pens. He was a great teacher, erased the board with the sleeve of tweed jacket and would be covered in chalk dust by the end of the day.
I didn’t know there’s such a thing as Pencil Day, but this collection is impressive.
I was hoping to see the names of the typefaces used on each pencil. Some are a mystery, some are tantalizingly familiar.
Happy to see our Portuguese pencil maker Viarco represented! (it's the first one in the pencil images). I just love pencils, have some hundreds of all sorts, and keep buying them; lol, i even pick up stray pencils on the street, took them home and take good care of them :)
I love the incorrect book quotes on the “Mitsu-Bisho” pencil!
On the Komet too which makes me wonder if book quote use standards or their stringency were different back then/in other countries.
Confirming I own at least 2 of these, possibly 4. My pencil archives are currently in another country so I can't check.
Pencils are lovely. Once you've got one, it works until it ends; this process is highly visible and thus predictable. They never leak. They're erasable. They write on almost any surface. They're cheap, so one can amass a collection without breaking the bank.
And, as demonstrated, they're beautiful, varied, and represent the entire world.
An utterly dependable instrument. I'm never without one, and can't remember the last time I wrote with a pen.
Pencils are awful because if it has been dropped once in its history then the lead inside is cracked into many pieces, and will randomly break off without warning, then you need to sharpen it all the way to the next piece of lead, which then has a fair chance of breaking off almost immediately, and so on until you run out of pencil or patience.
And that's if you have a pencil sharpener handy, which is extra paraphernalia the pencil requires of you. Or else a sharp knife and a steady hand, and then the temptation is always to end up with a blunt tip because at the margin making the point blunter allows you to expose more lead with a minimum of cutting through the wood.
An utterly infuriating instrument. The best writing and drawing instrument is the Mitsubishi Uni-ball Eye UB-150 pen. It always works and it lays down a high-contrast line very smoothly every time. I'm never without one.
The main downside of the UB-150 is that everybody who sees it instantly recognises it and they are liable to grow legs. I recommend buying them in large quantities and sprinkling them all around your house and workplace so that there is such obvious abundance that nobody feels compelled to take one. And if they do, well there are plenty more for everybody else anyway.
As you know for your Uniball, not all pencils are the same. A cheap ball pen can have a lot of problems and stop writting at any moment; a cheap pencil has always a broken core or is impossible to sharpen because the wood turns to pulp. But a decent pencil (Tombow Mono 100 or Faber-Castell 9000 or Staedtler Mars) will get you a perfect core and wood from beginning to end that should not break unless you press like crazy. Despite being excelent, they are cheap, about 2€.
Good quality pencils does no show the cracked lead and if you take good care of them they will not have those cracks. On the other hand you could use a mechanical pencil with replaceable good quality 2mm leads. It can also reuse any little bits of cracked leads laying around. Also if you don't want a blunter point, you can rotate the pencil every few strokes and it would auto-sharp itself.
Wes Anderson coded