August 2017

Old and new left-hand friendly stationery from Staedtler

Leave a Comment / Pencils, Staedtler / / , ,

It’s International Lefthanders day this weekend. For more than 40 years this day has been observed on 13 August.

 

In my wife’s photo above you can see two Staedtler items for left-handers. Yes, that left-handed Metro pencil is apparently made by Staedtler UK in Pontyclun. They also made pencils for Berol and Chambers in their Pontyclun factory (You might remember the 2014 La La Land post with Chambers pencils and the 2013 Berol post).

You can read more about the notebook used in the photo in Pencil Talk’s latest blog post and more about Helmut Hufnagl in this Insights X post and more about the left-handed rulers in another Insights X post.

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Exciting new colours from Kaweco

17 Comments / Fountain pens, Kaweco / / , , , , , , ,

You might have noticed that guest posts are few and far between on Bleistift, so it’s even more exciting when there is one. The one today is from my wife who you might have seen on Instagram and Twitter as Paperbound’s PingPing.

If you are into Kaweco’s special colours you might have come across the Al Sport in rosé gold which was available in Taiwan, Macao and HongKong. It’s simple, stylish, and yet sophisticated!

https://www.instagram.com/p/BSTas83BC5F/

A couple of days ago I came across the exciting news of more special colours that Kaweco are releasing in Asia end of September. Sebastian Gutberlet has confirmed that for the first year these will only be available for the Chinese market. This means that in the future there’s the possibility that these colours will be released to the rest of the world.

New Kaweco colours for China
New Kaweco colours for China (Image ©wfjsb)

There are three colours for the new release. They are (to my eyes): black blue for the Sport, grey green for the Sport, and red for the Al Sport. As a pocket pen lover, I use Kaweco’s (Al) Sport and Lamy’s Pico and compared the red colour of this latest edition with my lovely Lamy Pico in red. Well, from what I can tell, the Kaweco Al Sport is slightly lighter (pinkish) than the Lamy Pico, while still having the amazing sheen. Personally, I’d go for the red Al Sport ☺️.

I believe that the use of wfjsb’s image shown in this blog post falls under “fair dealing” as described by the UK Copyright service.

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Fake!

6 Comments / Faber-Castell, Graf von Faber-Castell, Pencils / / , , , , ,

This is a public service announcement. <Muzak playing in the background>

Many of our citizens have already been affected by a new type of fraud. The shameless fraudster don’t stop their relentless efforts to cheat us out of our well deserved stationery, working on schemes to exploit our deep desires for luxurious writing instruments.

The latest victim of the fraudsters is one of the staple pencils found in the office supply cabinet of bankers and dictators of small countries, the Graf von Faber-Castell Eine Cassette * hochfeiner Taschenbleistifte * Nr. II, versilbert.

Luckily, the forger behind this fake pencil that offers incredible resemblance to the original Graf von Faber-Castell made a tiny, but important mistake. This means that the fake pencil can be spotted without the need for carbon dating:
Unlike the real pencil, which is inscribed “Graf von Faber-Castell” the forger must have been a bit too much of a Tom Selleck fan and inscribed the cap ‘Magnum’. Open the picture in a new tab to compare the details. They also seem to have used a TiTi Kyung In T-Prime which had repeated appearances in this blog since 2009.

If you have any tips that could lead to the arrest of the forger please contact the Posh Stationery department of your local anti fraud organisation.

Just to spell it out to avoid misunderstandings: I can’t say this is a popular pencil (it’s not a popular Montblanc model) so I doubt anyone (other than myself for the photos in this blog post) would create a fake version.

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Dear uni-ball, I give up

2 Comments / Uni / / , ,

Dear uni-ball, I give up.

I really tried to liked your erasable Signo TSI pens.

I first got excited about your pens in the mid to late 1990s, when you handed out free eye fine pens outside my Mensa (that’s what they call a university canteen in Germany). I liked them very much and bought more. In fact, I liked writing with them so much that I tried refilling them, so that I could have more colours and a more letters per Deutsch mark spent. Of course that didn’t go well.

When Tesco, a British supermarket chain, had a big uni-ball mixed pen pack I couldn’t resist. Part of this pack were Signo TSI pens. Two of them, green and blue, never worked properly. You get a few millimetres of ink, that’s it. All you can do is use them to carve your message with their sharp rollerball into the paper. It doesn’t matter how hard or light you press, the ink isn’t coming. The other two pens, red and black, work but the coloured lines left on the paper are quite subdued and, to be frank, ugly.

I guess I have to give up and throw them. Trying to get them to work again and again is just frustrating and a waste of time.

 

You can read more about the Signo Erasable, probably the predecessor of the TSI, in this Pen Addict blog post from 2008.

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