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Mechanical Pencil Day Winner 1

 in Caran d'Ache / Cleo Skribent / Faber-Castell / Mechanical pencils  tagged Caran d'Ache / Cleo Skribent / Cult Pens / Faber-Castell / giveaway / mechanical pencil by

…and we have a winner! id00092 wrote the winning comment:

are you sure that Gessner is not a Ninja weapon??

id00092

Congratulations! Please contact me by email within a week (by 23 July 2019). My email address can be found on the ‘About’ page. You’ll need to let me know whether you want to win the Gessner or the other mechanical pencils (i.e. all of them except the Gessner).

To help you with that decision: Here’s a video about the Caran d’Ache 888 Infinite:

and one about the Faber-Castell TK-Fine 2315:

If you want to go back the the origins and prefer the Gessner then you’ll find some more information about the Gessner and the company behind it here:

Happy Mechanical Pencil Day 2019 58

 in Mechanical pencils  tagged Cult Pens / giveaway / mechanical pencil by

It’s time to celebrate Mechanical Pencil Day again. CultPens let me pick £50 worth of stationery and to get you into the mechanical pencil day mood I will give them away again, like last year.

This year I went with the theme of underdog mechanical pencils. That also means that most of the pencils were cheap and it’s not really worth me sending them out individually because international postage might cost me more than the value of the pencil.

Pencils for the giveaway
Prizes for Mechanical Pencil Day 2019

That means that this year I split the prize into two halves: The Gessner (the wooden one, third from the left with its ‘case’ next to it) is one half. You can find out more about the company behind the Gessner, plus a bit about the Gessner itself in the following video I made in the past. I think it’s one of many videos that was supposed to be used in a blog post, but the blog post just hasn’t happened yet.

All the other pencils plus the leads together are the other half. One of them is the lemon yellow Caran d’Ache 888 Infinite. I wrote a short blog post about this pencil on the CultPens blog.

The Bleistift.blog winner can decide whether he/she wants the Gessner or all the other pencils. Whatever is left will be a prize for Stationery.wiki.

Make sure you also visit Dave’s Mechanical Pencils and enter his giveaway.

FAQs:

Why is Mechanical Pencil Day on 5/7 (5 July)?

It’s on 5/7 or 7/5, depending on your countries way of writing dates because the two most popular lead diameters are 0.5 mm and 0.7 mm.

What do I need to do to take part in the giveaway?

I won’t force you to follow my YouTube, Facebook or Twitter account to take part in the draw for this giveaway. We’re all adults here and you should decide yourself who you want to follow. Instead of following my social media channels, all you have to do for a chance to win is to leave a comment at the bottom of this blog post.

When is the deadline for the giveaway, i.e. the deadline to leave a comment?

Deadline is 15 July 2019 at 12:00 (noon) Zulu time (UTC)

How will the winner be decided?

  1. I will use a random number generator to get a random number n. I will then check who wrote the nth comment.
  2. I will then check whether the nth comment is the first comment by a blog reader on this giveaway post. If it is the first comment by a blog reader on this post this reader will get the pencil of their choice. If the comment was written by myself or if it was not the first comment or if the reader wrote he/she doesn’t want the prize then I will go back to step one.
    This ensures that I won’t win a prize myself. It also means that you can comment as often as you want, but only one of your comments (the first one) will count for the prize draw.
  3. Deadline see above.
  4. I will announce the winner on this blog. The winner then has one week to contact me. If I don’t hear back from the winner within a week the prize might be given to someone else or used in another giveaway or contest or I might keep it myself.
  5. The remaining half/prize will be a prize for Stationery.wiki. You can, of course, take part in both, the Bleistift giveaway and the Stationery.wiki. In fact, I encourage you to.

Good luck!

Mechanical Pencil Day is Coming ..Again

 in Caran d'Ache / Mechanical pencils  tagged Caran d'Ache / Cult Pens / mechanical pencil by

Mechanical Pencil Day is coming again and CultPens have offered me again to choose £50 worth of mechanical pencils. Just like last year I want to give them away again – half on Bleistift.blog and half on Stationery.wiki.

For last year’s prizes I tried to focus on unusual mechanical pencils. For this year’s mechanical pencil day, I want to take a closer look at affordable mechanical pencils that don’t get the attention they deserve.

Caran d’Ache 888 Infinite

Have a look at my short blog post for Mechanical Pencil Day on the CultPens site where I look at one of these mechanical pencils that doesn’t get enough attention and love.

The Underrated and Humble Pencil 1

 in Pencils  tagged BBC / BBC Radio 4 / Tim Harford by

George, a reader of Dave’s Mechanical Pencil blog and of Bleistift, has contacted me this morning and told me about an article Tim Harford wrote about the pencil. Not much later my wife contacted me about the same article. The article is part of the “50 Things That Made the Modern Economy” series.

In 2017 I was hoping that the pencil gets voted to be the “51st thing”. My blog post Vote for Pencil! might have added a few to the pencil, but in the end “credit cards” won.

An image of a humble pencil from an old blog post – to make this one less boring

Luckily Tim Harford, who made several ‘appearances’ on this blog in the past, has finally had a closer look at the pencil.

You can read his article Have we all underrated the humble pencil? on the BBC web site.

Just a few weeks ago I finished his book “Messy” (around $9 or in the UK around £7). Fascinating reading, like his other works.

His podcast More or Less: Behind the Stats is available for free.