If you’re in the UK you might be interested in Lidl’s recent offers, including eraser tipped coloured pencils from Staedtler.
I didn’t buy them, but will probably go back to get a pack. They might be quite useful as I use coloured pencils for writing in notebooks I use at work.
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.
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.
Today’s edition of China Daily has a few very nice photos taken in Shanghai’s Chung Hwa factory.
Image © IC / China Daily
You can see all of the photos at
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201906/10/WS5cfdcd8ea310176577230489_1.html
You might also like the following blog posts about Chung Hwa
2012: Chung Hwa 6151
2012: Chung Hwa 6903
2019: Ordering Food? There’s a Pencil for that…
The image in this blog post has been taken from the China Daily web site. I believe that the use of the images shown in this blog post falls under “fair dealing” as described by the UK Copyright service.
The Chung Hwa Drawing Pencil 101 is still the pencil of choice in Shanghainese Dim Sum Restaurants.
In the nicer dim sum places, like here in a branch of Sue Hsiao Liu, they are of course also nicely sharpened.
If you wonder where they come from or how many a restaurant would keep: here’s this branch’s ‘secret’ stash of sharpened Chung Hwas, ready for the customers.
If you want to read more about Chung Hwa pencils – here’s a selection of related blog posts form around the web.
Other Chung Hwa Pencils:
As established in many previous blog posts the Staedtler Noris is THE common pencil in British schools. It’s no surprise then that (stock) photos used by British newspapers heavily feature the Noris.
I guess I should add this sighting to the Noris in the Wild page.