Recently, Roberto, a reader of my blog from Venice contacted me. He has been collecting pencils since 1985 and by now owns around 9000 pencils. His collection tells 120 years of history of this wonderful writing instrument.
He showed me an Italian article about his pencil collection which features some impressive and rare pencils – but he is not just collecting pencils, he is also using them for his drawings. His appreciation for this drawing tool is what started his collection in the first place.
He kindly allowed me to show you some of his beautiful drawings. Have a look at them, as well as the first page of the article I mentioned in the picture gallery below.
Another Noris in the Wild. This time from the cover of a single by indie-pop band Von Wegen Lisbeth. I got to know the band because of their song on the Crucchi Gang album and noticed that their latest single features what is unmistakably a Staedtler Noris.
I believe that the use of the cover of this single falls under “fair dealing” as described by the UK Copyright service.
Thanks to Shangching from East…West…Everywhere my family got a parcel with some nice stationery surprises and our son, and by extension I, were able to try out Tombow’s ippo! pencils for school children as well as the corresponding eraser.
My understanding is that the pencils from this set aim at being easily erasable, so they have soft leads that produced nice, dark lines and the special eraser makes it easy for kids to erase any mistakes cleanly and nice, making the page ready for the next attempt.
Like many other Tombow pencils, the ippo! pencils, this set came with two in red, two in blue, two in yellow, are all made in Vietnam. The eraser was manufactured in Japan.
Hats off to Tombow, this set definitely achieves what (I think) it set out to do.
The eraser performs very similar to other dust free erasers, but feels softer, so makes for pleasant erasing. The pencils, being (Japanese) 2B, are very soft. The softness of the lead will probably help in making the user press less hard, so the writing is more likely to be on top of the paper whereas a harder lead might have made the user press down more, resulting in compressed paper where the line was. No compressed paper -> no deep lines, which will still be visible after erasing as a sort of crevice on the page -> the erased area looks very clean.
I also like the fact that the eraser sleeve is perforated, so you can easily shorten it when the eraser gets used up.
Compared to another dust free eraser on paper from the Monocle by Leuchtturm notebook
Overall a very nice pencil and eraser set. Similar to other Kakikata pencils the pencils have an area for labelling with your name and are uncapped.
This is a Russian-made Krasin pencil [1]Their web site has Karandash in the name. You might be familiar with the story of the Swiss company Caran d’Ache’s name who is named after a cartoonist who in turn named himself after the … Continue reading.
Two years ago I was lucky enough to have met the Pencil Talk editor in person. He gave me a set of six Krasin pencils and some other very nice stationery-related items. I thought I wrote a blog post at the time, but when I checked a few days ago I wasn’t able to find it, so am posting about the Krasin pencil now. Some of the other items were also very special, so I might show some of them in the future.
Their web site has Karandash in the name. You might be familiar with the story of the Swiss company Caran d’Ache’s name who is named after a cartoonist who in turn named himself after the Russian word for pencil.
