Amazon

A Noris Pencil Case

It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of Staedtler’s Noris…

…so I was very excited to see that there’s a Noris pencil case!

Noris Pencil Case (Image copyright probably Staedtler)

I first thought this a UK only set, but when I checked Amazon US I saw that it is also available in the USA.

There are even different sets with different pens.

Noris Pencil Case (Image copyright probably Staedtler)

You can find one of the UK versions here and the US version here and here.

 

By the way, Daan De Winter’s Noris in the Belgian TV series Professor T. is visible in many episodes. It is also used to remove the seal of a crime scene and for other tasks. Nice.


The screenshot/animated GIF in this blog post has been taken from Episode One of Season One of the original Professor T. TV series. I believe that the use of Staedtler’s image shown in this blog post and the use of the animated GIF from Professor T. falls under “fair dealing” as described by the UK Copyright service.

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Suspicious Sellers

There seem to be a few suspicious sellers on Amazon Marketplace.

Well, I say they are suspicious, but I prefer to tell you what’s going on so that you can judge for yourself.

There are several accounts on Amazon Marketplace selling fountain pens for £7.99, £8.99 and £9.99, but even pens usually selling for several hundreds of Pounds are being offered for under £10.

Some of these sellers have real names, some just have random letters as their seller name. All of them seem to be registered in the USA. I wrote ‘seem’ because I don’t know whether Amazon will actually check the address used by sellers who register.

Why would they sell these pens so cheap, far cheaper than what they’d have to pay from the manufacturer?

..and especially when Amazon offers their “A to Z Guarantee”, which means that if there is a problem the customer won’t be out of pocket (and Amazon will probably chase the seller to get their money back…).

I rule out that this is just a simple mistake form the sellers. All these pens are sold by new sellers on Amazon Marketplace and they put a lot of them online. One wrongly priced pen might be a mistake, but not if all you offer is under £10.

Explanation a) Maybe it’s a bored millionaire who just wants to make people happy by reselling pens with a colossal loss.

Explanation b) Maybe they want to get people’s address details? ..but I guess there are easier ways of collecting people’s addresses

Explanation c) When you pay they get the money from Amazon and keep it for a while. Delivery times are very long (many weeks), so they have many weeks before the customers can complain that the product didn’t arrive (and then the postal service can be blamed), so it will be a long time before they have to return the money. Time they could use to get interest on the money or time to pack it all up and disappear.

Well, the good thing is that if anyone wants to try these sellers out and my suspicion that this is dodgy is right the customers are only out of money for a few weeks – until Amazon reimbursed them, so the risk for customers seems small.


Update: shortly after posting this I have been told that Scribble has discussed this issue a few days ago in Facebook’s Fountain Pens UK group. Thanks Mark Porter, for letting me know.

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Graphite screensaver

Look who made it into Amazon’s “screensaver” for the latest Kindle. Fittingly, the advertising shows the Kindle with a pencil next to it, the colour of the case is “graphite” and most screensaver images look like pencil drawings.

I would like to thank Sean for the Blackwing 602 used in this photo.

You can find more information about John Steinbeck and his relation to the Blackwing at the Blackwing pages and at Palimpsest.

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