wall of pencils
Thursday, May 22nd, 2008
At Wallack’s in Ottawa. They are Faber-Castells.

At Wallack’s in Ottawa. They are Faber-Castells.
also known as J B Seth et al’s paper The effect of moist air on the resistance of pencil lines.
Yep, another one about pencils. I do like the Dixon Tri-Conderoga, but I don’t think I could quite gush about it as much as Pencil Revolution did. It’s a nice writer, but the first one I tried was a bit gristly for sharpening with a knife. They do smell good. There’s a freshly sharpened one nearby, and it’s doing an excellent “walk through cedar woods” impression.
Just as well the six pack comes with a sharpener. Tri-Conderogas don’t fit a regular one.
my review of the Noris Ergosoft at Pencil Revolution.
(I just got a lot nerdier than you thought possible, didn’t I?)

I like these pencils. And no image scaling tricks were used; the bigger pencil is the bigger, thicker Learner’s Pencil. At the back is a Lee Valley belt-clip sharpener.
I think I was supposed to review these for Pencil Revolution, but looks like someone beat me to it.
My best music of 2005 list isn’t ready yet, so here are my Great Pencils of 2005:
The Papermate Mirado Classic just missed the cut. It’s a whole load of pencil for very little money, a sixth of the price of the Faber-Castell. Yes, it’s a yellow American office pencil with an eraser, but so’s the tri-write. Maybe I’m getting more used to this continent.
Just scored a nice Rotring 600 ½mm pencil from ypitko on eBay. It matches the fountain pen perfectly.
in no particular order:
You want I should review them? Get thee to Pencil Revolution!
It had to happen: Pencil Revolution.
I’ve just finished Henry Petroski’s The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance. While the standard wooden pencil is indeed a marvel of economical mass production, and you know I’m all about the pencils, I found the book to be pretty slow going. Petroski’s To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design is much more fun, if perhaps due to its wider scope.
While packed with more pencil lore than you could ever hope to learn in a lifetime (like the Henry David Thoreau connection to modern pencil manufacture), some of Petroski’s observations didn’t quite ring true. The books is written from a very American perspective, and when he claimed that the whole world is using a yellow-painted No. 2 eraser tipped pencil, I felt that there was something wrong with his usually objective prose.
To me, a good pencil is red or blue, or occasionally dark green or plain wood. A yellow pencil is a scratchy and petulant thing, consigned forever to the grubby bilges of a school pencil case. Petroski repeats the anecdote of how a manufacturer produced a batch of pencils, and painted half yellow and half green. Consumers complained that the green-painted pencils didn’t write well, and broke frequently. Curiously, I remember reading the same anecdote in the UK, except the batch was one quarter each red, blue, green and yellow. It was the green and yellow pencils that broke in Britain.
And a rubber (eraser) on the end? It destroys the balance of the pencil, and at best produces a nasty smear on the page. Rubbing-out is what your Helix Colonel is for!
Man, I bought a lot of pencils this week. There’s nothing quite able to cure that tactile jones than writing with a blade-sharpened wooden pencil on good paper. Let me see:
So all I need now is a couple of non-photo blues and a bible highlighter or two, and I am the king of pencils!
I’m reminded of the “world’s biggest pencils” that were the coolest things an 8-year-old could have in a Scottish primary school. Brought back from exotic holiday locations, they were enough to win playground approval for a few days by letting your friends have a shot. I always wanted one of these 40cm überpencils, but it didn’t happen then.
When I did get one, it was three years later, and the cachet was gone. To compound the disappointment, the pencil I got depicted the staid provincial crests of Belgium on a cream-of-chicken-soup–coloured background. To write with it was to be a hamfisted infant again; it looped and swayed against my will. Its lead was narrow and the wood was tough, resisting all sharpening. There was no “sharkener” (as sharpeners were pronounced in my primary school) that would point the thing. It was soon consigned to the back of the cupboard.
After reading leadholder.com, celebrate National Mechanical Pencil Day!