If you want to request a sample (limited time only) please fill in this request form.

Send to Kindle

I’ll start with some youtube videos. Watching it you might think it is an old recording (style, background music, quality), but it is a new episode (April 2013) from a series by NHK’s international broadcasting service.

You can find more information about the show at NHK World.

Send to Kindle

My desk this morning.

I’m currently very busy at work and when that calms down I’ll be busy with other things …so it might be June before I get round to writing the blog posts I’ve currently got in mind.

Send to Kindle

To celebrate this occasion: a picture of a Sandtropper with a Pelikan M100¹.

1. The Stormtrooper of the Fountain Pens!

Send to Kindle

The National Stationery Week’s web site gives you the chance of winning a stationery hamper!

First, something you might have already seen in my last blog post, where you can win two pens they sent me: The Pen Company is holding a competition where you can win a Graf von Faber-Castell fountain pen. They also have 10% off all purchases during National Stationery Week deducted at checkout, as well as some other special offers (unrelated to the National Stationery Week).

Each day this week there’s a chance to win a £10 voucher on the Ryman website.

I didn’t see any special National Stationer Week offers on bureaudirect’s website, but they had a special offer last year (free text markers with your order), so I wouldn’t be surprised if they will add one later in the week.

I don’t remember whether they had a special offer last year, they might have, but I also didn’t see any special National Stationery Week offers at CultPens, Pure Pens and Tiger Pens, but again I wouldn’t be surprised to see something soon.

Please let me know if there are others I’ve missed.

Send to Kindle

Both E-Motion pens on a teNeues Explorer Journal Hay Harvest.

It took quite a while before I bought my first Faber-Castell fountain pen. Now, only a few weeks after, I had the opportunity to try another Faber-Castell fountain pen, as well as the mechanical pencil from the same line.

I have been recently contacted by Anna from The Pen Company who asked me whether I would like to review a pen from their shop. In the end James from The Pen Company was kind enough to not only to send one, but two pens I had picked: the Parquet Ivory fountain pen and the Parquet Ivory mechanical pencil from Faber-Castell’s E-Motion line. I was also able to try Faber-Castell’s wooden Castell 9000 style 4GB USB stick out. As part of a promotion you get one of these USB sticks with orders of all Faber-Castell pens while stocks last.

Both pens come with an ivory coloured “precious resin” barrel. The parquet pattern on the barrel has been produced using laser etching, a technique often used for keyboards. There is a tiny burr visible on the barrel if you look hard. This burr is slightly more pronounced on my fountain pen, but it is really small. Most people wouldn’t even notice it.

The laser-etched Parquet pattern and Faber-Castell logo on the pencil

The mechanical pencil

Lead width

The mechanical pencil accepts 1.4mm pencil leads and comes with B leads. Size-wise these are between Yard-O-Led leads and the leads used in leadholders. I assume that unlike leadholder leads, which are usually sharpened, the Faber-Castell leads are not supposed to be sharpened, as I haven’t seen a dedicated lead sharpener from Faber-Castell. My handwriting is very small, which means that even if I frequently rotate the pen the lines get too wide and I have to starting writing bigger letters – but the lead size might be just right for someone with a bigger handwriting.

Propelling the lead

The eraser under the cap

To propel the lead you have to turn the cap clockwise. Similarly you can get the lead back into the body of the pen, e.g. when putting the pen in a pencil case, by turning the cap anticlockwise. This is different to twist-based mechanisms where turning will unlock and advance the lead. The E-Motion‘s lead stays ‘locked’ all the time.

The eraser

There is also an eraser under the cap. As expected for the big size of the pen’s body this eraser is bigger than what you usually find in mechanical pencils.

Replacement leads

The lead storage under the grip

When you unscrew the cap you can find a storage area on the side of the body that should be able to hold six to eight replacement leads. Unfortunately I couldn’t try out how many exactly will fit as I didn’t have enough leads of this size.

Conclusion

A very nice pencil. The spring-type clip is very nice. There is a big eraser for emergencies and the pen can hold several spare leads despite the big diameter of the leads. If normal pencils are to thin or light for you this might be a great alternative, as long as you don’t mind the width of the lead.

The fountain pen

The fountain pen comes with a big and heavy screw cap, that has a nice spring-type clip, like the one found on the pencil. The nib is stainless steel, available in F, M and B. I chose the F nib as it fits best with my handwriting. The pen accepts standard cartridges and comes with a converter.

The laser-etched Parquet pattern on the fountain pen. There is no etched logo. The logo is embossed on the cap.

The nib and its performance on paper

The bleed through of the E-Motion compared to that of a Lamy Safari, here on Silvine paper.

The nib is nice and smooth and writes well on all types of paper. I found that the writing experience is above average on really poor paper. When it comes to average paper performance is good, but not as good as some other fountain pens. I used the E-Motion with Diamine’s Sapphire ink, a very well behaved ink. On average quality paper, in this case a Yokrshire-made exercise book from Silvine, there is no feathering at all – but there is some bleed through: it’s much less than the bleed though you get with a wet Noodler’s Konrad, a bit more than with a Pelikan M215 EF and more than with a Lamy Safari F, which doesn’t produce any bleed through at all. The bleed through issue be easily fixed by using different paper or by trying to make the nib drier¹.

When freshly uncapped I never had any problems with skipping, unlike my experience with some other, more expensive fountain pens, like the Cross Century II. The cap-off time time of the E-Motion is however shorter than some other fountain pens. Left uncapped it tends to dry and start to skip when starting to write again after two minutes non-use, which might be a problem when taking notes in a meeting or in some other situations (classroom, writing comments, …)².

Conclusion

A very nice fountain pen. It is heavier than many other fountain pens and the grip section doesn’t provide as much grip as some other fountain pens. I think it’s a great fountain pen for constant writing. If you want a pen more suitable for meetings or other situations where you only write occasionally the short cap-off time means that a Faber-Castell’s Basic or Ambition fountain pen might be more suitable as it’s easier to cap and uncap these pens. If you want a pen with a more “substantial” feeling to it the E-Motion might just be the right pen.

Both E-Motion pens on a teNeues Explorer Journal Hay Harvest.

Giveaway

I was very happy that Anna and James from The Pen Company sent me these pens, but it’s time for the two pens to find a new home. For a chance to win the the mechanical pencil or the fountain pen please leave a comment at this blog post, telling me which type of pen you normally prefer (pencil, mechanical pencil, fountain pen, roller ball, ballpoint pen or whatever it may be). It would be nice if you explain why you prefer that type of pen, but that’s not necessary to be eligible to win. If your favourite type of pen is not the one you want to win, e.g. you might prefer pencils, but you’d like to try a fountain pen for a change, please state that in the comment, too.

I am happy to ship to any country as long as Royal Mail is delivering to that country. The UK’s National Stationery Week runs from 22 – 28 April, so the closing date for the giveaway will be 28 April 23:59:59 BST. To determine the winner I will go to random.org and will get a random number. The corresponding comment will win the pen of choice (either pencil or fountain pen) unless it’s a comment from me or it’s obviously spam (think ‘cheap Rolex’ ads) …in which case I will get a new random numbers until there is a winner. I will then get another random number to determine the winner of the other pen. Similar rules: the corresponding comment will win if the pen left is their pen of choice – unless it’s a comment from me, a comment from the first winner or it’s obviously spam. I will draw new random numbers until there is a winner. As long as you write meaningful comments, e.g. as part of a ‘discussion’, you can leave more than one comment and the comments will not be counted as spam.

If you want to win an even better pen: as part of The Pen Company’s Spring Poetry Competition you can even win a Graf von Faber-Castell Guilloche Fountain Pen in a choice of colours.

I’d like to thank Anna and James from The Pen Company for giving me a chance to try these pens out.

You can find a review of another Faber-Castell E-Motion pencil at Dave’s Mechnical Pencils.

You can find reviews of other Faber-Castell E-Motion fountain pens at Fountain Pen Geeks and From the Pen Cup.

1. Instructions how to do this can be found on the Internet.
2. This is obviously dependent on temperature, humidity, etc. – but as a comparison: in the same conditions a Lamy Safari can be left uncapped for 5 minutes or longer without any skipping when starting to write again.

Send to Kindle

Pencils sorted by colour (Image © Rare Day)

The Snowman

I know, Christmas is over, but the weather is still fairly wintery and it’s just starting to get warmer now, so you might forgive me if I wrote about snowmen. Since 1982 Channel 4 has been showing The Snowman every year for Christmas. It’s a 26-minute animation drawn using pencils.

A blue Prismacolor pencil at work (Image © Rare Day)

I don’t think The Snowman is very well known outside the UK, but if you’re not on the British Isles you might know another animation from the author Raymond Briggs: When the Wind Blows.

Are these Caran d’Ache pencils? (Image © Rare Day)

According to the Cumberland Pencil Museum, where you can see a making of video, it has been drawn using Derwent Cumberland pencils.

A Mars Lumograph in the Lupus Films Studio (Image © Rare Day)

The sequel

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the animation Channel 4 made a sequel: The Snowman and The Snowdog. When I first heard about the sequel I was sceptical and didn’t expect it to be hand drawn using pencils, but to my surprise it’s hand made using pencils. The sequel cost £2 million and according to a documentary about the making of the sequel 200 000 sheets of paper and 5000 pencils were used.

Prismacolor 20044 blue (Image © Rare Day)

In a documentary, also shown on Channel 4, you can see all sorts of pencils being used in the studio in North London where the cells were hand drawn. I was surprised to see fairly few Derwent Cumberland pencils¹. The pencils visible in the documentary don’t have to be representative of those used for the animation, but the pencils you get to see in the documentary are not from Derwent – they are mainly Prismacolor pencils. The 20044, an eraser-tipped blue pencil, seems to be particularly often used for outline animations². I believe the reason blue is being used is because cameras or copiers will ignore this colour or shade of colour, so that sketch lines don’t need to be erased and the final black lines can just be drawn over the sketches³. You can also see some Caran d’Ache pencils, Staedtler’s Mars Lumograph and two mechanical pencils, which I think were both Pentels.

Some of the pencils in the home of Raymond Briggs (Image © Rare Day)

Some scenes were filmed in Raymond Briggs’ House where many Derwent Cumberland pencils were visible and where you can also see him using a Staedtler Mars Lumograph.

Composer Ilan Eshkeri is using a red and blue pencil during recording at Abbey Studios (Image © Rare Day)

The images in this blog post have been taken from Rare Day‘s documentary How the Snowman Came Back to Life. 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 Snowman and The Snowdog (Image © Lupus Films, Rare Day)

1. I would have thought that Derwent Cumberland would have an interest in sponsoring this movie – 5000 pencils wouldn’t have been a lot for them.
2. If that’s the right word.
3. I first read about this when I discovered Staedtler’s non-photo-blue pencils.

Send to Kindle

The main ingredient: Hedge trimmings

Today: another handicraft blog post.

The problem -  the need for a desk stand

The idea: making a cap holder by drilling a hole in a piece of wood

There are some occasions when I’m not supposed to use a pencil, e.g. when marking assessments. I actually use mechanical pencils with different coloured leads for some assessments (e.g. programming related), but for other pieces of work I often use fountain pens¹. I don’t have a desk fountain pen with a stand and you might know that they are not common any more. In the past even inexpensive fountain pens for pupils came with a case that had a plastic pop up desk stand, but these days pen stands seem to be reserved for expensive fountain pens.

A desk stand would be handy when marking, i.e. if you only have to write a few words here and there with long breaks in between². Unfortunately there are no generic desk stands either, at least I’m not aware of any, no wonder: every pen has a different width and what would be a good stand for one fountain pen might be too wide for another one with the result that the pen would rest on its nib, which might cause damage if no care is taken when the pen is placed in the desk stand.

The solution – a cap holder

I’m not too keen on using the word perfect, but a fountain pen’s cap would be pretty much a perfect desk stand …if it’d just stand. There’s no danger of the pen resting on its nib³, so all you need is to hold the cap, preferably at an angle that makes it easy to place and draw the pen. The solution came in the form of unwanted hedge trimmings. I cut about 4.5 cm (~1¾″) off a branch with a diameter of about 5.5 cm (~2″). I then drilled a hole diagonally into the piece of wood that was to become my cap holder/desk stand and improved it by smoothing it with a knife. In the end the hole had a diameter of just under 2cm (~¾″). I also put some walnut oil on the now finished pen holder to make it look better and last longer.

The finished cap holder

Habemus stylo titulari

As a cap holder for a Noodler’s Konrad

As a cap holder for a Pelikan M205

The result: a cap holder and pen stand suitable for thin and thick pens.

It can be used for pencils, but I don’t think the usefulness in the case of pencils justifies the effort of making this pen holder: even though it only took about ten minutes to make the pen holder, with most time spend getting the tools, the added comfort when using the  pen stand with a pencil is minimal when compared to the comfort when using it to hold fountain pen caps. The cap holder turns the cap into a pen stand which makes using a fountain pen very comfortable even when only using it for a few seconds every few minutes. No more picking the pen up and removing, maybe even unscrewing, the cap every time and putting the cap back on.

As a desk stand for a Staedtler Mars Lumograph

1. Often, but not always, a red Pelikan M205 with an F nib. I currently use Pelikan’s red ink, but Diamine Passion Red is great, too. I’ve got a bottle of it in my office. In the past I also used the Dufte Schultinte für Lehrer by De Atramentis, but it’s feathering on our photocopy paper – only exams tend to be written on better paper (the paper in my employer’s exam booklets is surprisingly good).
2. I won’t start a discussion in this blog post on why I don’t use a ballpoint pen and why I want to use a fountain pen.
3. Unless you made some adjustments that result in the nib sticking out too much. SBREBrown explains how that happened to his Konrad.

Send to Kindle

What to do if your pencil gets too short to use comfortably?

I guess most people lose their pencils before this ever happens, but surely that won’t happen to pencileers, molyvophiles¹ and molyvologues². If my pencils reach the end of their useful length I’ll, more often than I should, put them aside – to be kept for an undetermined purpose in an undetermined future …but I could of course also put them to good use in a pencil extender. My poshest pencil extender, not counting the Perfect Pencil as it is also a sharpener,  is the Motus pencil lengthener olive from e+m, Art.Nr. GS24-53. It comes in a black pencil box with two “pencils XS”, that are surprisingly smooth(!)³ writers.

Properties

With about 15g (~0.5 oz) the pencil extender is fairly heavy. The handle is made of olive wood with, in my opinion, beautiful grain. The collar that holds the pencil in place is a metal screw-style collar. The space to hold the pencil extends into the handle so that my version of the Motus can hold 9.5 cm of pencil length in the pencil extender itself⁴, which means that even if your pencil hasn’t reached the stub stage of its life yet you can still use the Motus, maybe as a handle if that’s more comfortable for you than just holding a thin pencil.

Holding it

The Motus has similar proportions to other pencil extenders with wooden handles, but the handle gets wider towards the end. It is comfortable to hold near the pencil end of the metal collar or near the collar end of the wooden handle. Holding it in between is not comfortable as the end of the handle is too wide. This might be a problem if you don’t like to hold you pens close or far from the writing end.

It’s a busy road so I wasn’t able to take a photo without a car parked in front of the shop

Papier Pfeiffer

I bought the pen in April 2011 from Papier Pfeiffer in Würzburg, Bavaria, for €16,95 (~$22.05; £14.60). This shop has a fantastic choice of pencils, pens and stationery and I got great and friendly advice from the senior boss, Mrs Bienek-Pfeiffer, who had run the shop since the 1960s⁵ until she handed it over to her daughter. In all fairness I also have to add that I got less useful and less friendly advice when she wasn’t there and a member of staff was dealing with me. As mentioned before their selection is great, but there is also lots of stock, there are unusual items you won’t usually find, they even have their own, special products, e.g. special Papier Pfeiffer inks from De Atramentis⁶, and they also sell more expensive brands.

The e+m articles are in the fourth shelf under the Lamy logo. Click to enlarge.

Conclusion

A great pencil extender. If you ware willing to spend that kind of money on an extender you’ll get one that is really good looking. This model is also available in black oak. …and if you’re ever in Würzburg it might be worth having a look at Papier Pfeiffer at Sanderstraße 4a.

Price: April 2011

Exchange rates: March 2013

You can find a review of another e+m pencil extender at Lexikaliker (in German).

You can find a blog post about Papier Pfeiffer at re:duziert (in German).

Added after Michael’s comment: Cult Pens now stock a range of these extenders.

1. Someone passionate about pencils
2. A student of pencils
3. really! smooth!
4. I assume similar e+m extenders can accommodate pencils of a similar length, but I wasn’t able to confirm this.
5. The shop was established in 1912.
6. I suspect these might not be special colours, but existing colour given special names for Papier Pfeiffer by De Atramentis

Send to Kindle

The company behind it
Brandbook‘s main business is manufacturing custom-made and designed notebooks. Their notebooks are mainly for business customers, but last year they launched their notebook line nuuna, aimed at consumers. The Cloud Book is one of nuuna’s products, not intended to be used as an ‘orderly notebook’, but as a notebook that is supposed to help your creativity. To support this task the pages sport different cloud photos.

The notebook

The notebook itself is sky blue with a bright orange elastic band. I was told that the cover is made from Cutoron and that the paper used is Tauro paper². The first thing to notice when using the Cloud Book is that erasing graphite from the pages will also remove some of the colour used for printing the background picture. Some erasers are better than others. The dust-free erasers I used were particularly good at keeping the background photo ‘undamaged’. Another thing, the Tauro paper isn’t exactly what I would call ink loving: it absorbs ink more easily than many other types of paper. This means that wet fountain pens will cause some bleed-through, but the dry fountain pens I tried were safe³. The paper feels a bit rough, but graphite and ink are easily visible on the paper. I mention this because some papers with a similar feel need fairly soft pencils to produce a dark line, but this paper will also be satisfied with harder pencils.

How many shibbloths can you find when you enlarge the picture. I think there are at least three obvious ones.

Conclusion
I really like the idea behind the Cloud Book, but at work or at home I’d usually only write something in a notebook if I want to keep the information I write down – so the concept of using a notebook as a tool for creativity or to satisfy your play instinct is slightly alien to me – I’d usually use the reverse of an old calendar sheet or of an old sheet of paper if I want to scribble around… but now that I have the Cloud Book I’ll try to use it as intended.

The Cloud Book‘s RRP is €17.90 (~$23.30; £15.50) and it’s made in Germany, like all brandbook notebooks.

Price and exchange rates: March 2013.

I’d like to thank Carlos Monteiro Lanca from brandbook who sent me the Cloud Book free of charge.

The rare-ish GW nib of the Pelikan fountain pen used for the second picture has the honour of being shown on Werner Rüttinger’s Pelikan page.

The bought both, the Faber-Castell Guilloche fountain pen and the De Atramentis document ink, for an amazing price. The fountain pen was only a bit more than €20 at Amazon, but after I ordered it the price nearly doubled.  The De Atramentis document ink was very cheap at Pure Pens, much cheaper than what you pay at the manufacturer – probably a combination of it being the old price before the price increase and a good exchange rate when they imported the ink.

One last thing: users of the Cloud Book can send a photo or scan of their favourite scribbles to brandbook / nuuna for a chance to win a a selection of notebooks from nuuna.

1. You can also read about the Cloud Book at re:duziert.
2. I found some further information about these materials on the web, but wasn’t sure how much of that information is manufacturer dependent and whether the descriptions I found apply to this notebook.
3. To my surprise De Atramentis’ document ink, which tends to feather on some papers, behaved rather well on this paper.

Send to Kindle

The angle of the pencil point seems to be 14°. I assume the image has not been stretched. Ok, the pencil looks as if it has been bitten specifically for the purpose of this photo. The eraser also looks as if it has been used up for the sake of using it up, uniform use with no trace of lead – but that point….

The pencil on the book cover next to a Venezuelan-made Mongol

14°… and it doesn’t look knife sharpened! Currently my list of sharpeners sorted by angle doesn’t have any sharpener that comes close to this. Unfortunately the book’s colophon doesn’t mention the photo on the cover. The UK edition states that the cover is designed by Yes, but there’s a good chance they just ‘rearranged’ the American cover and don’t have much to do with the pencil on the cover.

Any hint on what sharpener has been used to sharpen that pencil would be greatly appreciated.

I’d like to thank Sean because I got most of my Mongol pencils, like the one pictured, either through him or because he made me aware of where to get them. Thanks!

Send to Kindle

Here are some examples. All prices are from Cultpens, just because that’s where these items were bought. I didn’t pick Cultpens because their prices increased more or less compared to other shops – other shops had similar prices at the same time and have similar prices now. Example: The price Niche Pens charged for the M400 was nearly the same at the time and is nearly the same now. Let’s have a look how the prices developed.

Neither RPI nor CPI were as high as the stationery price increase, even when you take the VAT increase into account. One point to mention is however that these pens are what I would call luxury pens¹. So luxury stationery went up². How did the price of branded, good quality stationery increase?

Interesting. That’s much closer to inflation. The Stabilo pencil even got cheaper. Unlike all other products mention so far the Stabilo is, as far as I know, not made in the eurozone. Maybe the Euro is one of the reasons behind the price increase, the Pound lost a lot of value against the Euro and QE certainly doesn’t help to keep it’s value up⁴. OK, that’ Europe, but with Japan being a big manufacturer of stationery, how did the price of Japanese made pens develop?

The price were quite stable, they actually even went down, especially in real terms!

So. Luxury stationery prices went up a lot. Eurozone stationery got more expensive, but in real terms it probably kept its price, especially when taking the VAT increase into account. Non-Eurozone stationery went down in price. I wonder what happened to luxury stationery from Japan. Did it go up or down in price? Did anyone buy, let’s say a Pilot Falcon or something similarly priced in the last years in the UK? How much did you pay?

Percentages are rounded.

The old price was reconstructed from the order confirmations which listed prices for all articles without VAT and the VAT sum for the whole order. This means that the old price listed for stationery might be off by a penny or so. I’d also like to add that this is not at all supposed to be representative.

Price Increase / Year is what it say on the tin. Price Increase divided by the years since the item was bought. Compounding has not been taken into account, hey: I’m not an accountant or economist.

The pictures are from old blog posts (here and here), just to put some colour into this blog post.

1. Customers of Montblanc pens might disagree with me on that and might call these mid- level pens.
2. I’ll just generalise instead of going down the “the price of three pens at one retailer went up” route.
3. More precise: 6‰, but I tried to stick to rounded %.
4. Every time the latest QE figures are in the news I get a shock when I think about how much money that is equivalent to when you divide it by the (working) population.
5. Yes, it’s made in Japan.

Send to Kindle

You might remember my 2011 blog post about the Schwanberg and the pencil cedar. If you visit the castle grounds, mentioned in that blog post, you’ll have a chance to look for the pencil cedar as part of an organised tour this Sunday.

Two more blog posts that mention the pencil cedar:

Schön gespitzte Bleistifte from Lexikaliker

and Juniperus virginiana

The newspaper article has been taken from the Kitzingen Section of the Main-Post newspaper from 14th February 2013. I believe that the use of the fax of the article in this blog post falls under “fair dealing” as described by the UK Copyright service.

Send to Kindle

In December 2011 I bought a Noodler’s Ahab fountain pen¹ and I didn’t use it a lot. Why? Because I was disappointed.

Why was I disappointed? That was actually down to my unrealistic expectations and wasn’t Noodler’s fault at all. When I read that it’s supposed to come with a flexible nib I expected some wonderpen that would be the fountain pen equivalent of my Brause 361 nib, i.e. I thought even relatively few pressure would make it possible to create a lot of nib variation. That wasn’t the case. The nib wasn’t much more flexible than M200 steel nibs from Pelikan in F or my Lamy 2000 M nib. My initial impression of the Ahab’s nib was probably also made worse by the fact that I often write on poor quality paper² and because I used an ink that tends to be absorbed into the paper instead of staying on the paper to form a crisp line once dry.

Left to right: M215 Orthogons, Konrad Galapagos Tortoise, M215 Lozenges, M215 Blue Barrel and Stripes

Enter the Konrad. The text from the leaflet that comes with the Konrad reminds me very much of the Citroën C5 adverts³. I bought it because I like the look of it – no wonder: I like the look of Pelikan pens. I prefer the look of the round cap Pelikans to the crown cap Pelikans – and the Konrad has the round cap look I like. Unfortunately, the celluloid derivative used for the Konrad⁴ doesn’t look as good as the one on my Ahab, probably because it’s more translucent. This is however completely subjective and someone else will prefer the material used for the Konrad⁵.

In terms of nib flex the Konrad and Ahab are great, I just have to accept that I need more pressure to make it flex compared to my dip pen nibs. On the maximum flex end of the scale they don’t really produce a wider line than a Pelikan M200 steel nib in F, but they can produce a slightly thinner line on the minimum flex end of the scale. If you now think a Pelikan steel nib in EF will produce similar results you might be disappointed. On good paper (steel) EF nibs produce a finer line than F nibs, but on poor quality paper the difference can be hardly noticeable. The EF nibs do however tend to be very hard and there’s hardly any line variation, i.e. they are much less flexible than the F nibs.

M205 De Atramentis Schwarzriesling ink, Konrad Pelikan Blue ink, Ahab Noodler's Baystate Blue ink -- Please excuse the shape of the letters, I usually don't try to vary pressure on purpose when writing

Pricewise the Konrad is amazing. I paid about £23 including shipping (~$35; €27), bought on eBay. That’s about half of what I paid for my last Pelikan M215, about £56 including shipping (~$87; €66), bought from Amazon Germany. There are similar offers for different versions of the M215 on Amazon UK, but just to spell it out, one reason why the Pelikan pens are cheap on Amazon is because they don’t come in the Pelikan gift box, they come in a cardboard box, similar to the one the Konrad came in. The body of the Konrad does not seem to be as carefully handled as the Pelikan, mine came with some scratches on the body, but nothing too obvious or bad. The Pelikan has some advantages, too. It comes with a metal sleeve on the body and the body and cap have a higher quality feel to them – but hey, the Konrad is only half as expensive, plus it can take all sorts of nibs.

Prices: January 2013.

Exchange rates: February 2013

Sbrebrown reviewed the Konrad on YouTube.

You can find reviews of the M215 at OfficeSupplyGeek and Goldspot pens.

1. The Ivory Darkness version. Mine ended up being extra dark.
2. Simply because many of the documents I get are printed on that kind of paper.
3. “Not a single component of the Konrad pen is German made. Yet, its design is extremely German…”
4. In my case the Galapagos Tortoise.
5. I don’t and am thinking about getting the Ebonite Konrad once it’s available again. The Goulet Pen Company will have it back in stock again soon, but I’m undecided whether I should order because I might have to pay Customs Duty, Excise Duty and import VAT.

Send to Kindle

1. The protected grippers that do not mark the pencil, unlike the usual metal “jaws of death” seen on most rotary sharpeners.
2. The sharpener is advertised as having 2 point settings – sharp or blunt, however the screw type mechanism seems to allow for an infinitely variable sharpness between these two extremes.
3. Low cost, from 7-10 pounds sterling depending on colour. I didn’t realise Amazon were also offering a green and white and black and white model for a couple of pounds less than my model.
4. Sharpens pencils from the usual standard around 7mm up to 11.5mm for some chunky art pencils.

PERFORMANCE

As my main interest is graphite pencils, I sharpened a selection to see if it produced a point comparable to my gold standard sharpener – a modified (with padded grippers from the premium model) Carl Angel 5 (chinese mechanism). Here’s the results.

• Standard diameter hex pencils such as the Faber Castell 9000 and Tombow Mono 100 produced a short exposed core and a dull point. Not impressed.
• The round barrel Papermate Black Warrior (Mexico) produced a nice long cone and good point sharpness.
• The oversize triangular Dixon TRI-CONDEROGA sharpened nicely with a long cone and medium/long exposed core.

While not as good as a Carl Angel-5 it does have the advantage of padded grippers and the ability to sharpen oversize pencils. I would give it a 6 1/2 out of ten for graphite pencils. BUT, and here’s the big BUT, this sharpener is absolutely brilliant with all the coloured pencils I tested. It seems the thicker cores of coloured pencils – 3mm and up are better suited to the geometry of the mechanism than thinner cored graphite pencils.

- the overall cone (wood and core is long and nicely tapered) and the exposed core is almost razor sharp and with just the right length.

For comparison I sharpened a graphite pencil and more coloured pencils in one of Matthias’ favourite sharpeners – the Deli 0635. The result for the graphite Berol Turquoise was quite good but the point and cone shape/length not up to the standard of the Carl Angel 5. But, yet again the coloured pencils were sharpened to an almost absurdly l.o.o.o.ng cone length and the exposed core is also massively long and deadly sharp, even sharper if that’s possible, than the Dahle 133.

Of the two sharpeners I would plump for the Dahle 133 for the more reasonable length of the cone and the exposed core. The Deli 0635 cone is simply freakishly long and sharp and thus the point strength is compromised.

OTHER POINTS OF INTEREST

Both these sharpeners would fit easily in most outdoor art sketching kits. The Deli 0635 is super compact and the Dahle is compact – about half way between the Carl and the Deli in size.

Both these little sharpeners are basically plastic externally but have robust all metal cutting cylinders with all metal gear drive.

The padded grippers on both sharpeners was the main reason I purchased them and in this regard they do their job admirably. I only wish that manufacturers and sellers would promote these padded gripper models as a feature – which they certainly are.

Given the results with coloured pencils, I will certainly be using mine more often in future.

Thanks to Matthias for the airing of this guest review.

You can find another review of the Dahle 133 at Lexikaliker (Google translation of the blog post).

Send to Kindle

Their new digital product might be more interesting, though I don’t have any further information yet¹. It’s a digital pencil‽² You can see some picture at their Initium site. You’ll also find pictures of their new fountain pens there.

1. I asked Staedtler for further information and will let you know if I get a reply.
2. Two ideas so far: It could either just be a pencil similar to Faber-Castell’s Perfect Pencil with a conductive end, to be used on tablets and phones, or, less likely, it could be something similar to Staedtler’s existing digital pen.

Send to Kindle

A Spy vs. Spy Pencil sharpener gag by Bob Clarke.

Spy vs. Spy (Image © Bob Clarke)

…and another pencil sharpener gag from the The Mad Student Survival Guide for Those Bored of Education.

(Image © Mad Magazine)

I’d like to thank Anthony Snyder for allowing me to show Bob Clarke’s drawing. He is currently selling this drawing on eBay.

The image of Bob Clarke’s Spy vs. Spy comic is from Anthony Snyder, who allowed me to show it in my blog. The sharpener gag is taken from The Mad Student Survival Guide for Those Bored of Education. I believe that the use of these images in this blog post falls under “fair dealing” as described by the UK Copyright service.

Send to Kindle

I’d like to thank Lexikaliker for the Graphit Kropfmuehl Group pencil and my colleague Dr. Mitch Larsson for the Rothschild pencil.

Send to Kindle

A few days ago I noticed that my magnesium sharpeners look pretty bad. The surface is now very rough, not shiny any more at all, except for some small areas. The sharpeners have been stored together with a silver plated letter opener I bought very cheap from The Pen Shop. A few erasers were also next to the sharpeners for a long period of time. I’m now wondering what caused the corrosion/tarnishing of the magnesium.

Maybe someone who knows more about chemistry can tell me what happened – so that I can avoid similar mistakes in the future.

Click to get a better look how the surface looks like now

My first idea what might have happened: A process similar to the one when aluminium is used to clean tarnished silver took place. The magnesium sharpeners kept the silver-plated letter opener untarnished, because magnesium is less noble than silver and therefore attracted sulphur or other chemical elements.

My alternative suggestion: Just like the chemicals from another eraser ‘ruined’ one of my wooden pencil boxes once, the chemicals from the erasers that were stored together with the magnesium sharpener changed the sharpeners’ surface, too.

Can anyone tell me what really happened to the magnesium sharpeners?

1. I think this has now been reduced to 12 years.

Send to Kindle

Manchester Art Gallery - Entrance

Last weekend I went to the Manchester Art Gallery. Their current exhibition The First Cut is still open until 27 January 2013.

Wonder Forest (© Manabu Hangai 2012)

For this exhibition paper has been ‘cut, sculpted and manipulated’ into works of art. I’ll try to keep the number of photos in this blog post low, but that’s really difficult with so many exciting pieces of art made from paper.

Notice-Forest (Burger King) (© Yuken Teruya 2009)

Many pieces of art have been made from everyday objects. Japanese artist Yuken Teruya uses paper bags from different companies. Using a photo of a tree from the bag’s company’s country he then cuts the paper into the shape of this tree.

Big Wave Moving towards a small Castle made of Sand III (© Peter Callesen 2012)

Danish artist Peter Callesen uses normal sheets of A4 paper for his works of art.

Chaos City (© Béatrice Coron 2010)

Béatrice Coron uses Tyvek, a material similar to paper that is used instead of paper for some types of envelopes.

Fotoecken (© Sarah Birdgland 2012)

Sarah Bridgland uses second-hand ephemera to create her art.

Matemaatika (© Sarah Birdgland 2011)

The Harbingers (© Claire Brewster 2011)

Claire Brewster’s flock of birds is cut from vintage maps.

Going West scene (© Andersen M Studio 2010)

There were also several pieces of art cut from books.

Admission to The First Cut exhibition is free.There’s also a catalogue available and you can even buy limited edition artworks by selected artists.

The Manchester Art Gallery allows taking photos unless there are signs indicating that specific works may not be photographed. I did not see any signs indicating that the works shown in this blog post may not be photographed. I believe that the use of the images shown in this blog post falls under “fair dealing” as described by the UK Copyright service.

Send to Kindle

Faber-Castell Higgins Ink, used by Carl Barks (Image © Helnwein)

You might remember my blog post about Carl Barks. I just made an exciting discovery linked to Carl Barks that I’ve got to share with you….

If you follow Sean’s Contrapuntalism blog you already know about his visit to Faber-Castell’s headquarters. He was kind enough to get me one of these magazine, as they can’t be bought in shops. After travelling from Germany to the USA ‘my’ magazine made a trip back to Europe. This time to Great Britain.

In the ‘Tool for the Creatives‘ section the anniversary magazine is giving examples of artists who are using Faber-Castell products. One exciting discovery I made is that Carl Barks was using Faber-Castell products.

As far as I can tell this photo has been taken by Gottfried Helnwein. You can read about his talks with Carl Barks on one of his web sites.

The image of the Faber-Castell Higgins Ink has been taken from Faber-Castell’s 250th anniversary magazine. The magazine indicates that the copyright for this photo is with Helnwein. I believe that the use of this image in this blog post falls under “fair dealing” as described by the UK Copyright service.

Send to Kindle

...even got a free OHTO Smile Paperclip with the order

Berol, a British company that is now a subsidiary of Newell Rubbermaid, has its origins in pencil making. In 1856 Daniel Berolzheimer went from Franconia, where Staedtler and Faber-Castell are from, to the USA and founded the Eagle Pencil Company. I don’t want to bore you with details, but in the end Newell Rubbermaid took over. Many readers of pencil blogs will also know that the Berolzheimer family is still part of today’s pencil industry as they own CalCedar. Some will also remember how they managed to upset parts of the pencil community last year, but there is no direct link to Berol or Newell Rubbermaid.

That's the 'wrong' Berolzheim. There are two of them...

What you pay and what you get

I paid £2.45 (~ $4; €3). There is only one nib width available. The pen is made in China. I don’t really find it very good looking, but better looking fountain pens, like the Pelikan Pelikano junior (< £10) or the Kaweco Sport (< £20) are several times more expensive than the Berol Handwriting Cartridge Pen. The Berol comes with a rubber ring and a rubberised grip area to make holding the pen more comfortable. It is very light, some might find it too light, but fairly comfortable to hold.

The grip area (bottom)

Writing

The nib is not very wet, not very dry either. It’s certainly drier than most Pelikan nibs, but they tend to be on the wet side anyway. Ink will dry fast and you won’t see a lot of shading. With it writing fairly dry ink cartridges should last a long time, but light inks might appear too light on the paper. I didn’t have a problem with nib not ‘starting’, even after the pen hasn’t been used for several weeks. Unfortunately I only had the pen on my desk, so I am not sure whether ink will spill if the pen is knocked around in a pencil case.

The nib is very rigid, which is normal for cheap pens. If you try to vary the line width this is not the pen for you.

The nib

Conclusion

This pen offers excellent value for money. For me it’s not really a beauty, but that’s subjective – you might like the looks. If you want a cheap fountain pen that does the job this pen might just be right for you.

Price: December 2012

Exchange rates: January 2013

The paper in the pictures is from the RAH STMT X Iceland kit.

1. at least in the UK – prices in other countries might vary

Send to Kindle

Being old fashioned?

Not long ago I felt like a Luddite when I talked about radios in a workshop and my students told me that “radios are for old people” and that they don’t listen to the radio unless they are driving a car and there’s no other option…

The creeping feeling that I am too old fashioned didn’t get better when, just before Christmas, I saw an old friend I haven’t seen in many years. At one stage I took the X17 out of my shirt pocket to make a note of something when he let me know that paper notebooks are old fashioned and how surprised he is that I don’t make notes in my mobile phone. My counter argument was that I must be modern because he’s the one with the analogue watch¹, but he said his watch is a quartz watch, so it is in fact modern, so me having a digital watch doesn’t cancel the old fashioned paper notebook out.

I guess stationery users are seen as being old fashioned…

Update available. Download now?

Not that my student or my friend would read my blog, but here’s a handicraft blog post to combine the old (stationery) with the new (well, not that new any more).

At work I tend to carry my diary with me². If you have an NFC-enabled phone³ you can use ‘old-fashioned’ stationery to automate certain tasks, e.g. setting the phone to quiet/vibrate in meetings by putting the phone on your diary. The stationery is not actually necessary, but makes the whole experience more exciting and aesthetically pleasing.

How to do that? You need NFC tags and software that lets you set up the desired actions on your phone. The phone will notice when you put it on an NFC tag and will then do whatever you told it to do earlier.

You can buy NFC tags you can write information on. These tags are very useful for automating tasks as you can store the tasks directly on them – but these tags cost money. On the other hand you can use existing NFC tags, even read only ones, to automate tasks. The phone will then remember which tag is supposed to activate which action. In my example I am using my staff card from work. It comes with an NFC tag so that I can log on to printers or copiers. Now I use it to set my phone to quiet. I just need to store the card in my diary, tell the software that if it detects my staff card it should be quiet and whenever I put the phone on the diary, e.g. in meetings, I can be sure the phone will not make people spill their teas and coffees when it starts ringing.You could of course think of other tasks to launch, too, and attach the appropriate tag on selected stationery, e.g. play “Ode to Joy” when your phone comes close to your Eberhard Faber Blackwing 602 or play “Big in Japan” when your phone is near the Tombow pencils.

The software used in my example is “AnyTAG NFC Launcher” for Android. If you have writeable NFC tags you could try “NFC Task Launcher”.

If you don’t want to spend money on NFC tags: some department stores use NFC tags for stock control, mainly for clothes, so you could keep those and reuse them on your stationery.

To be honest, I’m not sure I will keep that software installed. If I find out that battery life of my phone suffers I might stop using NFC tags to launch certain tasks.

1. Yes, I know what that the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy says that humans are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. Well, I do think that they are – the watches that is …or maybe both.
2. My colleagues and I get them free from our employer
3. These phones have been around for six years now, so I’ll accept the argument that this is still old-fashioned, but it might be new to some…

Send to Kindle

Jason born with a Rotring 600 (Image © Universal Pictures)

I have recently watched The Bourne trilogy, after reading the books, and was surprised to see in “The Bourne Supremacy” a Rotring 600. Matt Damon (Jason Bourne in the movie) is making calls from a phone both, and uses the Rotring to take notes.

Jason born with a Rotring 600 (Image © Universal Pictures)

The Rotring appears 3 times during the movie but only in this scene you can clearly see it.

Jason born with a Rotring 600 (Image © Universal Pictures)

The images in this blog post have been taken from the Bourne movies. I believe that the use of the images shown in this blog post falls under “fair dealing” as described by the UK Copyright service.

Send to Kindle

The Cumberland Pencil Museum

The museum

Considering that I don’t live too far away from the Cumberland Pencil Museum, both the Museum and I are in North West England, it took me quite a while to get there – but this May my wife and I finally made the trip. The weather was fantastic and the Museum managed to convey a lot of information despite being rather small. Admission is £4 (~$6.40; €4.95), but comes with a ‘free’ souvenir pencil.

How pencils are made - temporary(?) mural outside the museum. Notice the "i" in weird.

There were explanations how pencils are made and you could admire historic pens and pencil and machines. I will only show one photo from inside the museum as I haven’t asked whether they permit the posting of photos taken in the museum on the web.

On exhibition: Cumberland pencils from the 1920s

There was a pencil labelling machine, too, but unfortunately it was broken at the time …I would have really liked to get some personalised pencils.  A subsequent enquiry regarding the pencil labelling machine was not as helpful as it could have been, so I decided not to chase this up further. Maybe the machine will work again if I go there again in the future.

The Pencil Museum Shop

Obviously I couldn’t resist stocking up on pencils in the museum shop. The shop’s selection is aimed at artists, but if you use pencils for office purposes you’ll also find nice products. Pencils are from Derwent, who are running the museum, but you can find pencil related items from other brands.

The Eisen 060 sharpener, top

The sharpener

One of the products I picked up in the museum is the Eisen 060¹. I like this sharpener because the rounded corners make it “different” while still maintaining the classic wedge shape look². I paid £1 (~$1.60; €1.25). This sharpener’s body and blade were both made in Baiersdorf near Nuremberg. The 060′s produced in the last three years still feature the blade made in Baiersdorf, like all Eisen sharpeners, but the body is now made in Taicang near Shanghai. Performance of this little sharpener is very good, too.

The Eisen 060 sharpener, bottom

The Eisen 060, a Wopex and the Museum pencil

Giveaway

As this is a (belated) birthday blog post I am giving away an Eisen 060, some British-made Staedtler pencils and possible a few other small items I can find. I am happy to send the prizes to any country as long as Royal Mail doesn’t refuse to send them there. I will use random.org to get a random number and the author of the corresponding comment will get the price (unless I am the author or the comment is definitely spam). To take part please leave a comment for this blog post before Friday, 30th September 2011, 23:59 UTC.

Prices: May 2012

Exchange rates: November 2012

I would like to thank Stephan Eisen for providing additional information regarding the Eisen 060.

1. Eisen changed their web site. The pages are only available in German at the moment, so unfortunately all links to Eisen are to their German product page.
2. Eisen’s classic wedge sharpener is the 040.
3. I measured 25°, the official figure is 24° which is also the one I used for in the list of sharpeners

Send to Kindle

You might remember that the Staedtler Wopex is a difficult pencil to sharpen. Nevertheless, I like it so much that on an average day it is my most used pencil. Even though sharpening it with a knife yields good results I thought I should try sharpening the Wopex in KUM’s Automatic Long Point 2M, a sharpener I haven’t used in a while because of the unsightly marks it leaves at the base of the exposed graphite¹. To my surprise I got fantastic results when I used it to sharpen a Wopex.

KUM’s Automatic Long Point 2M and Staedtler's Wopex

I get best results if I align the Wopex with the top of the sharpener during the second step. If you have a Wopex and the Automatic Long Point 2M try them out. My Long Point sharpener performs much better than the dedicated Wopex sharpeners I have.

Pencil talk has a review of KUM’s Automatic Long Point 2M.

1. These marks are one of the reason why I prefer the Deli 0635 or the Eisen 402.

Send to Kindle

Episode: Le Ali della Sfinge / The Wings of the Sphinx (Image © RAI)

Commissario Montalbano, the famous detective from Sicily, is a keen user of the Staedtler Noris¹. Even though he’s driving around in an old Fiat Tipo his home is fantastic and is furnished and and decorated with classic and vintage bits and bobs, just like the grand homes of the criminals he is visiting. The Noris is a suitable pencil for him to use as it is the archetypal European pencil – even though it is a surprising choice as it is clearly a branded item.

Episode: La Pista di Sabbia / The Track of Sand (Image © RAI)

PS: Does anyone know what those cards / brochures / journals are that most civil servants in this TV series seem to have pinned to their walls.

The images in this blog post have been taken from Episode Le Ali della Sfinge / The Wings of the Sphinx and episode La Pista di Sabbia / The Track of Sand of the RAI TV series Il commissario Montalbano. I believe that the use of the images shown in this blog post falls under “fair dealing” as described by the UK Copyright service.

1. with and without eraser tip

Send to Kindle

The Castell 9000 in action (Image © 2 Player Productions)

Even if you are not interested in video and computer games you might have heard about Double Fine Adventure, a game that raised more than $3 million on Kickstarter this February – an amount of money unheard of in crowd funding until the Pebble watch came along.

Scott Campbell using a Castell 9000 (Image © 2 Player Productions)

One of the artists working on the artwork for the new game is Scott Campbell.

Scott Campbell using a Castell 9000 again (Image © 2 Player Productions)

In the Double Fine Adventure documentary by 2 Player Productions he can be seen using a Faber-Castell Castell 9000 for his sketches.

Scott Campbell still using a Castell 9000 (Image © 2 Player Productions)

The images in this blog post have been taken from Episode 4: “Walking Around in Our Drawings” of the Double Fine Adventure documentary by 2 Player Productions. I believe that the use of the images shown in this blog post falls under “fair dealing” as described by the UK Copyright service.

Send to Kindle

Wopex, presharpened

Desktop sharpeners are not good at sharpening pencils with such a hard casing. They won’t stop automatically, too, which means that you might shorten the pencil too much when using a desktop sharpener and you’ll got a less than exciting finish where the blade cylinder stopped.

Wopex, prism sharpener sharpened

Click to enlarge

A normal prism sharpener does a better job when it comes to sharpening a Wopex, but the lead tends to look rather porous after sharpening and the fine point created will break much easier on a Wopex than on a pencil with a traditional lead.The special Wopex sharpeners don’t seem to do a better job than any other prism sharpeners. At least they don’t do for me, maybe I don’t use them the way they should be used. One example is shown here, but the point doesn’t always look that bad. A better looking point, made using a prism sharpener, has been shown in a previous blog post.

Wopex, knife sharpened

The presharpened Wopexes¹ are looking and performing best. They are sharpened on an abrasive surface, something that is not necessarily practical for home use because of the time and dust involved. Searching for an alternative, better than a normal prism sharpener, I thought of using a knife to achieve a point similar to the one of presharpened Wopexes.

“Unlike most other sharpening techniques, in which blades engage the pencil’s wood (and later, graphite) at an angle more or less parallel to the shaft, the pocketknife’s blade is applied perpendicular to the pencil’s shaft.” (Rees 2012, p.46)²

There is a special pencil knife for sharpening and erasing, but I used a normal knife. In this case one with a high carbon steel blade, but stainless steel blades work just as well. The results are good, better than what I get from a prism sharpener, including the Wopex sharpener, but are slightly worse when compared to a presharpened Wopex.

I would like to thank

• Tom from Hide stationery for the Monsieur notebook
• Lexikaliker for the M+R grenade sharpener.
• Didier Baraderie for the Opinel N°8.

1. Wopeges, Wopeces? or whatever the plural may be
2. Rees, D., 2012. How to sharpen pencils. Brooklyn, New York: Melville House.

Send to Kindle

Right hand side: Dr. Konstantin Czeschka (Image © Bayerischer Rundfunk)

To celebrate 350 years of Bleiweißsteftmacherhandwerk¹ the Franconian and Bavarian regional news reported live from Staedtler’s factory on 25 September 2012. The reports were only a few minutes long.

Leads (Image © Bayerischer Rundfunk)

Dr. Konstantin Czeschka, Chief Technology & Production Officer, and Axel Marx, Managing Director, talked about the history of the pencil and included these interesting details:

• The graphite used for pencil leads is ground to particles whose size is in the range of a micrometer, one millionth of a metre.
• In 1900 there where 23 companies manufacturing pencils in Nuremberg. They employed 10,000 employees.
• One machine, shown on TV, can produce 1000 leads per minute.
• The pencil leads are heated to 1000°C
• The leads seem to be made in Nuremberg, but the pencils seem to be assembled in their factory in Neumarkt.
  I thought Staedtler’s mechanical pencils are made there, but didn’t expect their pencils to be made there, too. I mentioned Neumarkt in a previous blog post when I wrote about the ONLINE All Wood Marone. ONLINE is based in Neumarkt, too, as is e+m Holzprodukte.
• Producing a pencil is a fairly automated process. You only need about 1-2 seconds of human labour time. 100 years ago about one minute was needed, 200 years ago it was about an hour.
• The price of graphite is expected to rise. One of the reasons is that it is needed for manufacturing batteries for electric cars.

The Noris being painted (Image © Bayerischer Rundfunk)

You can find reviews of products from e+m Holzprodukte at Lexikaliker and Lung Sketching Scrolls.

The images in this blog post have been taken from Frankenschau and Abendschau. I believe that the use of the images shown in this blog post falls under “fair dealing” as described by the UK Copyright service.

1. the craft of making pencils – Bleiweißsteft is what the Bleistift (German for pencil) was called during the 17th century

Send to Kindle

A hot contender is the Monami MP-4003.

Luxurious, but also a but crazy? Yes, but maybe a bit too kitsch.

Decadent? Yes. Even hedonistic? Probably not.

Steam punk? Dunno, maybe more like Art Noveau punk…

If the Empire State Building was in Korea, some might call the MP-4003 the Empire State pencil.

Quality

The Monami MP-4003 comes in a nice-ish plastic box and is accompanied by a nice lead container. Quality-wise you can see that the accessories that come with the pencil are not top class: the plastic box had a broken off corner and the lid of the lead container had a crack, probably not because they weren’t handled probably, but because of the materials used.

The quality of the pencil itself is better than that of the accessories, but if you look closely, you also notice very minor problems – like scratches on the surface of the plastic body, marks that might be sprue marks or problems with the friction fit of the cap, which is too tight …at least in the case of my pencil.

Design

The look of the pencil is fantastic, even though they have overdone it, at least for my Western taste. The knurled grip works well, but could maybe have a bit more grip. It feels like knurled for effect, not knurled for purpose and the knurled section also starts rather far away from the tip.

The cap gets wider towards the end. Something I like very much, probably the main reason why I like the Yard-O-Led Edwardian pencil or Graf von Faber-Castell and Faber-Castell Perfect Pencils with this design.

There is a lead hardness indicator, but oddly enough the only grade printed on the body is “HB”, which makes it nearly useless. One possible use might be to set it to “HB” for HB leads and to the black colour of the body for anything other than HB. Speaking of HB leads: the leads that come with the pencil are very soft and dark for HB leads.

Monami

Monami, the manufacturer, seems to be Korea’s biggest stationery company, but according to Kent almost all of their wood-cased pencils are cheap pencils for children with cartoon characters  printed on them. I couldn’t find this pencil on their web site, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it is not being made any more. As far as I can tell my pencil was manufactured in 2011.

Conclusion

Value for money is good, with the price of this mechanical pencil being similar to most other mechanical pencils. I paid $6.50 (£4; €5) plus shipping on an auction web site. Keeping in mind that this pencil has more ‘metal’ on its body than most pencils in this price range makes it a very good price.

It is a nice pencil, but maybe a bit too much over the top. It reminds me of the kind of male fashion and accessories I have seen more and more often on recent trips to Asia: something that would look odd in Europe because it would look too delicate and playful, maybe even slightly unmanly. This pencil isn’t really at that level yet, but it is rather eccentric and likes to show off it’s golden coloured elements…

Alternatives

You can admire the MP-3003, IMHO a nicer, because silver coloured, version in Gunther’s virtual pencil case.

If the MP-4003 isn’t over the top enough for you, have a look at the Micro HEXA 10000 (again in Gunther’s virtual pencil case). It looks like a Pharao’s mechanical pencil with the grip of the Faber-Castell TK_Fine Vario.

Price and exchange rates: September 2012

Send to Kindle

Caran d’Ache’s cheaper pens

The edelweiss ((Edelweiss is not only the English, but also the Swiss spelling of Edelweiß because the ß is not used in Switzerland.)) is, as far as I know, Caran d’Ache’s cheapest full-length pen¹. Outside Switzerland the company is mainly known for their luxury writing instruments, but they also sell what I would call “office supply priced” stationery. I paid € 0.60 (~ $0.78; £0.48) each for the edelweiss pencils. Their other “office supply priced” stationery includes ballpoint pens which start at just under CHF 2 (~ $2.15; €1.65; £1.30).

Then and now

Caran d’Ache’s history goes back to 1915 when a pencil company was established that, nine years later, was bought by Arnold Schweitzer and became Caran d’Ache. The company name is linked to the Russian word for pencil – but I won’t go into more details: since you are reading pencil blogs you have probably heard this story before.

I tried to find out more about the history of the edelweiss pencil, but was unsuccessful as Caran d’Ache did not reply to my request for information. I do hope that it will be possible to find out more about the edelweiss and their other products in the future, as the company’s new boss Carole Hübscher is said to want to “communicate actively”, unlike her father who run the company before her and who only gave one interview in 30 years.

I hope Caran d’Ache will continue to make cheap stationery, but am not too optimistic about this in the long-term as their cheap products are, with a few exceptions, only available in Switzerland and even there it’s easy to find stationery shops that don’t stock Caran d’Ache pencils but those from other manufacturers. The future of Caran d’Ache and its 300 employees seems to be with high end writing instruments and boutiques like the one opened recently in Geneva.

The pencils

The edelweiss pencils are nice writers, but definitely less smooth than Staedtler Mars Lumograph pencils of the same grade (F, HB, 3B). Ghosting/graphite transfer between pages is good, comparable to other European pencils, with the edelweiss HB maybe performing a little bit better than Mars Lumograph of the same grade, but the F and 3B edelweiss performing a bit worse than the Mars Lumographs of the same grade. Personally, I’m partial to F pencils as they tend to keep their point for a long time without their marks being too light on paper, so I like to use them for writing in situations when sharpening a pencil too often would be odd, or when I write in a book or diary².

The paintwork and print are well done with only minor issues of chipped off paint near the unfinished cap. The current version has a black barcode printed on the pencil. The wood seems to be cedar and the pencils are easy to sharpen.

I couldn't resist and had to put something stereotypical Swiss in the photo

Conclusion

The edelweiss provides very good value for money – if you can get your hands on this pencil that is rather rare outside Switzerland.

Sharpened with a Deli 0635. Pencils not rotated while writing...

I bought these pencils in November 2011 from Stilus BSA for € 0.60 each. The price has not changed since then (September 2012).

Price: November 2011/September 2012

Exchange rate: September 2012

You can find a review of the edelweiss at pencil talk and a blog post at Lung sketching Scrolls.

Brand name pencils has a photo of the old version of the edelweiss.

1. The 1/2 length pencil 541.272 must be their cheapest pen.
2. When it comes to ghosting/graphite transfer the Wopex is even better than a grade F pencil.

Send to Kindle

Rotring has changed a lot since Sanford / Newell Rubbermaid took this company over in 1998. It actually changed so much that it’s difficult to believe that the generic products that are left today used to be from a company that created many great pens and pencils. The sad remains actually remind me of the transporter accident in the first Star Trek movie, where Starfleet replies to Kirk “What we got back didn’t live long – fortunately”.

Today I want to talk about one of their post-Sanford pencils, the Rotring Newton. I saw it being advertised on Japanese web sites as being Made in Germany, but I doubt that. The Rotring 600 morphed into the first Rotring Newton, sometimes referred to as the Rotring 600 Newton, which then became the pen shown in this blog post, the final version of the Rotring Newton, a pen that can look nice, depending on the colour combination chosen, but that doesn’t feel like a proper Rotring. Even though this pen is not available any more with a red ring on its barrel, it is still available – in its reincarnation as the Parker Facet. This doesn’t come as too much of a surprise because this pencil doesn’t feeling like a real Rotring and because Parker is another subsidiary of Newell Rubbermaid.

I mentioned that this pencil doesn’t feel like a proper Rotring. The main reason for this is that it is not very practical – it is actually one of the most impractical pencils I know. To advance the lead once you rotate the front barrel clockwise. If you rotate the barrel counter-clockwise you advance the lead and unlock it, i.e. the lead can be pushed back or can be pulled out. If the barrel is in this position and if you wanted to and if there’s no other lead blocking the way you could refill lead by pushing them from the tip into the pencil.

If you want to refill this pencil the proper way you have to

1. Pull the front barrel out of the sleeve section in the middle. This hexagonal sleeve section its the main design link to the Rotring 600 pencil.
2. Unscrew the cap you’ll find on the barrel. This cap come with a removable eraser.
3. Take the pencil mechanism out of the front barrel.
4. Remove the lid of the pencil mechanism
5. Refill leads.
6. Close the lid of the pencil mechanism.
7. Put the pencil mechanism back into the front barrel.
8. Screw the cap back onto the barrel.
9. Push the fron barrel back into the sleeve section.

If you thought that’s acceptable… There’s one more thing you need to do: Pray that the eraser from the second bullet point doesn’t get stuck in the sleeve section. If it does you won’t be able to get it out and the rotate-to-advance mechanism will not work any more, instead you’ll have to advance the lead by pushing the front barrel against the sleeve section – or if you want press the sleeve section while holding the front barrel.

I bought this mechanical pencil last week from eBay for around £5 (~ $8; €6.25). The price including shipping was around £7 (~ $11.20; €8.75).

Price and exchange rates: September 2012

Dave has a review of the Trio version of this pen.

Send to Kindle

Here is the link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-19506417

Send to Kindle

End of July I visited Staedtler Welt, Staedtler’s shop in the centre of Nuremberg.

Mechnical pencils

The weather on the day was great, around 35°C (~95°F), and I even passed Staedtler’s headquarters when I drove into Nuremberg. This was because my wife, I and two friends went to Herzogenaurach first, the city where Adidas and Puma are from, and when you drive form there to the centre of Nuremberg on the Bundesstraße (B road / national highway) you pass Staedtler’s headquarters, a nice surprise and something I didn’t know or expect.

Nuremberg Souvenirs

Staedtler Welt opened in November 2010 and offers a great selection of Staedtler products – obviously the best I have seen so far in a shop, but I was slightly disappointed because there were many current Staedtler products I am aware of that I couldn’t find in this shop. To be honest I was expecting to see more products, but nevertheless, the products available include some items you don’t usually see in shops, like the Mars rasor and even products that are not made any more, like the Mars stenofix.

The Mars stenofix was still being sold

Most of the space in the shop is used to display stationery, but there is also an area in the back of the shop dedicated to FIMO and related products, like FIMO accessories. In this part of the shop you can even find ovens and an area that is probably being used for FIMO workshops.

The employees were extremely friendly. One of the employees is originally from the UK and started to talk to our British friends who went there with me and my wife. The prices in the shop were similar to what you would pay on the high street or in a typical department store.

The FIMO area is on the left. You can also see an oven.

Wopex and the trend line colours are also on display in the shop. These trend line colours, many are different shades of brown, were first released about a year ago. I thought that they were originally colours exclusive to the Wopex range, but I couldn’t find any evidence for this. In any case, you can now find non-Wopex products in trend line colours, too. When they were first released the trend line products were only available in the Staedtler Welt shop, but during my trip to Germany this July I saw trend line products in department stores, too.

Most items were reasonably priced. This leather(?) mouse pad was nice, but expensive.

I would like to thank Vernon Antcliff for letting me know his camera when we were in Staedtler Welt.

Send to Kindle

I tried to get hold of an Atoma notebook for a while now. Atoma notebooks are quite common in Belgium where they were first produced in 1948. Despite their popularity in their home country they are not very well known outside Belgium, not even in the neighbouring countries. I haven’t seen them in shops in the UK or Germany and some Dutch friends I asked haven’t seen them in the Netherlands either. No wonder: 80% of more than a million notebooks produced every year stay in Belgium. The company behind Atoma did not extend their patent when it expired in the Nineties, so copies are now available from many companies: There’s Levenger’s Circa, Aurora’s Adoc, Clairefontaine’s Clairing, Elba’s Vario-Zipp, Staples’ Arc and there’s Rollabind.

Atoma

Arc

How do they work

The pages of the Atoma notebooks are being held together by plastic discs. The discs are holding the sheets of paper through special Atoma shaped ‘holes’¹. You can remove sheets from the notebooks or swap the sheets around, just like you can in a ring binder. One advantage of this system over a ring binder is that the notebook can be folded over. Another advantage is that an Atoma notebook, compared to a ring binder, is using less space because you don’t need the surrounding folder. The ring binder will also take away space even if empty². One disadvantage of the Atoma system is that you cannot label the spine of a notebook.

Atoma and Arc paper

Where to get them from

There are two shops in the UK selling Atoma notebooks: Craft & Party Direct and Manufactum, but I didn’t order my Atoma notebook from either of them. Craft & Party Direct charge a lot for shipping  and Koralatov and Iain pointed out that they had bad experiences when ordering from this company in the past. Manufactum charge too much for shipping, too, and they have a ridiculous conversion rate for their UK prices, charging UK customers 35% more than for exactly the same product from their other online shops – that is on top of their expensive prices in the first place. Manufactum’s other online shops in Europe are set up in such a way that UK customers cannot order from them – very annoying. This plus other bad experiences³ with them made me avoid Manufactum in this case. In the end I ordered my Atoma notebooks from the International School of Brussels. The notebooks were only €2.50 (~ $3.07; £1.96) each and shipping to the UK was free, so I only paid €5 for the two notebooks I ordered. The same order with Craft & Party Direct would have cost me £10.45 (~ $16.40; €13.35), five times as much. Manufactum’s Atoma notebooks are made of more expensive materials, so a direct price comparison wouldn’t make sense. I also bought one of M by Staples’ Arc notebooks in my local Staples⁴. With a price tag of £5 (~ $7.85; €6.39) it was more than twice as expensive as an Atoma notebook.

The discs: Atoma in blue, Arc in black

Atoma versus Arc

The Atoma A5 notebook is made in Belgium and came with 72 sheets (144 pages) of “ink-loving 90g/m² ledger paper”.

The A5 Arc notepad is made in China and came with 60 ruled sheets of 100g/m² paper. I like the fact that it came with a name/index sheet, but I am not keen on the white border on each page.

There is a lot of choice when it comes to covers and cover material, for both, Atoma and Arc. The cover of the Atoma notebook I bought is made of cardboard, while the Arc cover is made of polypropylene.

The paper of the Atoma notebook is rougher. Writing on it is nice and the paper absorbs the ink quickly.  The surface of the Arc paper is smoother, but ink takes longer to dry than on the Atoma paper. The ink doesn’t show through the reverse of the Arc pages as much as it does on the Atoma paper, but both papers are suitable for ink.

The rings of the Arc notebook are bigger, which means they will probably be able to hold more sheets of paper, but that also makes the notebook bigger, even if you don’t use too many sheets of paper. Aesthetically I find the Atoma ring size nicer and more suitable for the number of sheets of paper these notebooks come with.

Atoma (left) and Arc (right) paper

Conclusion

Both notepad are nice. I like the disc binding mechanism as it has several advantages over ring binders. If I had to choose between the Atoma and the Arc I’d go for the Atoma notebook. Not because it’s cheaper, but partly because I am not a big fan of polypropylene covers and prefer the Atoma’s cardboard cover. I also prefer the size and therefore look of the Atoma’s discs. Paper-wise the Arc’s paper seems to be better quality than the Atoma’s paper, but I haven’t used it long enough to be sure. My last reason for preferring the Atoma is that I prefer sheets without such a big white border.

Prices and exchange rates: August 2012.

I would like to thank Sean for the Blackfeet Indian Pencil seen on the last photo.

1. They aren’t really holes, but I’m not sure what to call them so that it’s obvious what they are.
2. By the way, the ring binder and the hole puncher were invented in 1886 by Soennecken, a company previously mentioned in this blog.
3. Delivered item not as described, security issues with their web site, …
4. I’ll refer to it as ‘Staples’ form now on, not as ‘M by Staples’

Send to Kindle

The Factis 60 RP and the Ty Peepers (unboxed)

Post offices in the UK sell all sorts of things and the things they sell are often quite reasonably priced. This can include things like cakes, hand bags or kitchen foil, but naturally there is also a selection of stationery available. In July I bought the Factis 60 RP eraser at the Cinnamon Hill post office in Walton-le-Dale for 25p (~39¢; 32c). I have seen Factis erasers in Germany, too¹. It is often not possible to identify the manufacturer of these erasers, but I assume many of them are made by Factis. I assume the company is named after one of the components needed to make natural rubber erasers.

The Staedtler 1810 KP72 and the two erasers

Another eraser I bought in July is the Ty Beanie Puzzle Eraser Peepers. When I saw a selection of the Beanie Puzzle Erasers on the MS Pride of Rotterdam I remembered Shangching’s positive review and bought one for £1.19 (~$1.87; €1.50). There were many erasers to choose from, so I picked Peepers, the duck, one of the erasers with a more complex looking surface structure.

The Factis 60 RP and the Ty Peepers taken apart

Performance-wise both erasers perform similarly well, with the more rubbery 60 RP needing a little bit less effort to eraser graphite than the Peepers. Both erasers perform worse than a good eraser, like my favourite non-dust erasers or the Mars plastic stick 528 55, but better than the typical non-name eraser or the most erasers you’ll find at the end of an eraser-tipped pencil.

Comparison of the Factis 60 RP and the Ty Peepers

You can find out more about Factis on the Eraser World web site.

I bought the Staedtler pencil with the mathematical formulas, the 1810 KP72, used in the photos and for the comparison in Nuremberg’s Staedtler Welt for 95 cents (~$1.18; 75p).

1. I would even go as far as saying that there has also been a surge in Spanish made erasers in Germany, but it could just be that the few shops I have seen just happened to stock more or display them more prominently.

Send to Kindle

I was just looking at the Belgian Atoma notebooks at Craft & Party Direct’s web site when I noticed that they sell the Rhodia ePure notebook covers for £1. The covers even come with a pad. I think I won’t order one as I alredy bought one at Meriful (paying much more). They also have other items on offer, like Rhodia pencils for 25p each.

Edit: Unfortunately Koralatov had a bad experience with this mail order. I haven’t ordered from them, so cannot comment. If you have ordered from them in the past, what was your experience?

I would like to thank Kent for the Munhwa Deojon you can see on the photo.

1. so no exchange rates this time

Send to Kindle

A Nene (Hawaiian Goose) at Mertin Mere

I found another one of the previously mentioned recycled pencils. This time in the souvenir shop of Martin Mere, a wetland nature reserve. The price was the same as what I paid at the Lancashire Science Festival: 50p (~ 78¢; 63c). Suffice to say that this one isn’t any better than the ones previously shown in this blog. As Kevin wrote in a comment, these pencils are not only not eco, but even anti-eco as they are pretty unusable when it comes to writing with them. A scorched piece of wood writes better than this pencil… This didn’t stop this pencil and the company behind it receiving several awards for it. Oh, well, at least their other, newer products look exciting, like their Saponite pencil holder.

Recycled stationery by Remarkable

I also bought another recycled item I have previously seen in different shops for quite a while now¹: a pencil case made from recycled car tyres. That’s definitely a better use for those old tyres than the horrible pencil made from recycled car tyres shown in another blog post. This pencil case is flexible, only smells a little bit like tyres and is nice to hold, even though it feels a bit wet and oily. I hope the material doesn’t get porous over time, but we’ll see. The case was £4.99 (~ $7.76; €6.33). You can get these slightly cheaper online – in some places these cases cost £4 each or less.

Two otters at Martin Mere

Prices and exchange rates: July 2012

A duck at Martin Mere

1. This pencil case must have been available in Sainsbury’s, maybe also in other supermarkets, for at least five years now.

Send to Kindle

There are pencil drawings in the Next Generation intro.

Send to Kindle

Titan, the robot, was one of the attractions

I couldn’t resist and bought two pencils made from recycled CD cases, for 50p each (~ 78¢; 62c). When I saw them I knew they were the same kind of pencils as the red pencil, made from recycled CD cases, discussed in the Battle of the eco pencils, but I was hoping these pencils had improved over the last two years.

The recycled pencils

This hope was unfortunately misplaced. The pencil is as bad as the red one I looked at two years ago. The lead is not very dark and writing with this pencils feels rubbery, but also a bit scratchy at the same time. After my bad experience last time I didn’t use my Deli pencil sharpener 0635 for this pencil. Instead I used the Dux 9207-N sharpener, which is so sharp that it can easily cope with the hard plastic that makes up the casing, but that only makes me happy about the good sharpener and doesn’t help at all with this horrible pencil. I only know one pencil that is worse: the Ticonderoga Renew HB.

Sharpened with a Dux 9207-N

Conclusion:

A fantastic science festival, but horrible souvenir pencils.

Price: June 2012

Exchange rates: July 2012

I would like to thank Lexikaliker for the fantastic DUX 9207-N sharpener that has been used to sharpen the pencil for the photo.

Send to Kindle

East…West…Everywhere wrote a blog post about the green version, available in the USA, that comes with Staedtler-made eraser caps. These eraser caps are basically a white version of the eraser caps that are quite common in North-America².

Price: April 2012
Exchange rates: June 2012

1. plus 90p shipping
2. Some pencils in North America come with these erasers attached to them, the Magic Writer for example.  You can also spot them fairly often in American TV shows, e.g. in Two And A Half Men.

Send to Kindle

Hi Matthias/readers:- today after a lot of searching through Japanese sites, I received the above sharpener from a store (AT-N) on rakuten.com (English version here). The store in this link, I’m showing because it has a close up of the rotary unit, showing the stamping “CARL” and “MADE IN JAPAN”. The standard Carl Angel-5 sharpener is now made in China. The following comments may be useful:

Design Differences to the standard CARL ANGEL-5:
1. Rubber padded pencil grippers
2. Chrome handles (pincers) in place of plastic pincers.
3. Crank handle has a nicer triangular plastic holding part in place of the ribbed plastic handle on the CA-5.
4. The milled rotary unit is stamped “CARL”, “MADE IN JAPAN”.

Usage Differences: – Now comes the disappointing part:
The rotary unit is not the same as the original CARL ANGEL – the point it produces is similar to the Mitsubishi KH-20, a somewhat dull point, and shorter, fatter cone – although I gather this is more preferred by “writers”. As I use this sharpener for sketching/drawing in a small A6 size sketchbook, my needs are for a “as sharp as reasonably possible” point. Even with the standard CARL ANGEL-5 I invariably touch up the point to serious needle sharpness with a OLFA cutting knife.

There was, however, a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow….but it means owning the two sharpeners – the Original and the Premium.
Solution:
I swapped the rotary unit including the crank handles ( the premium crank handle fits the standard Carl, but unfortunately the standard Carl crank handle doesn’t fit the Premium rotary unit – weird, I know) between each sharpener…(twenty seconds) and now I have my perfect (for me) sharpener, albeit using the “cheaper Chinese” but “better” rotary mechanism from the Standard Carl Angel-5. Now I can sharpen (and already have) my premium pencils in a truly “premium” sharpener, giving me what I always wanted:
- the long cone and sharp point of the standard Carl Angel-5 AND just as importantly to me
- rubber padded pencil grippers to keep the pencil surface pristine… very necessary when sketching, where visual distractions can be a problem to the creative process.
FC 9000, Staedtler Mars, Palomino Blackwing 602, and some vintage American drawing pencils now look much prettier when I’m sketching.

The important bits:
I paid net Y2000 (they deduct Japanese tax) and Y1860 shipping EMS. Total cost – just over AUD50.00. The process of ordering on Rakuten is quite simple and there is no need to become a member. I mucked up my credit card expiry and Rakuten admin simply cancelled the transaction with the store (AT-N) – I received a cancellation email, and I placed a new order without problem. The English translations of the numerous emails (shipping, cancellation, order, new order, etc) are quite amusing, but sufficient to get the message across.

Matthias and fellow readers, I hope this is of some help.

Send to Kindle

Top to bottom: Malaysia, Great Britain, Germany

In a previous blog post I compared three Staedtler tradition 110 pencils, made in three different factories – the one in Wales, the one in Australia and the one in Germany. Today I want to look at three different Staedtler Noris 120 pencils – made in Malaysia, Wales and Germany. I bought a dozen of the Malaysian Noris in March 2010 for £2.24 (~ $3.40; €2.78) from a Malaysian seller on eBay.

Noris presharpened, top to bottom: Malaysia, Great Britain, Germany

The only pencil from this comparison that is still in production is the Nuremberg-made Noris. The factory in Malaysia closed down two years ago and the factory in Wales closed down four years ago. You can still find Welsh-made pencils in the UK, but there are very few shops left that still have stock. I am not sure about the situation in Malaysia, but I assume most of the Malaysian Noris are also sold by now. In a previous blog post I mentioned that 2B is the most common pencil grade in Malaysia. It is so popular in Malaysia that the Malaysian Noris is only available in 2B, therefore I’ll compare it with the Welsh and German Noris in 2B.

Different caps - Top to bottom: Malaysian 2B, Welsh 2B, Welsh B, German 2B

The colour of the Noris cap normally indicates the pencil grade. The HB Noris has a red cap. Strangely enough the cap colour is not consistent. The older Welsh and Malaysian 2B Noris have black caps, while the newer German Noris, bought in April 2012 at Müller in Volkach, Germany for €0.59 (~ $0.73; £0.47), has an orange cap, similar, but a slightly lighter in colour than the orange cap of a Welsh Noris B.

Noris sharpener (511 004) and two wedge sharpeners (510 10 and 510 50)

Which eraser could be most suitable to sharpen a Noris? None other than the Staedtler Noris sharpener, of course. Bought at Currys / PC World in Preston, when they tried to get rid of their stationery in December 2011 this sharpener was part of a ‘study set’ that came with 2 Noris HB, one Staedtler Mars plastic eraser and the Staedtler Noris sharpener for £1.17 (~ $1.79; €1.45). The blister pack says “Made in Germany”, but the wedge sharpener in the Noris sharpener is made in China, or at least the the metal body of the sharpener inside is. I wonder why Staedtler put a metal sharpener in there. Most people probably wouldn’t notice and Staedtler sells plastic sharpeners with the same form factor that could have been used in the Noris sharpener to keep the price down…

The W wedge sharpener in the Noris sharpener

The bottom of the metal sharpener 510 10 in the Noris sharpener features a ‘W’, which indicates that this sharpener is one of Staedtler’s newer sharpeners, optimised for use with the Wopex. It has a sharpening angle of 23°. The thickness of the shavings produced by the Wopex-optimised sharpener is the same as the one by the older model, usually just under 0.3 mm. I assume the difference is in the way the blade has been sharpened.

The older 510 10 wedge sharpener

I used a notepad from Brunnen¹ to compare the different leads in terms of smoothness, reflectiveness, darkness, erasability, graphite transfer to another page and how long they keep the point. As far as I can tell the three different Noris perform very similar. The graphite from the Malaysian Noris might transfer a bit easier to another page, e.g. in a diary, but it’s only every so slightly worse than the other two Noris pencils.

No bar code on the Malaysian Noris

In terms of exterior appearance the Welsh and German Noris are nearly on par, with the paint on the Noris from Nuremberg being slightly more even. The paint of the Malaysian Noris is however much worse, but still better than the no name or own brand pencils you usually get in super markets. The Welsh Noris has a diameter of 7mm, which is slightly more than the 6.9mm the Malaysian and German pencils have.

For me the Noris is THE typical pencil. Previous blog posts showed the Noris being featured on TV. Today I want to add two more screen shots. One from Episodes, where Sean Lincoln (played by Stephen Mangan² ) is using a Stadtler Noris in the USA, even though it isn’t officially on sale in the USA. The character must have brought it from the UK, the desk is full of Noris pencils ..or, in the real world, this scene might have been filmed in the UK.

Episodes (Image © Hat Trick)

The other screen shot is from episode 705 “Liebeswirren” of German/Austrian/Swiss crime TV series Tatort. One of the actors in this episode from Munich was Christoph Waltz of Inglourious Basterds fame.

Tatort (Image © Bayerischer Rundfunk)

Exchange rates: June 2012.

I believe that the use of the following images falls under “fair dealing” as described by the UK Copyright service:

• The screen shot of Stephen Mangan and the Staedtler Noris, taken from episode three of the second season of the TV series Episodes
• The screen shot of Udo Wachtveitl and the Staedtler Nori, taken from the Tatort #705  Liebeswirren

1. bought in August 2011 at McPaper in Schweinfurt, Germany for €1.19 (~ $1.46; £0.96)
2. …who recently, as Dirk Gently, used a Faber-Castell Grip 2001

Send to Kindle

Nick Hewer (Image © BBC)

Today an interesting article appeared on the BBC News web site: “Why are fountain pen sales rising?“. You might remember that Nick Hewer from the Apprentice is using Lamy fountain pens (see my blog post from last summer where you can see him using a Lamy Joy). He is being mentioned, too, and there are also links to other fountain pen related articles.

Nick Hewer (Image © BBC)

The photos of Nick Hewer using a Lamy Safari have been taken from series 8 episode 2 and 6 of The Apprentice UK. I believe that the use of these images falls under “fair dealing” as described by the UK Copyright service.

Send to Kindle

The manufacturers of both erasers like to emphasise that the erasers are phthalate-free. A while ago plasticisers were a big topic in the news in Germany. I think there might have been a scandal regarding plasticisers in toys – or maybe this started another way. Both erasers were €0.79 (~ $1; £0.63).

Prices: April 2012

Exchange rates: May 2012

Send to Kindle

Screenshot taken from The Two Guys From Andromeda SpaceVenture Prototype (Image © Q42)

Two Guys From Andromeda

One of my favourite type of computer games were always adventure games. Even though I knew about the adventure games from Sierra On-Line, I played the games from Lucasfilm Games much earlier, as I didn’t have a 16-bit machine at the time¹. When finally did have a 16-bit machine (an Amiga) I played all their games I could get my hands on, including the remakes – and I then did the same again when I switched to a PC (which was quite late, in 1996).

The Two Guys From Andromeda, the creators of the Space Quest series, recently started a Kickstarter project and the first prototype they released shows the Staedtler Mars technico (see picture) next to a sheet of paper within which the protoype is running. Nice to know that they, or someone from Q42, is using this lead holder.

Print Ad of the Week

Speaking of Staedtler, an advertising magazine made one of Staedtler’s ads their “Print Ad of the Week” this week. Here’s a link where you can see the photos as part of a critical article (in German). The criticism is that Leo Burnett, Hong Kong, who is behind this ad copied the idea from Dalton M. Ghetti. There has also been a reply to the criticism (in English) where you can see both,  Ghetti’s and Burnett’s, pencils.

You can find a review of the Staedtler Mars technico at Lung Sketching Scrolls and some nice, vintage technico photos at Lexikaliker.

The screenshot of the Staedtler Mars technico has been taken from the The Two Guys From Andromeda SpaceVenture Prototype. I believe that the use of this image falls under “fair dealing” as described by the UK Copyright service.

1. There were of course also other companies making great adventure games, e.g. ICOM, Infogrames, Software 2000, …

Send to Kindle

Today I want to show you KUM’s Correc-Combi, a sharpener in an eraser case, which I bought this April for €2.79 (~$3.65; £2.25) in Müller in Volkach, Germany.

KUM's Correc-Combi opened

The eraser

The blade of the sharpener is fixed to a plastic body which in turn is encase by (quite a large) eraser. I am sure it will take quite a long time to use this eraser up.

KUM's Correc-Combi and Staedtler's norica

The sharpener

The performance of the sharpener is quite good, certainly much better than the performance of KUM’s 400-1K. The sharpener produces thin shavings with an average thickness of 0.2 mm¹.

KUM's Correc-Combi and Staedtler's norica

I also saw a set square from Globus by KUM for 49c (~ 65¢; 40p) in the same shop and couldn’t resist buying it. You might remember the list of sharpening angles of the different sharpeners in the KUM 400-1K blog post. When I figured these angles out, two years ago, I didn’t have a set square – so this time figuring the angle out was much easier. With about 22° the sharpening angle of the KUM Correc-Combi is very similar to the sharpening angle of Möbius+Ruppert’s grenade.

Globus by KUM's set square

Conclusion

A very good sharpener/eraser combination. The lid fits well, despite being a ‘click in’ lid (no screw thread) . The performance of the eraser is similar to that of KUM’s Correc Stick. It could be better, but is by no means bad. The performance of the sharpener is quite good and overall this eraser/sharpener combo offers very good value for money.

KUM's Correc Stick, KUM's Correc-Combi and Staedtler's norica

Prices: April 2012
Exchange rates: May 2012

I would like to thank Hen Chung from RAH for the Staedtler norica 132 46 HB you can see on the photos. It’s the less purple version with blind stamped “SRP”².

The Correc-Combi is part of KUM’s Blue Ocean series. You can read a review of KUM’s Blue Ocean pencil set at pencil talk. You can also read a review of Staedtler’s norica at pencil talk.

In a previous blog post I wrote about Faber-Castell’s sharpener-eraser pen.

1. I recently bought a calliper in Lidl, so I thought the thickness of the shavings would be a good thing to measure, especially since Lexikaliker mentions the thickness of shavings in his blog.
2. My more purple version is blind stamped “SRL”.

Send to Kindle

You might remember my blog post about the Carrefour Bloc-notes. Today I want to talk about another Rhodia-style notepad, the Oxford Bloc¹. I bought this notepad for €1.05 (~ $1.39; £0.85) at J. A. Hofmann Nachfolger in Würzburg, Germany. I haven’t seen it in any other brick and mortar shop yet, but I have seen several online shops that sell this notepad.

The company

Despite the British-sounding name Oxford belongs to Groupe Hamelin, a French manufacturer of paper and stationery with roots that go back to 1864 and with plants in nine countries.

Rhodia Oxford Carrefour

Just like the Rhodia and the Carrefour notepads this notepad is made in France and just like the Rhodia and the Carrfour notepad, the Oxford notepad is held together by a staple, too, and features a orange fold-around cover. The notepad is available in the same common formats – the one on the photo is the 74 x 105mm version.

The paper

The paper feels less yellow and more purple than the Rhodia paper and less grey than the Carrefour paper. The grid printed on the paper is similar to the one on Rhodia paper, much less blurry than the Carrefour grid. The paper feels very smooth – no wonder the name of the paper has satiné in it.

It is a fantastic paper for fountain pens and ink, the inks I tried don’t show through on the reverse side at all, even though one of the nibs was rather wet.  For pencils it is a different matter though. The paper is so smooth that the graphite from the point of the pencil doesn’t seem to want to stick to it as much as on most other paper. As a result the line from the pencil feels slightly lighter than on other paper. Lines also feel lighter than on the previously discussed Oxford Black n’ Red polynote notepad. Both Oxford products use Optik Paper, but the Black n’ Red’s paper has a density of 90 g/m², compared to the orange notepad’s 80 g/m². Just as with the Black n’ Red it is also easy to erase graphite from the Rhodia-style notepad’s paper, but there is a chance that you will still be able to see the indentation where the pencil line used to be.

Price and exchange rates: April 2012

As mentioned in the Black n’ Red blog post Hamelin / Oxford doesn’t react to query sent through their web site’s “Contact Us” form, therefore I’m unable to provide more information about the Optik Paper used.

1. I’m not sure what the official name is. There is a similar products, the Bloc Idéa, which seems to have the same format and the same 80g satiné extra blanc Optik Paper, but the cover of the Bloc Idéa is different

Send to Kindle

You can find more information at nationalstationeryday.com or on Twitter.

Happy National Stationery Day everyone!

Send to Kindle

In the evening my mother called me because pencils were featured on prime time telly…

Rette die Million! (Image © Endemol/ZDF)

In the German version of The Million Pound Drop Live, called Rette die Million!, candidates were asked for another name of juniperus virginiana (Virginische Wacholder). The correct answer was pencil cedar (Bleistiftzeder). The candidates lost more than half of their money on this question.

Great to see something pencil related on prime time telly!

…taking photos of TV shows is so much better on my mother’s flat screen compared to our CRT at home².

More about juniperus virginiana in the blog post Schwanberg and the Pencil Cedar.

The photo of the pencil has been taken from the ZDF TV show ‘Rette die Million!’. I believe that the use of this image falls under “fair dealing” as described by the UK Copyright service.

1. AE: trunk (just in case you thought of shoes…)
2. Just look at the ‘How I Met Your Mother’ photos I took from the CRT.

Send to Kindle

Meriful is quite different to the other shops you’ll find on Fuzhou Road. It is neither a cheap shop selling mainly Chinese-made stationery, nor is it one of those boutique-like shops selling a mix of “cute stuff” and designed, overpriced stationery of questionable quality. Instead you’ll find many items you might find in the online shops of the West, like JetPens, Cult Pens, bureauDIRECT or the less well known Deskstore.

Erasers...

Even though the shop is not too big you will find an incredible choice of exciting items. Just looking at the erasers – there must have been more than 100 different ones. Most items in the shop are imported from Asia, but you will also find European brands, like Rhodia (I bought the orange pad cover in Meriful) or Faber-Castell.

Midori Traveler's Notebooks

Meriful sells expensive designer calculators from Canon, but also affordable mechanical pencils from Redcircle (which are essentially fake Rotring pencils) as well as absolutely stunning handmade desk accessories from China (so beautiful, but so expensive).

Stationery by Carl

Imported items were usually about 50% more expensive than in their country of origin, but that isn’t too expensive, I thought. Other shops have similar mark-ups for imported stationery.

Carl Decorer Tape Dispenser

Their selection of items by Carl was amazing. The Decorer desk set (¥158, ~ $25 ; £15.60; €18.80) was unfortunately not available in the colour we liked, so my wife bought one of the Carl Decorer tape dispenser by itself, not as a set. It doesn’t feel as solid as it looks and it is a bit odd that the different materials have different shades of green, but overall it is a very nice tape dispenser.

Some of the items I bought in Meriful. The nice leather pen case is made in Korea.

Staff are very friendly and you can even negotiate the price if you find any issue with the products (previously opened, etc). When I asked for a new Rhodia pad cover from their stock they offered me a discount because they didn’t have any unopened ones left.

Price: December 2011

Exchange rates: March 2012

Send to Kindle

There are the functional ones, selling stationery and other office supplies. Customers seem to be companies, but you’ll also find pupils there.

There are the fashionable ones. You’ll find them near universities. They do have some normal stationery, but seem to focus on cute stationery. They also sell make-up and girly things, too. The fashionable stationery is not always of high quality.

…and then there are the overpriced stationery shops. They are often located in shopping centres. They sell all sorts of expensive stuff. To be fair, the price is not only the shops fault. Many items, even though they have been made in China, have been reimported from Japan or Korea. I assume that even in Japan or Korea they are not cheap in the first place and someone has to pay for (re-)importing small numbers of them, which are probably not very economical. You can often find other items in these shops, like Monchhichis or iPhone docking stations.

You can see the Delfonics range behind the theft detector pedestal

One example of this kind of shop is “Queen’s Market – selected by Tokyo” in the new Shanghai Hongkou Dragon Dream Shopping Centre. Amongst other items they are selling Delfonics‘ Rollbahn range, Japanese stationery with German text printed on that sounds very much like it’s coming straight out of a Kraftwerk song.

These kind of shops often don’t survive very long. One reason might be that there are similar shops near the shopping centres which pay less rent and sell similar items cheaper – often copies or similar no-name products.

In the last five years or so the number of these overpriced stationery shops has gone up steadily.

I would like to thank Hui Liu for telling me about this new shopping centre in Hongkou. I would have not gone there otherwise.

Send to Kindle

http://youtu.be/1miKKgnMGoE

1. …well actually, it’s a solid graphite pencil vs. a pinhole camera

Send to Kindle

The three competing black pencils, here in a Dairy Queen calendar pencil stand.

OK, we’ve got the black version of the Chung Hwa 6903 and the M&G AWP34601. Chung Hwa and M&G are both from Shanghai. Just South of Shanghai is Zhejiang province, represented by the Zibom P-6000 pencil.

Chung Hwa 6903

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post about the, in my opinion, better looking brown version of the Chung Hwa 6903. The black version is very similar. The pencil is still round, but painted black and the cap at the end is black, too, not white. I paid ¥9.9 (~ £1; $1.55; €1.20) for a dozen.

The Chung Hwa 6903

Zibom P-6000

Then we’ve got the hexagonal Zibom P-6000. It comes with an eraser and has the packaging I like most of these three pencils. It also comes with a sharpener, but the pencils have an unfinished end. I paid ¥7.5 (~ 75p; $1.20; 90c) for a dozen.

The Zibom P-6000

M&G AWP34601

The last pencil in this blog post is the hexagonal M&G AWP34601. This pencil is certainly the winner is this group when it comes to the coolest model number. I paid ¥9.9 (~ £1; $1.55; €1.20) for a dozen.

The M&G AWP34601

…and the winner is:

My personal favourite is the M&G AWP34601, the only 2B pencil in this comparison¹. It’s the winner …not because of the cool model number, which sounds like a model number for some sort of high tech robot, but because the wood is not red. If anything, the AWP34601′s wood is too yellow, but I still prefer that to red wood. The runner up is the Zibom P-6000, the packaging is great, it is the cheapest in this comparison and comes with a free sharpener. The worst pencil is the Chung Hwa 6903. Yes, I know, this must be difficult to believe, as my blog post about the brown version was quite positive – but unlike the brown version this black version is just not so nice. Plus, I prefer hexagonal pencils. Lead-wise the AWP34601 is smoothest, it is a 2B after all. The P-6000 seems scratchier than the 6903. Wood-wise the 6903 has the hardest wood, so hard in fact that the auto-stop mechanism of some desktop sharpeners will not engage.

Congratulations M&G AWP34601.

The winner: The M&G AWP34601 2B

Prices: December 2011

Exchange rates: March 2012

The Dairy Queen calendar pencil stand was ¥10 (~ £1; $1.60; €1.20). It comes with twelve walls for twelve months and three “bottoms”. Bureau Direct started selling a similar pencil stand (maybe a but late, now that it’s already March), unfortunately it is quite a bit more expensive: £9.95 (~ $15.60; €11.95).

Unfortunately I forgot to open the lens’ aperture on the photo where Renold, the robot, presents the winner.  Now the out of focus highlights are not round and a bit distracting..

1. The other two pencils are HB.

Send to Kindle

Dirk Gently and the Grip 2001 (Image © ITV Studios / BBC Cymru Wales)

The TV series seems to be loosely based on the book, with different episodes picking up different plots from Douglas Adams’ book (at least that’s the impression I have so far, after watching the pilot and episode 1. Future episodes might be different).

If you want to know more about Faber-Castell’s Grip 2001 pencils have a look at pencil talk’s review. There’s also another review at Pencil Revolution.

Update: 11 March 2012: Today would have been Douglas Adams’ 60th birthday.

The photo of the pencil has been taken from episode 1 of the Dirk Gently TV series. I believe that the use of this image falls under “fair dealing” as described by the UK Copyright service.

1. Episode 1, I thought, was not as good as the pilot from 2010

Send to Kindle

You can listen to this programme on the BBC iPlayer.

Send to Kindle

They will continue to trade at plattspens.co.uk and I wish them the best of luck for their future.

Send to Kindle

Lidl is currently selling a desktop pencil sharpener for £3.49 (~ $5.50; €4.30). I don’t know whether this sharpener has rubber grips or not.

WHSmith reduced the price for some of their edding products even further and many WHSmith stores sell edding’s push-button marker for 49p (~ 77¢; 59c)

Prices and exchange rates: February 2012

Send to Kindle

Since I’ve been very happy with the 1G carnets and use them regularly at work I asked Arnie, the man behind Banditapple, whether I can order a few of the 2G carnets directly from him as he does not have an online shop yet. To cut a long story short, in the end he send me four of the new notebooks and I only had to pay the postage (€5, ~$6.65; £4.20). The package he sent to me last year only took a few days to arrive, but unfortunately it wasn’t treated very well by one of the postal services involved. Luckily, after storing the maltreated 2G carnets under some heavy books, they were (nearly) back in shape. I specifically asked for the tablet sized notebooks as I find this to be the most suitable size for daily use, at least for my purposes.

The peewee sized notebooks (9×14 cm) are ₩2500 each (~£1.40; $2.20; €1.70).

The tabled sized notebooks (13×12 cm) are ₩4000 each (~£2.30; $3.60; €2.70).

CdA edelweiss, Stabile LeftRight, Staedtler Wopex, M&G AMP33701 and Pelikan Souverän 605 on a 2G carnet

The new notebooks are still sewn, not stapled and the cover is still made from coloured paper, something I like very much as this enables me to label the notebooks using a white pencil¹. The paper quality of the 2G carnets is possibly even better than the quality of the previous generation. It copes very well with ink and I cannot think of a paper that is better in terms of erasing graphite without leaving traces.

1G Hanoi Red (used) and the new 2G colours

Conclusion

A great, but difficult to get notebook.

Prices and exchange rates: February 2012.

Paperandco, an online shop from Paris still has a few of the 1G carnets in Hanoi Red and Saigon Black in stock.

The official Banditapple website and blog can be found here.

This previous Bleistift blog post has more information about the 1G carnets.

You can find a review of the 2G carnets at Okami Whatever.

I would like to thank Arnie Kim for the Banditapple 2G carnets.

1. Like the Faber-Castell Goldfaber Heft&Tafel 1133 or the Eberhard Faber 1410 in white.

Send to Kindle

Nevertheless, it’s still the inspiration for Deli’s pencil sharpener 0668.

The left one prefers Kodak Ektar, while the right one’s favourite food are Mars Lumographs.

Send to Kindle

Shanghai culture commercial building

The Stabilo LeftRight

One of the things I bought in the Shanghai culture commercial building, on New Year’s Eve, was Stabilo’s LeftRight. Officially referred to as a retractable pencil this is a leadholder for 2mm leads.

I paid  ¥18 (~ £1.80; $2.90; €2.20) for this set which includes the leadholder, a very nice eraser, a lead sharpener – very nice, too, and a container with four 2mm leads, supposedly 2H. I wouldn’t call these 2H. For me they are definitely softer than H B. As we know there is no standard to say what is HB, what is 2B, etc.,  but even in Asia, where leads with the same grade are generally much softer than in the West, most manufacturers wouldn’t label the leads that come with the LeftRight as 2H. Back to the set: all items that come as part of the set are blue and triangular. There is also a pink set available and as far as I know both, the right-handed and the left-handed version, are available in both colours. The items from the set do look quite nice. In my eye, the worst looking of these items is actually the leadholder, just because it looks a bit plasticy.

The problem

The left-handed and right-handed version of this leadholder come with a “ergonomic triangular thumb pointer grip for correct gripping”. Unfortunately there is a problem with this pen: because of the indentations there is only one comfortable position for holding this pencil. That’s intended. The (probably) unintended consequence is that the 2mm lead will always be used on the same side and will get too wide too soon which means that it will need sharpening too often – at least when you use the LeftRight for writing Western text. The situation might be different if you draw or if you write Asian character and hold the leadholder vertically like a brush. Rotating the pencil, to compensate for the one-sided use, is not really comfortable and rotating the leadholder mechanism in the pencil is only possible of you remove the triangular cap.

The Stabilo LeftRight on a Seagull notebook

Conclusion

The original idea for this leadholder might have been good, but the execution is less than exciting. I would not be surprised if a ballpoint pen user came up with the ergonic grip series idea – which I guess works well on the LeftRight ballpoint pen. It is really a shame because all the items that come with the Pencil set look quite good together. You really want to use this pencil, but it has such an off-putting property… I use it… …nevertheless …at least for now. All in all still not a bad buy as value for money is excellent, at least if you get it for a good price. The LeftRight seems to be for sale in very few countries¹. I am not sure whether Stabilo wants to start selling it in more countries or whether they have realised that something is not right therefore and don’t introduce the leadholder in more markets.

Presharpened vs. sharpener-sharpened

Price: December 2011

Exchange rates: February 2012

You can find information about the LeftRight on Stabilo’s Malaysia page.

There’s also a commercial for the LeftRight.

1. including China, Malaysia and Russia

Send to Kindle

Another great video from this web site: hot metal typesetting video tutorial …even featuring a pencil as a supporting actor.

Send to Kindle

You might remember Keyroad, a stationery shop on Shanghai’s FuZhou road, from the blog post about the Simbalion Graphic Pencils or from the blog post about the Deli pencil sharpener 0635. How could I not go there again this year… This time I was actually more excited by two other shops on FuZhou road, but I will not go into more detail now and will write more about them another time.

M&G

Back to Keyroad. I bought several packs of pencils, including a few different types of wooden pencils made by M&G, a stationery manufacturer from Shanghai which I only knew as a manufacturer of mechanical pencils and other stationery, but whose wooden pencils I have either never seen or I must have forgotten about.

Chung Hwa 6903

The best looking pencil in the shop was, however, the Chung Hwa 6903. A round, brown pencil with a white-painted cap and golden lettering. What a magnificent looking pencil, at least in my (subjective) opinion. I am not really a fan of round pencils and prefer hexagonal pencils, probably because I don’t have to write using pencils for six hours in one go… Nevertheless, the elegant look of this pencil, the great combination of colours used, the lettering and, not so common for a Chinese pencil, the painted cap made this pencil the star of the shelf.

Quality

There was some disappointment when I sharpened the first 6903 a few days later, the cheapish looking red wood does take some of the magic of the pencil away. There are also some gold flecks on the pencil body near the lettering and the white cap could have been painted a bit better. The 6903 seems to have a slightly larger diameter than some other round pencils, like the Faber-Castell 9008, but compared to the 9008 the difference is less than 1mm.

Conclusion

Keeping in mind that this is not an expensive pencil, I paid ¥9.9 (~ £1; $1.55; €1.25) for a dozen, the 6903 provides excellent value for money. The graphite transfer between pages for text written with a 6903 HB is similar to the transfer that is occuring with a Staedtler Mars Lumograph HB, definitely worse than a Staedtler Wopex HB and definitely better than a Tombow Mono 100 HB. If you have a chance to get the Chung Hwa 6903 for a good price you should definitely give it a go.

I am quite happy with these pencils, but wish there was a better version, made of cedar wood, or at least something not so red. I’d be more than happy to pay extra for the better material.

Price: December 2011

Exchange rates: January 2012

The Chung Hwa Drawing Pencil 101 has been reviewed in a previous blog post.

Send to Kindle

Price and exchange rates: January 2012

Send to Kindle

The contender that took over some restaurant tables and cashier desks was the Chung Hwa 6151, previously reviewed at pencil talk. The fact that the 6151 comes with an eraser must make it more desirable in many situations – like the one on the photo, where it is used by patrons to order dim sum by marking the desired types and quantities on a menu.

Send to Kindle

Until then just two things I want to mention:

• This blog is now two years old. I’m quite happy about this and hope that next year there’ll be many more blog posts. There are so many ideas I want to convert to blog posts… Some of them haven been in my hear for more than a year…
• For anyone living in the UK: I noticed that Currys (at least in one of our Currys / PC World stores) started selling stationery. The items they sell are ridiculously cheap, e.g. Helix rulers for 7 pence (~ 11¢; 8c) or Stabilo GREENcolors sets, 12 FSC certified coloured pencils, for 80 pence (~ $1.26; 94c) – plus many more items.

Prices and exchange rates: November 2011

Send to Kindle

Introduction

Out with the old, in with the new.

After I got rid of my old Brunnen Kompagnon A7 notebook last month I was looking for a new alternative. If you read the Kompagnon blog post you might remember that I had three favourites (Samsonite, Staufen and X17).  More alternatives were suggested in the comments to the blog post, but the suggested notebooks were unfortunately bigger than A7 and therefore too big for my shirt pocket, so I ruled them out.

The X17

In the end I decided to get the X17 and am quite happy with it so far. I picked the Mode or ModeSkin version. X17 described the Mode version as being made from bonded/regenerated leather. One of the names this material is known by in Germany is Lefa (Lederfaserstoff – leather fibre). It is a very nice material and this version of the X17 notebook is also available in A7 size for two inlay booklets. Let me explain how it works with the booklets: the paper of the X17 isn’t glued to the cover, but is instead removable. You can buy covers, made form different materials, that can hold between two and four booklets. There is also a version for one booklet to be released soon. Booklets are available plain, ruled, squared, as a calendar plus there are a few rather unusual versions, too, e.g. for pilgrims or for teachers. I ordered 2 ruled and two squared inlay booklets. The squared version did, however, surprise me. While squared paper squares in most parts of Europe¹ have sides of 5 mm length the X17 has sides of 2.5 mm length. To my surprise each page has a white border, too. I definitely would have preferred “standard” squared paper, but can live with this paper.

Overall I am quite happy with the X17 notebook.

Advantages

• The reason why I got rid of my old notebook was that after a few years the plastic of the cover got old, had some tears and these tears had sharp edges which damaged my shirt pockets. The Lefa material of my new notebook feels very pocket friendly and I cannot imagine it ever developing any sharp edges if old, torn or damaged.
• All the different parts of this notebook can be bought individually, so if any part ever gets damaged it can be replaced
• I just mentioned that all parts can be bought individually, this means that the inlay booklets can be replaced. I use one for todo lists etc. and replace it if full, while the other booklet gets used for permanent information I would like to keep in the notebook.
• The pages in the booklets are perforated which makes it easy to rip them out if needed, e.g. to write information down for someone or if you want to leave a note somewhere. Depending on how a traditional notebook is bound, ripping a page is not a good idea. It can make other pages become loose or fall out, too. This was the case with my previous Kompagnon notebook.
• 

Disadvantages

• Unlike many other notebooks the X17 does not have a pocket in the back. This makes it difficult to store little items like receipts. In my old notebook I used the back pocket to keep bits of paper to use as notes. Since I can remove the perforated pages now I do not really have a need for the pocket any more, but it would be nice, just in case.
• The way the rubber band (called elastiX) works means that the notebook is not closed as firmly as a moleskin-type notebook. In my shirt pocket the end of the Faber-Castell Perfect Pencil sometimes ends up in the notebook, bending the pages slightly.
• Because I bought the components for my X17 individually, not as a set, I had to assemble everything myself. This is not a problem in itself, but there were no instructions how to knot the elastiX rubber bands together. I could not find any instructions on the web site, either. I also didn’t realise the X17 comes without a ribbon bookmark – it needs to be ordered separately (I could have probably found out by spending more time on the X17 web site).

Conclusion

Including shipping I paid €24.50 (~ $33.70; £21) for the two booklet version of the X17, this price includes the elastiX rubber bands, and four booklets. Not cheap, but not too expensive either, keeping in mind that the X17 feels very well made. I am sure I will be able to use it for many years to come, hopefully longer than than the Brunnen Kompagnon.

Price: October 2011

Exchange rates: November 2011

1. in Finland squares with 7mm sides are common

Send to Kindle

Signed by Carl Barks in spring 1997 in his home in Grants Pass (Oregon)

Carl Barks, born in 1901 in Oregon, invented Duckburg, Scrooge McDuck and many other characters from the Duck-universe. Disney comics don’t seem to be very popular in North America any more, where they have been replaced by superhero comics long ago. Unfortunately, Disney comics are not popular in the UK either, but in Continental Europe it’s an entirely different story. More or less every adult is familiar with the characters invented by Carl Barks. In Finland the Mickey Mouse Magazine is² the best selling weekly publication – and in the Scandinavian countries and in Germany Donaldists research all things Barks-related. His stories are timeless and fantastic treasures.

1. This is a pure guess. If you know how many milli-, micro- or nanograms of graphite are in a line of graphite of a certain width and length on paper, please let me know.
2. …or at least was, this might have changed since I read this a few years ago…

Send to Kindle

nbf packaging, design: bartsch design gmbh

These days it is quite common for Western companies to move manufacturing to China. The China First Pencil Company, manufacturers of the Chung Hwa pencil, tried the opposite. In the late 1990s they opened a pencil factory in the German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the Norddeutsche Bleistiftfabrik (nbf) – the Northern German Pencil Factory. They planned to produce up to 100 million pencils each year in this factory. At the time it was the first direct Chinese investment in Europe, something not so uncommon any more today.

Why did the China First Pencil Company do this? The idea was to sell pencils “Made in Germany” in Europe, maybe even to export them to the USA. To keep prices down¹ the pencils were made in China using lime wood². The nbf factory only had to paint the pencils (using imported, Shanghainese machines) that were sent unpainted from the factory in China. The design of the pencils was done in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern by bartsch design, a company that won prestigious awards for wind turbine design.

Only six months  and more than 10 million Deutschmarks in subsidies and loans later it was all over. Rules did not allow “Made in Germany” to be printed on the pencils because they were only painted in Germany …and when they did not sell, not even after the price was reduced, China First Pencil Company and their partners, a Shanghai-based and a HongKong-based investor, had enough and their subsidiary, the nbf, filed for bankruptcy.

These pencils might have had a chance, I guess it didn’t work out, either because the quality wasn’t good enough³ or because nbf just wasn’t an established name. The missing “Made in Germany” could not have been the only reason why nbf failed. Look at other companies: Since Lyra has been taken over by Fila, the Italian company that owns Dixon, most of their pencils are made in China. That doesn’t stop them from printing “Germany” (not “Made in Germany” though) on their pencils. Leica can write “Made in Germany” on their M9 cameras, even though they only pair the camera body and electronics they get from Portugal with Kodak’s sensor made in Rochester, New York, and do some testing. Maybe cutting the sandwich in the nbf factory would have been enough to be able to label the pencils “Made in Germany”…

nbf pencils, design: bartsch design gmbh

Hourly wages and exchange rates: 1997

I would like to thank Mr Bartsch and Mr Rug from bartsch design for allowing me to show the computer-generated images of the pencil and packaging designs as part of this blog post.

1. Hourly wages at the time and in that part of Germany were nearly 12 DM per hour, at 1997′s exchange rate that was about $6.90 / £4.20. The USA’s minimum wage at the time was $5.15 and the UK’s minimum wage at the time was £3.60.
2. American English: Linden wood
3. I have never seen any of the pencils, so cannot comment whether that was the case. I assume that a few months were enough time for nbf to paint a few pencils – so there should be a few of them around. The question is how they were painted, i.e. which design was used, and where they were sold. I wouldn’t be surprised if they ended up in variety stores. If nbf‘s machines were sent back to China they might have also sent the pencils back to China at the same time – to sell them there…

Send to Kindle

Why another blog post about the Wopex? The Wopex has one property I really like, even though there are actually also a few things wrong with the Wopex. Back to the characteristic I like, which is why I pick this pencil more and more often when making entries in my diary. The reason is simple and has been mentioned by Koralatov in a recent comment: there’s hardly any graphite transfer between different pages when writing on the reverse. I use my diary to keep track of appointments and to record things that need doing. Graphite from soft pencils will transfer easily after something has been written on the reverse or on the next page, which will in then look very unsightly. Even though you can get graphite from the Wopex to transfer to another page if you want to, as seen on the photos, this transfer is usually not happing under normal circumstance and is therefore not a problem.

Graphite comparison in a Castelli Academic Diary

I think the Wopex has great potential, but it also has a few flaws which I want to mention.

• The “fibre Wopex material” is too hard, so I use dedicated sharpeners in my office and at home, just for the Wopex. The “fibre Wopex material” is also too hard for rotary blade sharpeners.
• If you sharpen the Wopex to a very fine point the point will break easily.
• Small bits of the “fibre Wopex material”, close to the lead, can crumble off when sharpening.
• There doesn’t seem to be a difference between the Wopex 2B, HB and 2H.

There are quite a few other issues, but mentioning them all would distract from the main issue I want to address here: Wopex‘s great lead that is a very good choice for diaries.

Top-bottom: Mars Lumograph HB, F, Castell 9000 HB, 2B, Technograph B, Wopex HB, Mono HB, Ticonderoga HB

Let’s look at the results from my (unrepresentative) graphite transfer test, conducted by writing on one page, putting the next page on top and applying pressure to the reverse of the next page¹. Harder and lighter leads do better than softer and darker leads – no surprise here. The best pencil in my comparison was the Staedtler Wopex HB, followed by the Caran d’Ache Technograph 777 B, which has previously been reviewed by penciltalk. The worst pencils in this test were the Tombow Mono 100 HB and the Amos Dixon Ticonderoga HB. This was obviously due to their softness which does however bring other advantages, e.g. better pressure/darkness ratio – I do however prefer a tidy diary and do tend to use the Tombow and Dixon only when smearing, smudging and graphite transfer don’t matter.

Price and exchange rates: October 2011.

I would like to thank

• David from Office Hero and Oliver Carding from Sagittarius Digital for the free samples
• Lexikaliker for sending me a set of special Wopex pencils from Staedtler’s open day.

The comparison has been conducted in a Castelli Academic Diary my wife got from her employer. I use a no name  academic diary from my employer, which has very different paper. My initial impressions are that graphite-transer-wise good pencils behave better in my diary, but bad pencils behave worse.

1. The effects can be stronger when applying pressure directly to the reverse of the page you wrote on.

Send to Kindle

A few days ago Office Hero, a new and independent stationery and office supplies company, sent me their catalogue together with free samples of four of their products for review. These products include a really nice ruler from Denmark, two different kinds of pencils and a notebook. After having had a look at their web site I was impressed by the fact that they stock many of the nice, specialist items that are not easy to get, like Linex products or, my favourite, the Velos Eyeletter. One thing to note is, however, that the prices displayed don’t include VAT, which is useful if you are buying commercially, but private customers from the EU have to pay 20% VAT for most items¹.

I was most impressed by the aluminium ruler I received and planned to review it first, but it is a ruler that can be used for pens and for cutting and unfortunately I wasn’t able to find my craft knife yet, so I’ll start with the notebook and hope I’ll find my craft knife to test cutting with this ruler before writing about the ruler.

The White Box Manuscript Book has a very nice, red surface and about 80 pages. It is a ruled notebook, but the strength of the lines varies quite a bit on different pages. The paper is very good. It copes well with many inks and I only noticed bleeding through with some inks and only when being used in combination with very wet nibs. The paper’s attributes are, with one exception, great for graphite, too. First the positive bits: the graphite doesn’t transfer easily to the next page, even after pressure has been applied from the back (e.g. after writing on the back). It also copes well with erasers. The only problem I noticed is that some of the softer leads smear more than on many other papers, in the example on the photo you can see this with the General’s Semi-Hex pencil. The most impressive thing about these  is however their price. They are currently on offer and a pack of five notebooks is only £4.07, that’s £4.88 incl. VAT (~$7.65; €5.55) – less than £1 for one A4 notebook.

Conclusion:

Great value for money, at least while they are on offer, and very nice paper that feels good and that copes well with ink and graphite.

(slight) bleeding through

Price and exchange rates: October 2011.

I would like to thank

• David from Office Hero and Oliver Carding from Sagittarius Digital for the free samples.

• Sean for the Eberhard Faber Blackwing 602 tested on the paper

I am very embarrassed, but I am not sure who gave me the General’s Semi-Hex pencils tested on the paper – even more so because I use one in the office very often. Whoever gave it to me, thank you!

Office Hero also included a leaflet with the samples: if you enter the code “BROCH1″ when you order you get a brochure and 5% off with your order.

1. Saying this reminds me that I once saw a camera very cheap at an online shop, I already put it in my basket and only noticed in the end that the price was without VAT and that the camera was actually quite expensive at this specific supplier of photographic equipment.

Send to Kindle

I cannot say that the quality of this notebook was poor, but after such a long time of carrying it around with me on a daily basis and using it on a nearly-daily basis it is definitely not in great condition any more. Quite early I also ripped a page or two out of the back, but didn’t know that the  Kompagnon doesn’t really like this. It didn’t take long before neighbouring pages became loose.The plastic cover near the spine got damaged over time, too. I fixed it with double-sided 3M tape, but that didn’t solve the whole problem. The plastic stuck to the spine, but over time the corners have now ruined two shirt pockets. Time to replace this notebook, but unfortunately there isn’t much choice when it comes to A7. I’d prefer a slightly thinner notebook, too. The 192 pages of 80g/m² Munken paper and the cover and pocket mean that the Kompagnon is about 1.5 cm thick.

I found the Samsonite basic notebook in A7¹, but it is 1.5 cm thick, too. The Staufen Poème is an A7 notebook with 96 pages of 80g/m² paper, so it might be thinner. Another alternative I found is the X17 system, reviewed at Notebook Loves Pen. The Mode A7 version, made from bonded/regenerated leather (“Lefa”), for two booklets looks very interesting, but I am not sure whether it is too thick. A version for one booklet is supposed to be released later this year.

Does anyone have a suggestion for a “not too thick” A7 notebook?

Price: November 2008

Exchange rates: October 2011

Wikipedia has an interesting chapter about the history of the A paper formats.

There is a good explanation on the server of the University of Cambridge.

1. unfortunately I couldn’t find an English web page with more information to link to

Send to Kindle

Two of the Castell 9000 Jubilator tins

Our favourite count certainly knows how to to party like it’s 1761, but in terms of products celebrating Faber-Castell’s 250^th anniversary there hasn’t been a lot. The anniversary pencils, discussed at pencil talk, seem to be the best products so far. Artists might like the set of coloured pencils, limited to 1761 boxes, and if you have a bit more money to spare the Elemento pens, released for the anniversary, might be just the thing for you, but they are out of reach for most of us.

1983: 222 years Faber-Castell, 2005: 100 years Castell 9000

Let’s have a look at Faber-Castell’s 222^nd anniversary in 1983. Back then pencileers, molyvophiles¹ and molyvologues² had more than enough reason to celebrate. I wonder whether there was a corporate party for their business partners in 1983, too. Personally, I prefer nice anniversary products, but that’s rather selfish, Faber-Castell business partners will probably prefer the party.

Click to read (subject to screen resolution)

Why is the 222^nd anniversary so important? I don’t know. I certainly don’t know why there have been more exciting products back then than in the 250^th anniversary year so far. In my experience people from German-speaking countries place more importance on Schnapszahlen (repdigits) than people from English-speaking countries. You might argue that a repdigit is not very important, but then a ’round number’ is actually not that exciting any more once you change to another positional notation³.

The Castell 9000 Jubilator pencils

Faber-Castell released six different limited-edition tins for the Schnapszahl anniversary, featuring the following images: ‘The Nile Pencils’, ‘Railway Pencils’, ‘Aristocratic’, ‘The Caravan Pencils’, ‘Landscape Pencils’ and the picture with the jousting knights, previously discussed at pencil talk. Leadholder has more information about this picture – a mirrored version has  been used on pencil tins in the early 20^th century. The jousting knights image has also been used for a special box from the same year, containing one gross, i.e.12 dozen, Castell 9000 pencils and limited to 2000 boxes, and it has been used again in 2005 for a special tin commemorating the 100^th anniversary of the Castell 9000.

1. Someone passionate about pencils
2. A student of pencils
3. 250₁₀ = 372₈ = FA₁₆ = 11111010₂

Send to Kindle

I cannot deny that I was quite disappointed after trying the paper out. One claim is not true – Less bleeds? The ink is bleeding was bleeding through the paper at a phenomenal rate. I was trying to write as fast as possible to compensate, but no use. Unless the paper was stored wrong when being shipped to Europe or unless ‘less bleeds’ refers to the sheets having softer edges, resulting in fewer paper cuts at the edge of the paper (‽), ‘less bleeds’ is certainly not an attribute of this paper.

Ink bleeding through

Good news however regarding the ‘more smear resistant’ and ‘easy erase’ claim. It is easy to erase graphite from this paper and the paper is definitely more smear resistant than probably any other paper I know. The paper is very soft, but the surface is rather unusual. Graphite does not stick to the surface as it does on most other paper. This results in most pencil strokes looking very light, certainly much lighter than usual. Some pencils like Faber-Castell’s Castell 9000 2B leave much lighter marks on this paper than on other paper. For other pencils the difference is not as big, most notably for the Chinese made, yellow Amos Dixon Ticonderoga HB, a pencil I came to like. The pencil point of this Ticonderoga does not last very long, it is being ‘eroded’ at an incredibly fast rate for an HB pencil, but it does write well and, I am sure I heard this before in the context of the Blackwing, the lead being used up so fast makes you feel like you’ve done some work¹. The American-made General’s Kimberley 525 2B yielded excellent results, too.

I assume the Norcom notebook #77073 is either not being made any more or is not made for the American market, as it is not listed on Norcom’s website.

Conclusion

At 59p (~ 92¢; 67c) for 70 sheets this notebook provides excellent value for money, but the paper is not really suitable for use with pencils and definitely not suitable for use with fountain pens. It’s probably more than adequate when used with ballpoint pens.

Price and exchange rates: September 2011

I would like to thank

• Sean for the General’s Kimberley 525
• Kent for the Dixon Ticonderoga.

More about the General’s Kimberley 525 at pencil talk.

1. Update: I found a comment from Henrik about this.

Send to Kindle

Take the Pepsi Challenge!

In one of my previous blog posts I mentioned Staedtler’s Pepsi pen. Having found it in a pencil case, where it was hibernating together with its cousin, Staedtler’s Microfix S 0.5 773 05, I want to show you some photos of this nice Pepsi pen. After spending more than 30 years in a pencil case with pencils and mechanical pencils this pen did get some traces of graphite on its nice, yellow body, but despite its age it does still write.

Its cousin, the Microfix, must have been quite popular at the time if Lexikaliker and I both had one…

"I took the Pepsi Challenge !"

My previous blog posts mentioned the TWSBI Diamond 530, too. After having used the Diamond 530 for a while I have to say that it is a great fountain pen, but if you ever drop it by mistake it will spill rather huge amounts of ink, unlike other fountain pens I normally use – which have a much more conservative spillage-behaviour.

Send to Kindle

When I opened the box this weekend, after not having used it for a few weeks, I saw that the eraser got brown where it touched the wood. No problem, I don’t mind – my Staedtler Mars Plastic got brown when I stored it in my Sonnenleder Lasse case. The Staedtler / Sonnenleder combination did however not have any negative effect on the Lasse case. Back to Graf von Faber-Castell: I don’t mind the eraser changing colour, but what I do mind is that the wooden box changed. The colour changed where the eraser touched the inside of the lid and around the area of discolouration is a gluey layer of something – very sticky when you touch it.

Faber-Castell tries to use environmentally friendly production techniques, e.g. water-based varnish. I wonder whether that has something to do with this problem I encountered.

This is actually the second problem I have with this wooden box.The first problem was that one of the corners was bend. I am not sure whether this was due to bad packaging, I guess it was more likely because the parcel delivery service were not careful. I was able to fix this corner issue more or less by bending the corner back and by painting the discoloured wood there with a brown Stabilo marker.

I am not sure what to do about this new issue though. Use sandpaper to remove the sticky layer? …and never store the eraser in the box again? …or complain to Faber-Castell?

For now I left the eraser in the wooden box, this time wrapped in paper.

Send to Kindle

Real people

Let’s start with real, i.e. non-fictional, people using Staedtler pencils.

Stephen Wiltshire

I’ll skip photos of Stephen Wiltshire using Staedtler pencils. One reason is that you might remember seeing him using a Staedtler pencil from a blog post from March 2010 about the Staedtler Tradition. The other reason is that about a year after the blog post he started making advertising for Staedtler, so any new pictures showing him using Staedtler pencils would arguably be because of his contract with Staedtler, not because of the omnipresence of Staedtler pencils. I have seen him using other pencils in the past, I assume he is only or mainly using Staedtler products now.

Gordon Ramsay

Gordon Ramsay with a Tradition (Image © One Potato Two Potato)

Gordon Ramsay is a celebrity chef in the UK. Since he has been mocked in South Park I assume he must be a celebrity in the USA, too – or at least be known there. Here are photos of him in an episode of his TV series Ramsay’s Best Restaurant, where a restaurant ten miles from where I live was competing. I first wasn’t sure whether this is a real Tradition 110 or one of those copies available in many shops, but during this episode there were some moments when the reflection of the writing on the pencil can be seen quite well. It is not a copy.

Gordon Ramsay with a Tradition (Image © One Potato Two Potato)

Fictional characters

The Armstrong and Miller Show (Image © Toff Media / Hat Trick)

You can see Staedtler Tradition and Noris pencils in several school sketches in The Armstrong and Miller Show. Staedtler pencil’s use in The Armstrong and Miller Show is not really surprising. They are common and also to some extent the archetype of a pencil.

Tradition and Noris in The Armstrong and Miller Show (Image © Toff Media / Hat Trick)

In advertising

Staedtler’s pencils’ image as typical pencils means that you can see them often when an association with school is needed or in related advertising as in the example seen on the right. The advertising, probably created specifically for the UK and Ireland, was on a phone booth. A Staedtler Noris can be seen, even though the film is from the USA, where the Noris is not officially distributed and not available.

In the next example Harvey Nichols, a posh department store, used Noris look-alikes in their shop window to advertise perfume – I am not sure what the link between the perfume and the pencils is.

Noris look-alikes in Harvey Nichols shop window. (Thank you to Mrs Schmitt for allowing me to use Staedtler's photo)

Before I finish this blog post, a quick look at fictional characters outside the UK who use Staedtler pencils.

USA

Ted Mosby with a Mars Lumograph (Image © CBS)

In the US-American TV series How I Met Your Mother the main characters, architect Ted Mosby (actor: Josh Radnor), can be seen using a Staedtler Mars Lumograph. Unlike the Noris and the Tradition, the Mars Lumograph is officially being sold in the USA. A fitting pencil: in the past the Mars Lumograph has been advertised a pencil for technical drawings and for engineers.

I apologise for the poor quality of these photos.

Ted Mosby with a Mars Lumograph (Image © CBS)

Iceland

Daníel and a Noris (Image © Saga Film)

Daníel and a Noris (Image © Saga Film)

His second appearance in this blog …both times with a pencil: Daníel Sævarsson (actor: Jörundur Ragnarsson), one of the main characters from the …vaktin series and from the film Bjarnfreðarson, this time with a Noris in episode two of Fangavaktin.

In previous blog posts the Tradition was written with lower case letters because this is how the name is printed on the current version of this pencil. I decided to capitalise Tradition from now on, but I will probably refrain from changing the spelling in previous blog posts.

I would like to thank Mrs Schmitt from Staedtler for giving me permission to use Staedtler’s photo of the Harvey Nichols shop window.

I believe that the use of the following images falls under “fair dealing” as described by the UK Copyright service:

• The two photos of Gordon Ramsay and the Staedtler Tradition, taken from episode three of the TV series Ramsay’s Best Restaurant
• The two school sketch photos, taken from the second series of the TV series The Armstrong and Miller Show
• The photo of the UK advertising for the film Diary of a Wimpy Kid 2

• The two (poor) photos taken from the TV series How I Met Your Mother

• The two photos taken from the TV series Fangavaktin

By the way, this is blog post 112. Quite fitting, as 112 is the article number of the rubber-tipped Staedtler Tradition.

1. The blog post about the Staedtler Tradition and the one about the Chung Hwa drawing pencil both mentioned this, then there also the post about Staedtler UK.

Send to Kindle

The Pen Loop in the diary provided by my employer.

I recently bought Leuchtturm’s Pen Loop, a pen loop you can affix to any notebook to add a pen loop. A good idea, but I have to say that I am quite disappointed. The loop itself is stitched to a squary pad that is self-adhesive on one side. The problem is that a small ‘tab’ of this pad protrudes into the loop. This tab is self-adhesive, like the pad, which means that pens in the Pen Loop will get in contact with the self-adhesive side and some of the glue will stick to the pens. As a result the pencils I put in the Pen Loop so far got very sticky. I assume this will improve once all the glue has rubbed off to my pencils. The tab is also quite hard, I wouldn’t be surprised if it can scratch the surface of delicate pens. I only used painted pencils¹ so far – no pencils with a natural finish, so I was able to either remove the glue from the paint or sharpen the pencil to remove the ‘glued’ paint.

The gluey tab that makes my pencils sticky...

Conclusion

A great idea, but the execution is lacking.

It would be interesting to know  whether all Pen Loops have this problem or whether it’s a Quality Control issue and the one I bought has been sewed too close to the pad…

1. General’s Semi-Hex and the AMOS Dixon Ticonderoga

Send to Kindle

A big thank you to Sean from The Blackwing Pages for making the world a happier place by inventing the word pencileer and to Lito from Palimpsest for enriching our vocabulary with the word molyvologue.

I bought the razor, seen in the photo, many years ago. It’s Merkur’s 34C, which has been on the market for 80 years. I was very surprised when I recently noticed that the 34C won About’s Reader Choice razor of the year 2011 award. What a good choice. This razor is really great.

1. Someone passionate about pencils
2. A student of pencils

Send to Kindle

The magnet

Good it's not a CRT...

One of their products is a magnetic pencil, which I got sent by Mr Lorber earlier this month, together with some of Reidinger’s crystal pencils¹. It is a black wood pencil with a neodymium magnet at the end. Unlike Viarco’s or Lexikaliker’s version the magnet is hidden by a metal sleeve and is not directly visible. A metal disc is available and comes with one of the magnetic pencil sets, for sticking to non-metallic surfaces so that the pencil can be placed there. The disc is however not magnetic. A quick attempt to magnetise the disc using the magnetic pencil was unsuccessful (I was hoping to magnetise the disc to be able to use it for Eberhard Faber’s Microtomic or General’s Kimberly pencils). You might know that neodymium magnets are the strongest permanent magnets available and I have to say it is pretty amazing how much these pencils “stick” and what you can do with them: if you can connect two pencils at the end you can swing them around, which is pretty fun.

The pencil

Don't need the metal disc here...

The pencil itself is very good. It lays down a very dark line, is easy to erase and sharpen and is quite smooth, similar to a good pencil, like the Staedtler Tradition or Noris, but short of an excellent pencils, like the Faber-Castell Castell 9000, the Tombow Mono 100 or the Staedtler Mars Lumograph.

After talking to Mrs Morse from Reidinger I found out that many of their pencils are manufactured in Eastern Europe and are made using lime wood² and was told that the quality of the materials has  been certified by TÜV. I am however not sure where exactly the magnetic pencils and the crystal pencils are made. I know that some of the other crystal pencils available are made in China, but to my surprise there seem to be several factories making black wood crystal pencils as Mrs Morse confirmed that their pencils are not from China. Last year my wife bought some crystal pencils from The Pen Shop. They are in her office at the moment – so I cannot check now, but I should have a look and compare them to the ones from Reidinger…

Magnetic and Crystal Pencils

Giveaway

As these magnetic pencils are promotional gifts you cannot buy them individually. I believe you have to buy at least 288 for an order, but since Mr Lorber sent me several of them I am happy to give away a pack of three crystal pencils with Swarovski elements and a magnetic pencil with a metal disc. I am happy to send the prizes to any country as long as Royal Mail doesn’t refuse to send them there. I will use random.org to get a random number and the author of the corresponding article will get the price (unless I am the author or the comment is definitely spam). To take part please leave your comments at this blog post before Sunday, 4th September 2011, 23:59 UTC.



I would like to thank

• Mr Lorber for sending me these pencils and
• Mrs Morse from Reidinger for providing me with more information about Reidinger’s pencils.
• Sean from The Blackwing Pages for the Eberhard Faber Microtomic and the General’s Kimberly pencils I tried to use with the metal disc.

Related information:

• Pencil Talk has a review of different black wood pencils.
• Lexikaliker has DIY instructions on how to make your own magnetic pencil.

1. using Swarovski elements
2. American English: Linden wood

Send to Kindle

The 'town' of Castell

In the 12th century my home town, Volkach, became part of the county of Castell, which belonged to – you might have guessed – the Counts of Castell¹. Quite a bit later, in 1896, Alexander Graf zu Castell-Rüdenhausen married Ottilie Freiin von Faber and the name of the pencil manufacturer Faber changed to Faber-Castell.

Except this link to Faber-Castell there isn’t really much of a “pencil link” in the surrounding area of Volkach. All the exiting pencil stuff is happening about 100 km further South where you’d find the big pencil manufacturers like Staedtler, Faber-Castell, Schwan-Stabilo and Lyra.

Some branches the forest's caretaker removed. He also cut other trees nearby to give the Pencil Cedars more space.

I wrote there isn’t much of a “pencil link” here – well, the area around my home town can boast with one other link to the world of pencils, even though it is rather unknown. Trees from North America were planted in Germany to test the suitability of the wood for use in pencil production …and some of them were planted on Schwanberg², an elevation not far from the town of Castell, by the Counts of Castell – to test the suitability of the wood for use in pencil production. The trees brought over from North America were the Pencil Cedar (juniperus virginiana) and the Eastern White Pine (pinus strobus). You can still find some of the Pencil Cedars near Castell. 100 years ago there were also many well established Pencil Cedars North East of Faber-Castell’s home town, Stein, planted by Faber, which probably didn’t survive³. These trees are not really used any more for pencil production, but if you have an old pencil that is more than 70 years old, the wood might be from a Pencil Cedar.

The Schwanberg, seen from Volkach

More about the Pencil Cedars at Lexikaliker’s blog post “Der Graphit” (German) (Link to the Google Translation)

1. At that time it actually wasn’t a town yet, but documents show that by 1258 it was a town (‘in civitate nostra Volka’).
2. The Schwanberg isn’t really a hill, but an elevation (474m / 1555 feet) – about 200m above the surrounding area. According to legend Saint Hadeloga (sometimes called Adeloga or Hadla) built an abbey (nunnery) on Schwanberg. She was the daughter of Karl Martell (Charles the Hammer). He repudiated her when she vowed virginity (so she is not mentioned very often in history) but they reconciled many years later. She is actually an aunt of Charlemagne, King of the Franks, and she is the patron saint for fever.
3. This tree was first introduced to Europe in the 17th century. Faber is supposed to have planted, between several thousand and several tens of thousands of these trees in the 19th century, depending on which source you check. I assume many must have survived outside Schwanberg, but it is unknown how many are left and where they are. One of Lexikaliker’s blog posts indicates that the trees planted by Faber near Nuremberg did not survive. Other Pencil Cedars planted in Germany did not survive either.

Send to Kindle

The Tesco I went to is in SongJiang, not far from the Shanghai Institute of Foreign Trade. The selection of stationery is fantastic, much better than in the English Tesco extra I usually visit. The stationery products on offer are dominated by Chinese brands, which is no surprise – there are a lot of Shanghainese M&G products in the shelves. Even though I did not notice this brand in the beginning of the decade, it has certainly been in all the supermarket chains in recent years. Pencil-wise the choice is not great, there are only a few different pencils to choose from. Most are hexagonal, some are triangular. Most space was reserved for Tesco’s own brand yellow pencils (I’ll try to check where they are made when I go there again), Staedtler’s yellow pencil 134 (produced in Shanghai) and Chung Hwa’s Drawing Pencil 101. Pens are surprisingly cheap, but I’ll write more about that another time. One brand that seems to grow year on year in China, Britain and Germany is Maped. Maped -  Manufacture d’Articles de Précision Et de Dessin (Manufacture of Precision and Drawing Tools) is a French company established in 1947. Unlike companies like Staedtler or Faber-Castell, Maped concentrates more on non-pen stationery, like paper-clips, scissors, etc. Since 2006 they own Helit and Diplomat, two German companies. Helit manufactures Bakelite desk accessories and other items. You can see their Bakelite blotting roller in this blog post. This blotting roller is from a mould or based on a mould that is at least 90 years old. Back to Shanghai: I’m quite happy to have so much choice. You can be sure that I already bought quite a few stationery products in LeGou Tesco.

A small fraction of the stationery in LeGou

1. Tesco entered the Chinese market in 2004 when they bought the Chinese supermarket chain 乐购 (LeGou – Happy shopper)

Send to Kindle

This is not the first time I mention Muji, a Japanese retail company with stores in many countries. Their idea sounds good: No brand¹ quality goods with a simple, often minimalist design. The problem is that many of their products aren’t really “quality” as promised by the brand name. I remember buying a very nice, not cheap teapot that cracked the first time we put hot water in it². Their Memo Pads don’t work well with fountain pens and their “cotton fabric bonded cover” notebooks are a catastrophe with fountain pens. I don’t thing I have ever seen paper that is less able to cope with ink.They do however have nice products, too. Their “passport” notebooks for example – and William Gibson swears by their tooth paste. A few years ago I tried it for fun, but wasn’t too excited about it.

Make your own pencil set

Last week I went to the Muji store in Manchester’s Trafford Centre land saw this “Sawdust clay – Make your own pencil set”. Originally £3.95 (~ $6,45; €4.50) it was on sale for £1 (~ $1.63; €1.14). I couldn’t resist and bought three of these sets. There are no instructions in text form, there are only the instructions in picture form printed on the box. Each set contains 5 lead (length 9cm, diameter ~ 2mm) and two individually wrapped bricks of wet sawdust clay (~ 65 g each). As you can see from the instructions the clay doesn’t need to be dried on an oven. I assume it will just dry out slowly, once taken out of the protective wrapping.

When commenting on one of my previous blog posts Stationery Traffic suggested that I should bake a cake in the shape of a pencil – but no I have a situation that works the other way round: what shape should I make these pencils in? Suggestions are welcome.

Prices and exchange rates: July 2011

1. No brand meaning that their products don’t have the Muji logo printed on them
2. I refer you to this Lexikaliker blog post and its comments that shows that water should be boiling for certain types of tea. Our water wasn’t even boiling, but the tea pot just didn’t like it.

Send to Kindle

The first number I got from random.org was 20, this means Kartike E from Indonesia gets the first prize. She chose the rubber-tipped version of the Noris, the Noris 122 HB.

The next number from random.org was 16 – Palimpsest from the UK wins the Welsh-made sketching pencils.

Number 15 came next. That was a post by myself, so I requested another number from random.org instead, which was number 5: Lexikaliker from Germany. Since he already has some Staedtler Tradition 110s he was kind enough to give someone else the chance to win. Thank you! The replacement number I got was the 13, which means that Sheryl C from the USA wins the blister pack with Welsh-made Staedtler Tradition 110s.

Thanks again to all who took part. I hope the winners will receive the pencils soon.

Send to Kindle

Notebook

Monsieur looks a bit like Mr. Peanut

I was very sure that I wanted a tan coloured notebook², not the brown or black one. Deciding on the size was easy, too. A6 is a bit small unless you want to carry the notebook around, A4 is a bit big – so I chose A5. But what paper to choose? I didn’t want the plain 90 g/m² paper …but the 140 g/m² paper from Star Paper Mills was certainly tempting. In the end Vulcan logic won over Romulan passion and I chose the more practical, ruled version with 90 g/m² paper from BILT industries, a company which traces its roots back to 1945 when Ballarpur Straw Board Mills was established in India. BILT industries is not only making paper, they also manufacture other stationery. One of their pencils has been reviewed at pencil talk. In the future there will also be a version of the Monsieur notebook with 100 g/m² paper from the Finnish paper manufacturer Stora Enso.

Leather

Let’s look at the leather used. The leather is vegetable tanned, which means the environmental impact is not as high as it is with many other types of leather. The leather looks more red than other vegetable leathers I have seen in the past and it certainly didn’t have an artificial grain applied to its surface – you can see blemishes and marks. Personally, I like this natural, slightly rough look very much. It gives the leather a handmade and traditional look. Despite the look, the surface of the leather has a very even feel to it. So nice, that my wife first thought it’s not real leather as the surface is quite hard, but still feels smooth the same time. I have to say that she wasn’t too keen on it, maybe because of the natural look. Not that the leather is like “saddleback” leather in any way, but I would say that if you like matte, raw finished leather, like saddleback leather, and a natural look you will like this notebook – I certainly do. If you like perfectly looking leather with artificial grain, the one you see so often these days, you might not be too happy with the “naturalness” of this notebook.

Paper

Nick using a Lamy Joy (Image © BBC)

The paper performed really well. Even though it seemed to be sucking ink of very wet pens in, the picture shows this effect from a Pelikan M250, the ink didn’t bleed through the page and even though there was slight feathering with very wet pens the paper behaved well with pens that have a normal ink-flow, like the Hero 616 or the Lamy joy. Uncareful erasing of graphite with a Sanford Artgum Eraser did roughen the surface of the paper slightly, but gentle erasing was problem-free.

Conclusion

Overall, a great notebook. If you like leather and don’t reject it for ethical reasons³ this is a great notebook. Similarly priced as other notebooks with PVC or plastic covers, the notebook I reviewed here sells for £12.99 (~ $20.70; €14.50), but has a classic, much better feel to it.



Price and exchange rates: July 2011

I started using a new image plug-in. The old one didn’t really work well. From now on you should be able to get a close-up of most images by clicking on them. I would be happy if you could let me know, e.g. as a comment on this blog post, whether this function works well on your computer.

I would like to thank

• Tom from Hide stationery for the Monsieur notebook, who sent me the notebook free of charge
• Henrik for the Hero 616 and
• Kent for the Dixon Ticonderoga.

The photo of Nick Hewer using a Lamy Joy has been taken from series 7 episode 8 of The Apprentice UK. I believe that the use of this image falls under “fair dealing” as described by the UK Copyright service.

1. after last week’s Staedtler UK / Tradition 110 post
2. which might fit well with my Sonnenleder pencil cases
3. Most vegetarians I know don’t mind buying leather

Send to Kindle

By Appointment to the Late King George V

1790 – 1920 Wolff and Cohen

Elias Wolff

The history of Staedtler in the UK seems to date back as far as 1796. As far as I can tell this was the year when Elias Wolff, aged 15, started his career as a pencil maker. In 1822 he officially started his own company and by 1840 his son was on board and the name of the company changes to Elias Wolff and Son.

Why London?

The company was based in London, which is not surprising. The UK was and is very centralised and in the past graphite mining and production was controlled by the crown. Graphite had to be transported all the way from Cumbria to London, to be sold or auctioned. Soon Flemish traders were supplying graphite to all of Europe and the Society of Mines Royal asked the family of Höchstetter to apply their Bavarian mining techniques to make mining more efficient.

Solomon Cohen

Solomon Cohen, another pencil maker, was born around the same time as Elias Wolff. When his son Barnet Solomon Cohen took the business over he started trading as B.S. Cohen. In 1919, at a time when England had some of the best pencil factories in the world, B.S. Cohen and E. Wolff and Sons merged. The name for the new company: Royal Sovereign Pencil Co.

… and Napoleon?

These were turbulent times. Elias Wolff and Solomon Cohen were born around the time of the French Revolution and worked as pencil makers while the war between Britain and France and the Napoleonic Wars were going on.

Paulus Staedtler

Paulus Staedtler, another pencil maker, was born in 1779, in Nuremberg. Turbulent times there as well: Prussia took Nuremberg over before, in 1806, Napoleon’s army gave the city to their ally Bavaria – not long before all of Franconia was annexed to Bavaria in 1815. In 1835 Paulus’ son Johann Sebastian Staedtler started his own factory, the company we know today as Staedtler.

1919 – 1992 Royal Sovereign Pencil Co

The Royal Sovereign Pencil Co started life in 1919 and was renamed to Royal Sovereign Group Ltd in 1974, just before the factories where taken over by Staedtler. Strangely enough the names Wolff and Royal Sovereign never belonged to Staedtler. I have to assume that the new Royal Sovereign company only held on to the names and maybe some other intellectual property rights, not to any hardware. As far as I can tell, based on information provided by Companies House, the United Kingdom Registrar of Companies, the company was taken over in 1987. It took me a while to figure out that the company that took over the rights to the trademarks etc must be the Dickinson Robinson Group, a company that pioneered a number of innovations in paper-making in the 19th century. In 1989 this group was then taken over by Pembridge Investments, around the same time the rest of Royal Sovereign became part on Nontradorm, before the rest of the Royal Sovereign Group was officially dissolved in 1992. The names “Wolff” and “Royal Sovereign” do however live on. A family owned business, West Design Products, somehow got hold of the rights to the names Wolff and Royal Sovereign and sell Indonesian-made pencils under this name. A first attempt at contacting West Design Products nearly twelve months ago was unfortunately left unanswered, as was a subsequent attempt, so I was not able to find out how these traditional names came into their possession and whether their pencils are made in Staedtler’s Indonesian factory.

West Design's Wolff's Graphite Sketch Set

1975 – 2009 from Royal Sovereign to Staedtler UK – how the pencils changed

RS Bonded

In April 1966 Royal Sovereign started to produce two different types of Staedtler pencils in Pontyclun, Wales. The early Staedtler Tradition 110 pencils made there had “RS – Bonded” printed on them. The factory still made Royal Sovereign pencils and they, too, had “RS – Bonded” printed on them. These early Staedtler Tradition pencils were pre-sharpened on the right side, i.e. looking at the pencil with the print facing up, the right side of the pencil has been sharpened. The RS Bonded version hexagonal, like all other Tradition 110s, and mainly red. The cap has the typical Staedtler look, but only the side of the pencil with the gold letter print is painted black. All other sides of the pencil are red with a thin black strip in the middle.

Bonded

The next generation of Welsh-made Tradition 110 pencils is pre-sharpened on the left, the same way as nearly all modern pencils. This means that the text on the pencil is not upside down if the pencil is held in the right hand, as was the case with the RS Bonded version. The black and red pattern changed, too, and is identical to modern Staedtler Tradition 110s. The side with the print and the opposite side are black. The other fours sides are red with a black strip between two adjacent red sides. For this generation the stamped text “RS Bonded” has been replaced with “Bonded”.

Jet Bonded

The next generation of Tradition 110 pencils was probably released around 1972, a few years before Staedtler bought the factory in Pontyclun in 1975. This is the first generation of UK Tradition 110s, where the glue has been applied by a machine. Previous version had the glue applied manually. The print changed from “Bonded” to “Jet Bonded”.

Barcode S

I am not sure whether there has been a generation³ of Tradition 110s between the previous Jet Bonded version and the next version that features a bar code. It is more than likely that this version of the Tradition 110 was released in 1990 or shortly after.

Last generation

You can still find the last generation of the Tradition 110 made in Pontyclun in some shops that have old stock. This generation was in production until the factory was closed in 2007/2008. Around the same time, in 2008/09, the rest of Staedtler UK moved to nearby Bocam Park, about five miles West of Pontyclun.

Australia

Royal Sovereign had two factories, one in Pontyclun, South Wales (UK) and one in Sydney, New South Wales (Australia) and when Staedtler took over they bought both factories.  Unfortunately, the one in Dee Why (Sydney) closed down nearly 40 years after it opened, around the same time as the one in Pontyclun. Another Staedtler plant that was closed shortly after was the one in Pahang, Malaysia. Products previously manufactures in Australia and Malaysia are now made in Thailand (pens) and Indonesia (pencils). It is a real shame that these factories had to close down.

Pencils can last a long time. On several occasions I took a whole day worth of notes using a Staedtler Mars Lumograph F without having the sharpen the pencil the whole day. In comparison some other pencils wear down really fast, a Dixon Ticonderoga for example, or most of the Korean pencils I know⁴. Even the ones that wear down fast are usually good value for money, the ones that last longer often cost a bit more, but are even better value for money. In a time when many consumers will buy the cheapest pencil they see in the supermarket it must be difficult for the established, high quality pencil manufacturers to keep smaller factories and factories in high wage countries alive. I hope that in the future consumers will not just buy any old, scratchy pencil, but a good one, so that these factories can stay open as long as possible.

Pencil and ballpoint pen from Staedtler UK, sharpener from KUM

I hope you enjoyed reading this post. There was more I wanted to include, but this post starts to get a bit too long, so I will write more about Staedtler’s popularity in the UK another time. If you have further information about Staedtler UK’s history or pencils, not mentioned here, or if you find any mistakes please let me know.

Giveaway

After I heard that Staedtler’s Welsh factory closed down I started buying pencils from this factory in different shops. To celebrate the 100th blog post I am giving away three prizes, they are not worth a lot (check penciltalk’s anniversary post: How much is my pencil worth? Probably nothing! …but they were made in Staedtler’s UK factory in Pontyclun).

You can win…

• A dozen Welsh-made Staedtler Noris. You can choose between the rubber-tipped version (Noris 122 HB) or the version with the traditional Staedtler cap (Noris 120 HB)
• A pack of six  Welsh-made sketching pencils
• A blister pack with three Welsh-made Staedtler Tradition 110s

I am happy to send the prizes to any country as long as Royal Mail doesn’t refuse to send them there. I will use random.org to get a random number and the author of the corresponding article will get the price (unless I am the author or the comment is definitely spam, e.g. advertising for medicine, …). To take part please leave your comments before Friday, 8th July, 23:59 UTC.

I bought West Design’s Wolff’s Graphite Sketch Set in September 2010 from Granthams in Preston for £4.25 (~ $6.80; €4.70). The Sketching pencils set with six pencils (B – 6B) used to sell for £1.70 (~ $2.70; €1.90) in Granthams and for £3.70 (~ $5.90; €4.10) in Paperchase. All the old Staedtler Tradition 110 pencils are from shops in and around Lancashire. The oldest ones are from a corner shop about 200 yards from my home.

Exchange rates: July 2011

If you want to read more about Staedtler UK’s pencils…

• Lexikaliker has a blog post about another Staedtler UK pencil.
• Stationery Traffic has a blog post about the Tradition 110 and about another Staedtler UK pencil.

You can find more information about…

• …the Royal Sovereign Pencil Co at Gracesguide.co.uk
• …Elias Wolff at Randomwalk.me.uk and Palimpsest
• …Solomon Cohen and his son at the National Portrait Gallery
• …Paulus and Johann Sebastian Staedtler at nuernberginfos.de (in German)

I would like to thank my colleague and business historian, Dr. Mitch Larson, who gave me very useful information and suggested contacting Companies House, a registrar I hadn’t been in contact with for ten years.

1. Last time I spelled Tradition lower case, as printed on the pencils, but for this post I decided to consistently start with a Capital.
2. A post that mentioned that Stephen Wiltshire is using the Staedtler Tradition. Twelve months later Staedtler managed to get his support for their pigment liners.
3. or several generations
4. This is not meant as complaint. These pencils have other advantages, e.g. a very dark line

Send to Kindle

Price

My guess is that the 1117 is the cheapest pencil made in Germany¹. Today, you can find the version without ferrule and eraser for as little as € 0.20 (~ 28¢; 17p), if you buy them in Germany  over the Internet. That’s a bit more than half the Internet price of a Staedtler Noris and about ¼ of a good Internet price for the Castell 9000. I bought the last few dozen in the local stationery shop Schreibwaren Jäcklein in my home town of  Volkach when I went there in April. eraser-tipped 1117s for € 0.58 each (~ 82¢; 51p) and the untipped 1117s for € 0.36 each (~ 51¢; 32p). Last November I bought the eraser tipped 1117s in B for € 0.29 each (~ 41¢; 25p), online at Schule-Uni-Shop / CTK, but CTK do not stock the 1117 any more.

Writing qualities

The lead of the 1117 could be better, there is not doubt about that, but in good Faber-Castell tradition it does last a long time before it wears down and needs sharpening. Once the pencil it dull or blunt it is, at least in my experience, less pleasant to write with. This is however quite normal for inexpensive pencils and only very few pencils would excel in this category. The 1117 is however usually quite smooth and there would be very few combinations of paper and pencil point state that would result in a scratchy writing experience. The lead could be darker, but this is again something we shouldn’t be surprised about as Faber-Castell measure and label the softness of the lead quite conservatively. The 1117 shows no problems with smudging when being erased erased. I would describe the eraser from the eraser-tipped version as “normal quality”. It performs a bit worse than the eraser of a Dixon Ticonderoga , is similar to the eraser of a General’s Semi-Hex, but much better than the white eraser of the Palomino Blackwing.²

Overall

This is an extremely cheap, or better: inexpensive,  pencil and value for money is definitely excellent.  Production of the 1117 started in 1991/1992 (20th anniversary soon!). When this pencil was first introduced it was unfinished, but for hygienic reasons later versions got a protective finish. The feel is however very similar to an unfinished pencil. Depending on your perspective this means that the pencil has a great grip or it is slightly too rough and therefore uncomfortable. The version without ferrule and eraser is available in 2B, B, HB and H. I have seen the eraser-tipped version in B and HB, but according to the label on the box the eraser-tipped version is available in five grades. All versions feature SV-bonded anti-break leads.

Næturvaktin, episode 8: Is Ólafur giving Daníel a Faber-Castell 1117? Will there be a pencil in the US remake? (Image © Saga Film)

Prices: November 2010, April 2011 and June 2011

Exchange rates: June 2011

I would like to thank Ms Schaklies from Faber-Castell for the additional information about the 1117.

The photo of Ólafur handing over a pencil to Daníel has been taken from episode 8 of the great, Icelandic comedy Næturvaktin. I believe that the use of this image falls under “fair dealing” as described by the UK Copyright service.

1. Probably even the cheapest pen
2. In case you wonder why I picked these two for the comparison: Those pencils were just lying on my keyboard. Thanks to Sean, Kent and Adair for these.

Send to Kindle

While I was preparing the dough I realised that some of the ingredients link to the pencil friends I got to know during the last one or two years. The butter was from Denmark (Hej Henrik) and I even used a cake tin that came from the same Danish company. Most of the ingredients were obviously British (Hello Bruce) and the recipe was from Germany (Hallo Gunther). I thought the ginger was bought from a US-American company (Hi Sean), but it turns out this chain isn’t American at all. I do have honey from New Zealand (Kia Ora David) and some very strong Canadian bread flour in the cupboard (Hi Stephen), but both were not needed for this recipe. What a shame I couldn’t include the countries from all my pencil friends.

Not easy to recognise: that's suppossed to be Lexikaliker's logo on the cake

Lexikaliker’s recipe has been slightly adjusted to fit the ingredients I could get:

• 125 g butter
• 150 g sugar
• one pack of vanilla sugar (occasionally available from Lidl UK)
• 2 eggs
• 50 g starch
• 200 g self-rising flour
• 2 bananas
• 50 g candied ginger

Icing:

• 150 g icing sugar
• 2 – 3 tablespoons lemon juice

Our gas oven is very difficult to use, it tends to be either too hot or too cold, but one thing you can be sure of: it delivers inconsistent results. Lexikaliker’s baking time of 45 minutes at 180 °C was nowhere near enough in our oven..

Send to Kindle

These discounts seem to be across the range, i.e. including mechanical pencils, fountain pens, etc. Some of the (not so exciting) Pelikan discounts are available online, too, but the GvFC discount are unfortunately not available online.

The information I was given by the employee implied that the discounts would last until they sold these pens/brands off, but I don’t believe this as I was told something similar in the same shop in December 2009, but back then the discount were only for a short period of time.

Send to Kindle

Click for full size

When you look at it you realise that it is from a time when pencils were less of a commodity and more of something the manufacturer was proud of. This specific specimen must have been deemed to be of so poor quality that the logo was sanded out and that it was stamped “SECONDS”.

"SECONDS"

Needless to say that there is nothing really wrong with this pencil and that it is miles better than the no name pencils you get in many supermarkets. It is just from a time long gone, when there were more manufacturers who were proud of their products and more consumers who paid what the products were worth.

The logo has been sanded out

Send to Kindle

A male blackbird feeding a fledgling, photographed by my wife.

One of the blackbirds even knows how to let us know that they want more food on the bird table: if there is no food left he will fly to the roof of the bird table, land and then fly towards us when we are near the window or in the garden.

Send to Kindle

The GvFC Perfect Pencil I always carry in the pocket of my jacket.

This short video shows the factory and includes a few scenes showing how Faber-Castell tests the pencils for poisonous and unwanted components to make sure they are absolutely safe. If you like Lexikaliker’s museum posts you will be delighted to see some old catalogues and products in the video, too …and even our favourite count, Count Anton Wolfgang von Faber-Castell makes an appearance¹.

Another video, similar to Lexikaliker’s old Staedtler video, gives a glimpse of pencil manufacturing 100 years ago. There is also a radio report about pencil manufacturing. The radio report mentions how Lothar Faber became a member of the aristocracy and why the name changed from Faber to Faber-Castell.

1. I wonder whether his family got invited to the royal wedding. His niece is married to a relative of Prince Philip.

Send to Kindle

There have been quite a few changes for Pelikan in the past months: As mentioned previously they now manufacture the Porsche Design pens, but they stopped distributing certain Henkel products – Staedtler does that now  …no wonder Staedtler’s glue in the Pencilmaker Set is from Henkel.

I hope Pelikan’s financial situation will improve again. It certainly wasn’t my fault – I bought quite a few Pelikan products (mainly fountain pens).

Continuing the Pelikan theme: you might remember one of my previous blog posts that included a video of Japanese politicians using a Pelikan. Well,something similar might happen in New Zealand soon: politicians there use Pelikan fountain pens, too. Simon Parker, New Zealand’s Minister of Justice, Minister for State Owned Enterprises, Minister of Commerce, Minister Responsible for the Law Commission and Associate Minister of Finance received a Pelikan fountain pen as a gift from the German State Secretary.

What stationery taught me about Oceania:  Australian pencils are harder than British pencils and New Zealand’s politicians hold more ministerial posts than British politicians.

Send to Kindle

This weekend’s 56th annual Eurovision Song Contest is over. With an estimated 125 Million viewers watching it is a big event, but even though it is quite big in Europe not many people outside Europe¹ would probably know about it². Nevertheless, the contest even seems to inspire politicians: a few years ago Putin proposed a similar Asiavision Song Contest.

While watching the final this weekend I was kind of expecting that Jimmy Jump would invade the stage again – like during last year’s Eurovision final and during the Football world cup final – but there was no sight of him…

Moldova’s entry was funny-ish, but I thought it was nowhere near as good as the (kind of) similar entry  from the Ukraine in 2007. It also somehow reminded me of a Knorkator song that made it into the German national finals in 2000. …and a last comment before I stop writing about Eurovision: what a shame that Switzerland did not get more votes. I thought their song was really nice (even though the singer should not have moved her arm so much).

Düller notepads

John Lewis Door Stop

Other things I did this weekend, except watching the Eurovision Song Contest,  included going to Manchester’s Trafford Centre. In John Lewis I saw a pencil shaped door stop for £25 (~$40; ~€29), but even more interesting than this was Pedlars in Selfridges. They sold Düller memo pads, including the long version featured in pencil talk’s recent Düller Memo Pad post …but unfortunately, they did not have the dotted version in stock. When I was in Pedlars a few weeks ago they still sold the Düller mechanical pencil that comes “in” a note pad, but this time only the sample was left (which is probably not for sale and was slightly damaged).

Oops - Upside down

Ships!

I bought a nautical stationery set by SORT, The Society Of Revisionist Typographers, despite the name obviously a company, not a society. When I bought it I didn’t know yet, but a quick search on the Internet revealed that this set was featured in a UK newspaper’s 2009 Christmas gift guide. I am not so keen on the nautical theme, but the paper and printing were nice enough to convince me to buy this stationery set.

Something else I discovered this weekend, this time in Homesense in Preston: nice leather bound notebooks from Gallery Leather, printed in Korea (so I assume the paper is Korean, too) and bound in Maine, USA. All the journals I looked were very well made and at around £8 (~$13; ~€9) they were also very reasonably priced. I assume you can also find them at T.K. Maxx / T. J. Maxx, since they belong to the same company.

1. …or better: outside the “European Broadcasting Area”, which includes many non-European countries, that participate in the contest
2. Australia might be an exception. Not only is it shown there, viewers can even vote, even though their vote does not count.

Send to Kindle

Kronenheft, Morning Glory pencils (with point protectors) and Noodler’s X-Feather ink

Back from Germany, I am going to try another four-in-one blog post. I did not take part in the Faber-Castell factory tour mentioned in one of the previous comments because of a bereavement – which resulted in a very different trip than planned. I hope to take part in one of their factory tours in December and hope to find the time to visit Staedtler’s shop in Nuremberg, too.

This is going to be a four-in-one blog post because I want to speed things up as there are so many things I want to write about but I do not write enough blog posts – so the queue gets longer and longer. The low number¹ of comments on the previous four-in-one blog post about the Black n’ Red polynote does however make me think that writing about multiple items in one blog post does not give each individual item the attention it deserves, so I might switch back to one or two items per post…

…but today another (the last?) many-in-one blog post.

Kronenheft

The Kronenheft must be one of the most understated notepads available. I bought mine at Antiquariat Daniel Osthoff in August 2010. I mentioned this shop and some of the papers they sell in my blog post about the OHTO Super Clip. The Kronenheft notepad has been on the market for many years and is distributed by Carta Pura. It measures 15 cm x 10 cm and features a 290 g/m² Preßspanersatzkarton cover, an “imitation particle board” traditionally used, amongst other things, for book covers. It is a sturdy material made from wood pulp. The paper of this pad is 80 g/m² Salzer Werkdruck paper from Austrian paper manufacturer Salzer. Even though paper has been manufactured in Salzer’s town since 1469 and at the their mill, Obere Papiermühle, since 1579, the history of Salzer is slightly younger as the founder Kaspar Salzer did not have his own paper mill until 1798. Even though the 80 g/m² Salzer Werkdruck paper is not their best paper it is very good with a great feel and texture and a slightly creme-coloured tint.

Carta Pura, the distributor, sells this notepad in twelve different colours for € 7 each. You can also get a refill (40 sheets) for € 3. I paid less, but I am not sure how much exactly. FontShop used to sell them for a good price, but when I check recently I could not find it in their online shop any more.

The crown (German: Krone) in the Kronenheft

Morning Glory

This is the second appearance of a Morning Glory pencil at Bleistift. The first appearance was last month, when I wrote about RAD AND HUNGRY’s STMT X Korea kit. This time I used a much older Morning Glory pencil that my wife bought about ten years ago, the morning glory No. 33322-45229 HB. You would think that such a long product number can definitely point to one specific type of pencil, but there are actually different versions of the morning glory No. 33322-45229 HB pencil, with different colours printed on the pencil, but with the same product number.

The pencil itself writes very well. It could be a bit smoother, but it is by no means a scratchy pencil.

Pelikan M100

Since today is Star Wars day (May the Fourth be with you) I have to include the Pelikan M100, too. I cannot look at this pen without thinking of Stormtroopers and am convinced that if Stormtroopers had fountain pens  this Pelikan M100 would be standard issue! It is a great fountain pen and all of its parts are either white or black, even the nib is black. The piston mechanism does not feel as smooth as it does with a Pelikan M200 or a Souverän, but when this fountain pen was released in 1987 it was not an expensive pen so it is no surprise that the piston mechanism is not on the same level. The nib however is excellent for a steel nib and is quite flexible, too.

If Stormtroopers had fountain pens this Pelikan M100 would be standard issue. Here you can see the M100 camouflaged between other black and white items.

Noodler’s X-Feather ink

The ink used in the M100 is Noodler’s X-Feather ink, a black ink that is bulletproof, i.e. resistant to bleach, chemicals, light, etc. I have used this ink for years and am very happy with it. There is only one disadvantage I noticed. If you use it in a wet writer and use paper that does not absorb ink easily (e.g. post cards) it can happen that a layer on top of the ink does not ‘dry’ completely. In this case it can smudge or smear, even days after the text has been written. Under normal circumstances this is however not really a problem.

Conclusion

The Kronenheft is just great, but with its price tag I am not sure I will use it often. It copes well with ink (no bleeding though) and pencil and has a nice colour and texture.

You can find another photo of the Kronenheft in my previous blog post Wooden Letter Rack with Draw.

You can find English blog posts about Carta Pura at bloesem travel and at snowflakes & blackvampires.

Noodler’s X-Feather ink has also been used in my previous blog post Carrefour Bloc-notes.

I’d like to thank Ms Schwamborn from Carta Pura for additional information about the Kronenheft.

In case you wonder where my Cherry G80-3000LSC went: the photos show my wife’s desk, which is very similar – except the keyboard.

1. i.e. one

Send to Kindle

You can also read comments about this programme from the presenter Peter Day on his In Business page.

Two more comments:

• It was nice to hear people speaking with a Franconian accent on the radio, even though the accent was not very strong.
• I was not surprised to hear Count Anton-Wolfgang von Faber-Castell in this programme. He is the one who is often representing Faber-Castell in the media. Last month there was a rare chance to see his brother – in a children’s programme on the TV channel of the public broadcasting authority for the German Freistaat (Republic) of Bavaria. The programme (“Ralphi”) explained how pens and brushes are manufactured and Faber-Castell was represented by …not Count Anton, but Count Andreas von Faber-Castell, who settled in Australia in the 1970s.

1. According the the information currently displayed on the BBC iPlayer page the programme will be available online until 2099, if I access the programme with my phone the programme is said to be online for about 300 more days …but usually programmes are only available for a week, so I would not be surprised if this programme will disappear from the iPlayer

Send to Kindle

I assume there is some similarity between the “crystals” on this pencil and the raised dots on Faber-Castell’s Grip 2001 – even though the position of the crystals on the barrel of Staedtler’s pencil does not seem improve grip.

1. I assume the silver stamps do not cause problems for the sharpener.

Send to Kindle

Pelikan released an iPhone App called PeliCard. You can use it to write digital postcards (some of the postcards can be seen here). You can even choose between different (virtual) nibs and colours for your postcards.

My wife used to have an iPhone, but she has another phone now and I don’t have an iPhone either, so I could not try this App out. If you have used this App please let me know what you think about it and whether it is available in English.

Send to Kindle

1. normally not exactly my favourite colours

Send to Kindle

Black n’ Red recycled hard cover notebook

My previous Red n’ Black purchase, the recycled notebook is really nice. Unlike the US version reviewed at Office Supply Geek it features British and European maps and information. I only paid £ 3.50 in my university’s library, but the price is probably either subsidised or they do not earn any money from this notebook as I have never seen anywhere else for a similar price. I have used this notebook for several months, but have only used pencils in this notebook, so I cannot comment on the suitability of the paper for fountain pens. It does however feel like good quality paper. I did contact Hamelin / Oxford brands with some questions about the paper, probably about a year ago, but unfortunately I never received a reply.

Back to the polynote

There seems to be a ruled version, too, but I bought the plain version. It contains 192 pages of 90 g/m² Optik Paper. The polypropylene cover seems durable and robust and can be wiped easily if dirty. The polynote does also contain a page with reference information, similar to the one found in the recycled notebook, but this time restricted to metric / imperial conversion tables. There is no danger that pages would fall out by mistake, but they can be removed easily if you wish to do so. The paper has a high quality feel to it and is more opaque than other 90 g/m² paper I have used in the past.

As you can see in the first photo I tried a pencil and two fountain pen inks on the paper.Erasing the graphite works well. The paper feels extremely smooth when erasing, but seems to retain more of a dent where the graphite was than other paper. This means you can see or guess the writing because of the slight indentation. Both inks worked well on the paper and did not bleed through the page.

Bach’s Purpur-Tinte

I bought the ink used with the TWSBI Diamond 530 at Eberbach Abbey, where some scenes of the film “The Name of the Rose” were filmed. This ink is from a small ink manufacturer called “Bach’s Tinten” (Bach’s inks). I have an iron gall ink from the same manufacturer, which is absolutely fantastic when used with a dip pen. Unfortunately, I was not able to find out more about the manufacturer of this ink. All I know is that it seems to be sold in some German museums and other tourist attractions. If you know more about this ink, please let me know.

TWSBI Diamond 530

I used Bach’s Purpur (purple) ink in my brand new TWSBI Diamond 530, which I bought from The Writing Desk for £36.79 (~$59.35; €41.75). TWSBI, originally an OEM manufacturer, make mechanical pencils, too. You can read more about their history and the meaning of their name at Okami Whatever. I first thought about buying this pen from the TWSBI ebay store, where it is slightly cheaper than in the UK, but the price is just above the threshold for VAT and customs (and therefore handling) charges, so buying it from The Writing Desk was the better option. The pen is quite big and made for fountain pen geeks: it is a demonstrator that can be disassembled and even comes with sililcon grease and the wrench needed for disassembly. As far as I know it is using a Schmidt nib, but a limited edition pen with a Bock nib will be released if there are enough orders. The pen is great and offers fantastic value for money. When it comes to fountain pens I am a fan of Pelikan, a Malaysian owned writing instrument manufacturer headquartered in Switzerland with manufacturing facilities on several continents, so – naturally – I compare the diamond 530 with Pelikan fountain pens and I have to say that the Diamond 530 is very big in comparison – much bigger than, for example, a Pelikan Souverän M600.  I do own a few fountain pens from manufacturers other than Pelikan and quality-wise the TWSBI is certainly one of the better ones, especially for this price.

Noodler’s Baystate Blue

Noodler’s, from Massachusetts, “the smallest ink company in the world with the largest color selection” is, without a shadow of a doubt, my favourite ink company. I do like inks from other companies too, but Noodler’s is my overall favourite. Baystate Blue is a very unusual ink, unusual in its rebellious colour and the high, i.e. alkaline, pH value. You can read more about it on Noodler’s web site. The first time I saw this intense ink on paper it reminded me of a pen I got in the late 1970s / early 1980s. At that time Pepsi ran a big marketing campaign worldwide – and in Germany, too: “Mach den Pepsi Test” (Take the Pepsi Challenge)¹. Afterwards you got a “I took the Pepsi Challenge” pen. As far as I remember it was a Staedtler pen and looked like a Lumocolor with a yellow body and with a Pepsi logo and reference to the Pepsi test printed on it. As far as I remember it  had a colour very close to Noodler’s Baystate Blue …and I completely forgot about this pen until Baystate Blue reminded me of this pen and this unusual colour. It’s not really my favourite colour, maybe because it is a bit too unconventional, but it might actually look quite good with a fine nib. I will try that out after I used up the Baystate Blue in my Pelikano junior.

Conclusion

The Black n’ Red polynote is a great little reporter notebook. I think I might carry one with me in the future. There is a plain and a ruled version, both probably ref. number M67072. The robust covers makes it a notebook you can carry around with you all the time and the current half price offer is really good, but even if you pay the full price it offers good value for money and nice smooth and unusually soft (maybe even a bit too soft) paper.

Prices and exchange rates: March 2011

You can find a review of Noodler’s Baystate Blue at Without ink.

Office Supply Geek has a great review of the TWSBI DIamond 530.

1. At that time RC Cola and Afri Cola were still commonly available in Germany

Send to Kindle

…but I thought I amuse you with with this video from Pelikan’s youtube channel.

Montblanc fountain pen failed – Pelikan M800 to the rescue

Pelikan’s description of the video reads as follows:

“During the inauguration of Japanese minister Kensaku Morita on April 6th, 2009 the fine writing instrument failed. The former Minister Akiko Domoto spontaneously offered her Pelikan Souverän M800 to her successor and the documents could be signed without further delays…”

On a related note: Recently, Pelikan changed the logo on the top of the cap to a metal logo.

Usually, I do not display images from other web sites for copyright reasons – one of the reasons why my blog posts with news look quite bare. If I do include images not taken/created by myself I mark them accordingly (e.g. a screen shot from a TV series). Since youtube provides the code to embed videos on your own web pages I decided to embed this video directly. Last year, I did something similar for a Staedtler video. I will keep my restrictive policy regarding images and will mark all images taken from other sources explicitly.

Unfortunately bad news keep coming from Japan. Let’s hope for the best, which (currently) is probably a hope that things don’t get even worse.

Send to Kindle

Nicely wrapped

Back to the parcel I received this morning, it was the fourth kit, Korea-themed. I do like Korea (even though I have never been there) and listen regularly to the German Service of South Korea’s KBS World Radio on short wave. Their programme is very good and introduces Korea and life there from different angles and on different levels. North Korea has a similar service, Voice of Korea – from the Radio TV broadcasting committee of the DPRK in Pyongyang. I really like the music the Voice of Korea plays. The Pochonbo Electronic Ensemble is so plasticy, it’s just great. It sounds very much like the background music from the video game Puzzle Bobble (Bust-a-Move in the USA). I think there is no need to describe what kind of non-music content you can expect to hear from North Korea’s international broadcasting service. Suffice to say that I do not listen to the North regularly – but their music is really nice.

The contents

Oh, that was off topic. Let’s talk about pencils again. The Korean kit was $26 (~ £ 16.20, € 18.70) including shipping¹ . One of the pencils in this kit is the Morning Glory Black Grip in B, which I examined a bit closer. The Black Grip is very similar to the Bauhaus 6004. Both have a triangular barrel, both are black wood pencils, both are from Korean companies, both are made in China, but the Black Grip does not come with an eraser. I assume the Black Grip is made by Marco, but I cannot be 100% sure. Other pencils similar to these two include the Rhodia pencil, reviewed at Lung Sketching Scrolls and pencil talk. Rhodia’s pencil is made in China, too. The way the ferrule is clinched in exactly the same way as the Bauhaus 6004 makes me think that this is another pencil manufactured by Marco, but it has a smoother lead than the Black Grip or the 6004. Two other, similar pencils, probably form the same factory are two “non black wood pencils”, the Marco 9001, reviewed at woodclinched, and the pencil’s from Eisen‘s fusion line, which are – in some markets – distributed by Lyra.

Stop the press! Supreme leader sees performance of women's brass band!

Conclusion: The kit is very nice. Other items included in this kit, except the Black Grip, are more pencils, a note pad and a correction tape as well as some comments from the trip and some paper to test the items on, all wrapped up very nicely. The Morning Glory Black Grip itself is a nice every day pencil, there is no point in comparing it to some top of the line pencils, but it certainly does a good job.

Click image for details

Prices and exchange rates: March 2011

I would like to thank Kent for the Bauhaus 6004.

You can find a review of Rad and Hungry’s Colombian kit at Notebook love Pen and Lung Sketching Scrolls.

You can find a review of Rad and Hungry’s French kit at Okami Whatever.

You can see a reception report to KBS World radio in the second picture of the ONLINE All Wood Marone review.

You can find more Korea related blog posts at Bleistift by searching for Korea.

1. $14 for the kit (the price for a kit as part of a quarterly subscription) and $ 12 for shipping

Send to Kindle

After my good experience with another Deli sharpener I could not resist and bought this TLR shaped sharpener, the Deli 0668, in December 2010 when I saw it in it in Shanghai – in a stationery shops outside a university. Deli’s headquarters are near Shanghai, so I it is not surprising that this sharpener was inspired by a Shanghainese-made Seagull TLR¹.

The 0668's single rotary blade cylinder

I paid about ¥ 30 (£ 2.80, € 3.30, $ 4.50) for this sharpener, a bit more than what I paid for the Deli 0635. You can get this sharpener cheaper if you look around or if you buy online, e.g. from Taobao. Outside China you can get this sharpener from Kikkerland for $15 (£ 9.30, € 10.80) or from Urban Outfitters for £ 15 ($ 24.20 , € 17.50)². It is currently on offer and can be bought for £ 8 online and in the Urban Outfitter shops .

The 0668 has a single rotary blade cylinder, similar to the one in the 0635. There is also a removable tray for the shavings. The clamps that hold the pencil during sharpening have a rubber surface so they won’t damage the pencil’s surface. Additionally, there is an automatic stop mechanism that will prevent you from over-sharpening a pencil. The main difference between the two Deli sharpeners is that the 0668 produces a shorter (and blunter) point. It also features a point adjuster switch similar to the one seen in the Carl Bungu Ryodo BR-05 pencil sharpener, reviewed at pencil talk and in the Dahle 133 / M+R 0981, reviewed at Lexikaliker. The blunt setting at the extreme end will result in a “point” diameter of about 2mm is only suitable for colour pencils with a wide core. Normal graphite pencils do not have a wide enough core for this setting.

On the left a Faber-Castell 1117 sharpened with the Deli 0668 (sharp setting), in the middle a Faber-Castell 1117 and a Mitsubishi Arterase Color 0668 sharpened with the Deli 0668 (blunt setting), on the right a Faber-Castell 1117 sharpened with the Deli 0635

Conclusion: A great sharpener for a great price. I will not use the blunt setting and, to be honest, I do prefer the longer point I get from the Deli 0635 much more. It is nevertheless a sharpener I will enjoy using. It is currently in my office where I use it for all kinds of wooden pencils, but not for pencils that use difficult to sharpen material, like the Wopex, as my experience with the Deli 0635 has shown that the Deli’s automatic stop mechanism does not work with these pencils and that the harder material seems to be detrimental to the blade cylinder.

A Faber-Castell 1117 sharpened using the sharp setting and a Uni Mitsubishi Arterase Color Vermilion sharpened using the blunt setting.

The pencils used in this blog post are Faber-Castell’s 1117 B and Uni Mitsubishi’s Arterase Color Vermilion 310. The 1117 feels like an unpainted pencil. It is not really painted but features a water-based varnish. It also has a breakage-resistant lead and an eraser. It does performs well for a budget pencil. It is made in Germany and sells for around € 0.30 each (~42¢, ~25p). You can find a review of the Faber-Castell 1117 at pencil talk. The Uni Mitsubishi’s Arterase Color Vermilion 310 is made in Japan. I do not have more information about this pencil, but you can find a review at Lexikaliker and at pencil talk. I would like to thank Lexikaliker for the Arterase Color pencil used in this blog post.

Prices: December 2010

Exchange rates: March 2011

The Deli in Urban Outfitters (Manchester)

1. Seagull TLRs were basically Rolleiflex copies. Outside China Quelle rebranded Seagull TLRs and distributed them as Revue cameras (40 years ago). There are still companies out there that distribute Seagull cameras outside China, one of the most famous ones is Lomography. Another interesting point: Whoever designed this sharpener changed the markings compared to the real camera, from f/3.5 to f/1.5
2. Urban Outfitters buy it from Kikkerland and in the end after shipping it over, everyone adding some profit and after adding tax, it is more than five times as expensive than what I paid in a little shop that wasn’t cheap in the first place.

Send to Kindle

Stabilo celebrates the 40th anniversary of their Boss Highlighters. As part of this anniversary there is a giveaway from Tiger Pens, where you can win Boss mugs, and a game from Stabilo where you can win Boss mugs, USB sticks and other prizes (there are different prizes for different countries).

Stephen Wiltshire, using a Staedtler tradition, on BBC's Top Gear (Image © BBC)

Staedtler‘s  historic pencil construction kit will unfortunately not be available in shops. The good news: you can order these kits directly from Staedtler for € 5 each. You can also get Staedtler’s historic Lumograph tin (100 M12H: € 16.20), the historic Tradition tin (Nr. 110 M12H: € 14.40) and the historic Noris tin (Nr. 120 M12H: €  9.60) directly from Staedtler. All of these special items are only available while stocks last. The historic pencil construction kit is not available yet, but can already be ordered.

Staedtler also managed to get the support of Stephen Wiltshire for their pigment liner. Lexikaliker mentioned him in his report about the Paperworld 2011 and I mentioned him previously in this blog post.

The photo of Stephen Wiltshire using a Staedtler Tradition has been taken from Top Gear Episode 5 of Series 14 and has been used previously in a blog post from March 2010 about the Staedtler tradition. I believe that the use of this image falls under “fair dealing” as described by the UK Copyright service.

Send to Kindle

Therefore, I am quite happy that I finally managed to put together some photos and a few words about two pencil stands I bought last November. They are from Wedo (Werner Dorsch)¹, a company established 1933 and located just south of Frankfurt. In the first years Wedo’s main business was repairing fountain pens. Later they started manufacturing nibs for fountain pens. These days Wedo’s main business seems to be the distribution of office products, school supplies and gifts.

Before I start talking about these pencil stands I want to emphasise first that I love products made from bamboo and I am quite happy that products made from bamboo have become more and more common. Ten years ago there were not many products made from bamboo available in non-specialist shops in Europe. The only “solid” bamboo products I can remember from that time are tea sets and tools used for tea ceremonies. Even earlier, in the 90s,  only “thin” bamboo products, e.g. bamboo steamers, could be found in shops  …at least as far as I know, but please let me know if this was different where you live or whether there are some products I left out. Luckily today you can get lots of products made from bamboo: chopping boards, trolleys, laundry baskets, pencil sharpeners, … I assume that part of the reason of the increased number of bamboo products must be that the gluing process involved improved dramatically over the last years.

Wedo Desktop Butler

When I saw Wedo’s bamboo products online I could not resist and ordered their desktop butler and pencil pot, the fact that the price is very reasonable did not help resisting either. The desktop butler was € 9.40 ($ 12.85; £ 7.90) and the pencil pot was € 8.50 ($ 11.60; £ 7.15). Both products are extremely well made and look fantastic. I really like them. The strips of bamboo glued together are about 2 cm wide (nearly an inch), must bamboo products seem to be made from much narrower strips of bamboo. The walls of the desktop butler are 5mm thick, the walls of the pencil pot 7mm. This gives both products are very solid feel. My only concern with these pencil stands is the aluminium insert at the top. I fear they might scratch the surface of the pens out inside. This problem is however more perceived than real, at least in my case. I use these pencil stands for everyday pencils and if I store pens with polished surfaces in them I put them in and take them out carefully. The aluminium insert might not make any scratches, but I just don’t want to risk it…

Wedo Pencil Pot

Prices: November 2010

Exchange rates: February 2011

I bought both products in November 2010 from Schule-Uni-Shop.

1. Using this type of acronym to create a company name is quite common in Germany. Other company names created using  a similar mechanism are Haribo (Hans Riegel Bonn) or Adidas (Adi Dassler).

Send to Kindle

More affordable was Montblanc’s saffron coloured Mahatma Gandhi ink, which was released around the same time but sold out very soon. De Atramentis started selling an ink with the same colour and the same name. Even though there is a chance that Montblanc’s Gandhi ink was manufactured by De Atramentis I wouldn’t bet on it. Old Montblanc ink and De Atramentis inks are made in Germany, but as far as I know Montblanc’s old inks were made by Gutenberg¹ – not by De Atramentis. Montblanc’s new inks are made in Austria.

De Atramentis’ Mahatma Gandhi ink is probably a copy of Montblanc’s ink, but it might be worth a try if you were keen on getting Montblanc’s Gandhi ink and missed your chance when it was first released. Unfortunately, De Atramentis’ shipping costs outside Germany are quite steep.

1. previously mentioned in this article

Send to Kindle

Graf von Faber-Castell’s Pen of the Year so far:

2001: Olive wood (at the time not yet called “Pen of the Year”)
2003: Snakewood
2004: Amber
2005: Galuchet (Stingray leather)
2006: Mammoth Ivory and Ebony
2007: Petrified Wood
2008: Indian Satinwood
2009: The Equus (horsehair fabric)
2010: Hunting Rifle (walnut and case-hardened steel)

I would like to thank Sean for letting me know about this pen.

Send to Kindle

This year Staedtler will offer a historic pencil construction kit. I have seen it in photos taken at their workshop and am really excited that it will be available to buy for those of us who can not attend the workshops.

For more information check this page on Staedtler’s web site.

Update: Staedtler’s German and Austrian web sites have a short video from a trade fair in Linz, Austria. This video  shows how to “assemble” Staedtler’s historic pencil. Unfortunately there are no English subtitles.

I really like that Staedtler refers to this pencil as being historic, instead of historical – because Friedrich Staedtler’s pencils of similar design are such an important part of Staedtler’s history.

Send to Kindle

…and if you feel less like Sledge Hammer and more like world peace you can destroy the bullet in a pencil sharpener.

Send to Kindle

The Staedtler 525 B30 PVC-free eraser

What I like most about the recently reviewed Faber-Castell 18 71 20 Dust-Free eraser is that you only need to apply very little force when erasing and that it does erase very thoroughly, much better than most other erasers. To my surprise the material of the Taiwanese-made Staedtler 525 B30 PVC-free eraser seems to be even softer than that of Faber-Castell’s dust-free eraser. It is therefore also no surprise that you do need to apply more force when you use the Faber-Castell eraser. This might be down to the fact that when I compared them the Staedtler eraser was brand new, freshly unwrapped, while one of my Faber-Castells has seen a few months, the other one a few years of use and contact with air. Just like Faber-Castell’s eraser the Staedler is also available in two sizes: the model number of the big one ends with 20, the number of the smaller one ends with 30.

Conclusion: The Staedtler is an exceptionally good eraser. It is not my favourite but comes very close. One disadvantage for me (others might not mind at all) is that the eraser waste does not twists up into strands, which makes it a bit more messy when you want to clean the paper and get rid of the eraser waste – but to be honest, for most erasers the waste does not twist up into strands, so this is nothing unusual.

I bought the Staedtler 525 B30 in November 2010 for 47c (~62¢, ~38p).

Läufer Oval Office

Läufer is relatively well known in Germany for their erasers. In 2004 Läufer merged with Gutenberg, a company some stationery fans might recognise because they supply indelible, permanent ink used for official documents – in Germany many dioceses and government offices use their G10 ink for official documents. As far as I know Läufer & Gutenberg are now part of Société Bic, the company that owns the BIC brand – but I have not been able to confirm this.

The Läufer Oval Office is, in my opinion, an average eraser when it comes to perfermance and the material it is made of. It is mainly interesting because of it’s shape and that is also why I bought it. The Oval Office has the shape of a stretched lens. While the 90° angle of a traditional eraser will soon get too wide for erasing small areas, the shape of the Oval Office means that it can be used for more precise erasing for longer.

Conclusion: A nice eraser I will use occasionally. The shape is practical and looks nice, but performance-wise I would describe this eraser as ‘normal’.

I bought the Läufer Oval Office in November 2010 for € 1.69 (~$ 2.20, ~£ 1.40).

The Staedtler Mars rasor you can see in the photos has been reviewed at pencil talk.

Prices: November 2010

Exchange rates: December 2010

I bought all three erasers in November 2010 from Schule-Uni-Shop. The Staedtler Mars rasor was € 1.37 (~$ 1.80, ~£ 1.15).

On a slighlty unrelated note: If you like Staedtler AND Star Wars, have a look at this article: Staedtler and Star Wars

Send to Kindle

…and found out that there is no Season’s Greetings ink for 2010 …What a shame!

Maybe this should not be too much of a surprise after they recycled 2008′s White Forest ink in 2009. The reasons for last year’s recycling are now unclear. Was it because of quality issues or did they just have too much stock left?

If you want to read more about the Season’s Greetings inks that were available from 2005 to 2009 have a look at this blog post.

Send to Kindle

Today: a mechanical pencil – The Faber-Castell TK-Fine, which is – despite the similar name – quite different to the TK-Fine Vario L, discussed by Dave. or the TK-Fine Executive, also reviewed by Dave.

Price-wise the TK-Fine is only about a third of the price of the TK-Fine Vario L. The TK-Fine is also slighlty cheaper than the Executive version, but this price difference is not that big.

All of the different TK-Fine pencils come in Faber-Castell’s famous dark green colour you know from the Castell 9000, but the TK-Fine version does not have the twist eraser, nor does it have (adjustable) lead cushioning. Another difference is that the Vario has a grooved metal grip area and that the Executive has a similar plastic grip while the TK-Fine‘s grip area is very much like the Apollo‘s. The Apollo has unfortunately disappeared, but a few weeks ago Lexikaliker had a post about the Apollo (Google translation of Lexikaliker’s Apollo post) and he was even kind enough to give his Apollo to an artist whose Apollo broke after 15 years of intense use.

…but the grip is not the only similarity between the Apollo and the TK-Fine. Let’s have a closer look at the similarities and differences between the Apollo and the TK-Fine.

The Apollo was available from 1983 until 2000. Different version can be seen in Lexikaliker’s post and in my opinion the Apollo XL looks just beautiful!

The TK-Fine has been available for over ten years and looks very similar, the main difference in appearance being the different top cap. It is actually being manufactured using the same tools that were used to make the Apollo, but the TK-Fine is made for technical drawings with a rigid, but fully-retractable lead sleeve, similar to the one you might know from Staedtler’s Mars micro. The Apollo on the other hand was made for writing and had a sliding sleeve that retracts as the pencil is used.

The TK-Fine is being produced in Geroldsgrün in Upper Franconia (Germany) available in 0.35mm (TK-Fine 9713), 0.5mm (9715), 0.7mm (9717) and 1.0mm (9719) and has an according top cap marked according to the ISO norm for technical drawing.

I bought the TK-Fine 9717 in April 2010 in Müller in Volkach (Germany) for €4,39 (~$5.80; £3.70) and the TK-Fine 9715 from Schule-Uni-Shop.de, who also ship internationally, for € 2,67 (~$3.50; £2.25). The price in the UK is comparatively high: At CultPens TK-Fine sells for £4.16 (~$6.50; €4.90).

Conclusion:

The TK-Fine offers great value for money if you find a shop that sells it for a reasonable price, but since it is not a common pencil you might have problems getting hold of one.It comes with 3 super-polymer leads in HB, offers a pocket-safe lead sleeve (fully-retractable), it is colour coded according to ISO for lead width, it has an adjustable lead-grade indicator (2B – 4H, plus one neutral setting) and the eraser comes with a cleaning pin.

Exchange Rates: December 2010

I would like to thank Ms Schaklies from Faber-Castell Customer Care for the additional information about the TK-Fine.

By the way… Faber-Castel made it into the Economist again. This time into the Economist’s Schumpeter column, which was introduced about a year ago.

Send to Kindle

PencilWrap has a Peanuts Molskine Giveaway! Just leave a comment at their Peanuts Moleskine Giveaway blog post before 23:59 Pacific Time on 2nd December and you have the chance to win a sealed copy of the large Peanuts 60th Anniversary Limited Edition Ruled Notebook. PencilWrap is even shipping internationally.

Good luck!

Send to Kindle

It’s incredible how fast time is flying by. This blog started last November with a blog post about the Kuru Toga and now it is already more than a year old. In the first year there were altogether 65 blog posts. Now for some statistics: during the first year most visitor came from the USA, followed by the UK, then Germany, then Canada. In terms of numbers the visitors from these four countries, where more than 65% of all visitors came from, were followed by visitors from 106 other countries.

…but enough about statistics. Let’s talk about pencils!

Today I want to write about a pack of “graphic pencils” from Taiwan’s Lion Pencil Co., Ltd., better known as Simbalion. I bought this pack of pencils in December 2009 at Keyroad a shop on Shanghai’s FuZhou Road. If the name rings a bell, I mentioned it in my previous blog post about the Deli sharpener 0635. I never saw this brand in the West before. Have you seen Simbalion pencils in your country?

The pack contains twelve pencils with the grades 4H-H, F, HB, B-6B. My pencil came in an “easy to use easel box”, but this box has since been replaced and these pencil are now available in a new polypropylene case.

The Lion Pencil Company was established in 1956 and is one of Taiwan’s oldest stationery manufacturers. The Lion Pencil Company is proud of having invented the “art set”, but I am sure some other companies will lay claim to having invented the art set in the stationery context, too. Their Taiwanese factory is in Taipei county, but they also have a factory in Kunshan (Jiangsu province), very close to Shanghai and just next to Taicang, where Eisen has a factory.

In Taiwan the normal price for the new set of these pencils in a PP case is 120 NT$ ($ 3.95, £ 2.50, € 2.95). I paid much more for my old “easel box”, maybe because these pencils were imported into the Chinese mainland or maybe, this is only speculation and probably not the case, because the new set is from the factory in Kunshan. According to the labels and stamps on my pack it was produced in the factory in Taipei county on 7th May 2009 – nice to get so much information

The pencils are nice, certainly not scratchy, but I do wonder about Simbalion’s grading. The H pencil from this pack is certainly the softest H pencil I have ever used and does feel softer than the HB pencil from the same pack. The print on the pencils is uneven in places and the end of the pencil has too much paint that is not evenly distributed.

Altogether a nice set of pencils for this price. The pencils are not scratchy or bad in any other way. My main criticism would be the unpredictable hardness or softness of the lead that does not seem to be consistent with the printing on the pencil.

Conclusion

Nothing too fancy, nothing too bad – you get what you paid for as long as you pay not more than the official price.

Price and exchange rates: November 2010

I would like to thank Kevin Davis from O’Bon for the sugarcane paper used in these photos.

Send to Kindle

Today: a tie-in with pencil talk’s blog post about FILA’s global pencil. I want to add the Korean version of the Ticonderoga to Fila’s global pencils series. According to the information from the packaging it is manufactured by Beijing Fila Dixon. One sentence printed on the packaging is very interesting: “R&D in Korea”.

Has the current Ticonderoga been developed in Korea?

Pencil talk mentioned that the different version of this pencil have different cores. This could also mean that not the whole pencil, but that only the core for the Korean version has been developed there – to fit local preferences.

Other Fila pencils I have at my disposal do not emphasise where they have been developed. A pack of Lyra pencils has this sentence printed on the packaging: “Made in China under LYRA-Germany quality standards”, while Dixon pencil packaging only states where the pencils have been produced: Triconderoga: “Made in Mexico”, Ticonderoga Renew: “Made in USA”.

The Triconderoga blister pack comes with a fantastic sharpener from Eisen.

I would like to thank Kent for the AMOS DIXON Ticonderoga.

I would like to thank Sean for the Triconderoga and the Ticonderoga Renew.

Send to Kindle

Please have a look at this exciting new blog.

Send to Kindle

When I started school and we learned how to write we were using writing slates, probably because you can practise again and again without wasting paper. They were not really made of slate, instead they were a bit like a laminated piece of paper, just that the plastic used is much harder and that the surface was not smooth. A few months ago I found my old writing slate again, together with the sponge to clean it and the pencil to write on it.

The sponge came in a container that could be closed – nice when you want to transport it, but not nice if you do not let the sponge dry out from time to time, as the old water will get smelly. The pencil was a “Heft und Tafel” (exercise book and chalkboard) pencil from A.W. Faber-Castell. As the name suggests they can be used on slate and on paper. You can still get the “Heft and Tafel” pencils today. I bought the white Goldfaber pencil you can see in the photo in April 2010 from Bürobedarf Jäcklein in Volkach for € 1 (~$ 1.38; ~85p). Even the writing slate Scolaflex is still available from Brunnen. Mine is from the late Seventies, just like the blue pencil. It has lines on one side to help getting the cap height and baseline right and is plain dark green on the other side.

Writing slates from proper slate are still available for a reasonable price. I just bought this school writing slate (see photo) from Inigo Jones for £ 3.25 (~$ 5.25; ~€ 3.80). It even comes with a slate pencil. Unfortunately I was not able to find out whether the slate is real Welsh slate.

Lexikaliker has a nice photo of a writing slate (Google translation) .

Send to Kindle

My favourite eraser is, without a shadow of a doubt, the Faber-Castell 18 71 20 Dust-Free eraser …or its little brother, the 18 71 30. There are many good erasers. I like Sanford’s Artgum eraser, I sometimes use the Staedtler Mars plastic stick eraser and also cannot really complain about some of the high end erasers I use, like the Graf von Faber-Castell Ersatzradiergummi…

…but none of them matches the comfort and softness of the 18 71 20 / 18 71 30. It does not smear and it does erase like a dream. It is made in Malaysia, like many of Faber-Castell’s erasers, and is suppossed to be dust-free, which refers to the fact that the eraser waste twists up into strands. There are similar erasers out there, for example Flomo’s Non-Dust eraser from Shanghai, but they are usually not as soft and do not erase as well.

Faber-Castell’s dust-free eraser is relatively new, it has only been introduced in 2004.The retail price in the UK is around the £ 1 ($ 1.62; € 1.14) mark, often a little bit higher.

I would be happy to hear what you think of this eraser. Is it only me or do others also think that this eraser is so much better than any other eraser? If you have a chance to try this eraser out, please give it a go.

Flomo Non-Dust (left), 18 71 30C (middle) and 18 71 20 (right)

In case you wonder about the notebook you can see in the photos. It’s a A4 spiral divider notebook with coloured index tabs, made from FSC paper (70 g/m²). It was sold in the UK through Lidl stores and is, as far as I know, made by Zebra Papierverarbeitungs GmbH. It should be available from ProNa.

Send to Kindle

As I mentioned earlier there are new limited edition Moleskines available to celebrate the 60th Anniversary of Schulz’s Peanuts. I first read about the Pac-Man edition in Office Supply Geek’s newsletter which in turn lead me to the Peanuts edition.

This is my first Moleskine. I have used similar notebooks in the past, but somehow I have never bought one from Moleskine Srl / Modo & Modo Spa. My first surprise came when I saw that Moleskines are made in China. I assumed they are made in Italy, but (as Lexikaliker would write it) a quick google search extensive research has shown that they are made in China since 2006. Contrary to the popular believe, I come across quite often, made in China does not equal inferior quality: I have seen many items of extremely high quality that are made in China …but without going into too much details about currency exchange rates etc, I would like to say that I was quite surprised to see Moleskines are made there because similar notebooks made in “high wage countries” are not more expensive than Moleskines (limited edition or not) – I just assumed Moleskines were made in Italy because of the high price …but of course I cannot blame Moleskine Srl or its parent company for trying to milk the cash cow by increasing their profit margin. In the end they are a company and want to make profit.

I ordered this Moleskine from WHSmith’s online store – they were the cheapest shop I could find. This A6 Moleskine was £7.43 ($11.93; €8.56). I have not yet been able to find the limited editions on the high street or in shopping centres (Paperchase, WHSmith, John Lewis, …). It feels nice and well made, though I have seen similar notebooks where the workmanship seems to be better. The coating above the spine feels a bit loose but should be able to cope with daily use.

The notebook comes with Peanuts stickers

Exchange rates: November 2010

Send to Kindle

I assume that that only the tins have the nostalgic look and that  the pencils inside will have the modern look.

Fantastic! I hope I will be able to buy some before they are gone. Getting this years 1835-2010 set was difficult enough.

Send to Kindle

No, you don't have to store your envelopes upright...

A few weeks ago our local Past Times shop sold many items at a reduced price.  Past times is a UK retail chain selling vintage looking gifts influenced by different design periods. Among other reduced items they had this wooden letter rack from their Wit & Wisdom collection¹. I bought it for £12.60 ($19.90, €14.20), the original price was ~ 50% higher.

There's a lined drawer for the more precious pencils

Price: September 2010, exchange rates: October 2010

I would like to thank Henrik for the Stresemann and Sean for most of the rare pencils you can see in the photos.

Two less common items in this photo: ink from Bach’s Tinten and a Kronenheft notepad.

1. that’s why there is a quotation on a plaque

Send to Kindle

If you search for “pencil vending machine” in the search engine of your choice you might be surprised how many different types of pencil vending machines there still are today.

…and a last link: some authors still start the process of writing a book on a piece of paper. Award-winning children’s author Donna McDine used her favourite Graf Von Faber-Castell pen for the first draft of her latest book. The only question remaining is: was it a pencil?

Send to Kindle

For me the Staedtler Noris has always been the archetype of a pencil. The Mars Lumograph might come close and these days I might also consider the Castell 9000, but somehow I never really saw the Castell 9000 being used around me when I was younger. My father was a joiner, so he used carpenter pencils and normal pencils …and because he used a lot of them he would not buy the more expensive ones. There was a point, I think it was the early nineties, when Herlitz Scolair pencils became quite cheap. So he usually used those …and he used a lot of them. Even though I also used to use them I never thought of them as nice pencils, they were always just cheap pencils to me. In the eighties there were of course  Japanese pencils in Germany, too,  but they were usually novelty pencils, not branded pencils. Their selling point would be the unusual look, e.g. unusual patterns or colours printed on them, often metallic. Unfortunately they usually suffered from lead breakage, probably because the manufacturers did not have to try hard: Everybody who bought them did so because of how nice they looked, not because of their reputation – and since they were not branded you could not really know which ones to avoid in the future .

Shanghai's Chung Hwa Drawing Pencil 101

Back to my original topic: I think the Staedtler Noris can be seen as the archetype of a pencil in the UK and in Germany. In the UK the Staedtler tradition can also be seen quite often, but in both countries the Noris seems to be the pencil that is most ‘common’ and recognisable the same time.

Shanghai’s popular pencil

Last time I was in Shanghai I was trying find the Shanghainese equivalent by looking for the most common pencil in everyday life. I expected it would be the Chung Hwa 6151, just because it was a Shanghainese pencil you come across in stationery blogs or web sites, but I never really saw the 6151 in the wild. Instead I came across the Chung Hwa Drawing Pencil 101 again and again. Employees in supermarkets used it to make notes. Waiters in restaurants used it to take orders. It just seemed to be the most common pencil in Shanghai. If there are any reader who know or live in Shanghai and disagree please let me know. I would like to know what your experience is.

China First Pencil Company Ltd.

Before I go into more detail about this pencil I would like to talk about the manufacturer, Chung Hwa, first. There are many Chinese companies and products in different and unrelated industry sectors that are called Chung Hwa: there are Chung Hwa cigarettes, cars, there is Chung Hwa cognac, ink, etc. As far as I can tell these companies have usually no connection except the common name. Chung Hwa (PinYin: ZhongHua) does translate as ‘China’ but not in the normal sense, i.e. when you talk about the country, but in a cultural or literary sense.

The Chung Hwa pencil company traces it roots back to 1935. It changed the name a few times and today’s official name is China First Pencil Company Ltd. They manufacture graphite, colour and cosmetic pencils as well as pencil related stationery and machines for the pencil industry.

Chung Hwa Drawing Pencil 101

Prices for a pack of 10 Chung Hwa 101 Drawing pencils start at 6.50 RMB (97¢, 61p, 70c) but usually they are quite a bit higher. The look of this pencil seems to have changed dramatically over time: In the past there was one version of this pencil (i.e. same name and model number) that  looked like a typical Mars Lumograph copy. The article number of Chung Hwa’s pencil with the Mars Lumograph look (Google translation of the linked page) has however changed from 101 to 111, and you can sometimes even find this pencil in supermarkets in the West.

Today the Chung Hwa Drawing pencil‘s body has a dark green body colour with a light green pattern of bamboo leaves and totems printed over it. The pencil is hexagonal without a painted cap and is labelled on three sides. The wood used is rather red, but does not seem to be the Vatta wood (Macaranga Peltata) mention in a previous blog post. Two sides are labelled in white, one in white and gold. As far as I know the Chung Hwa 101 should be available 6H – H, F, HB, H – 6H. Despite my best efforts I was however unable to find this pencil in F, so I bought one pack in HB and one in H.

…compared to the Staedtler Noris

Since this pencil seems to be Shanghai’s everyday pencil I thought it would be a good idea to compare it to what I think is the UK’s and Germany’s everyday pencil, the Staedtler Noris, as explained earlier. Let’s start by looking at the finish. I like the fact that you can see the wood grain through the paint, but on the 101 the paint has not been applied as well as on the Noris. This applies to both the dark green base and the light green pattern. The Chung Hwa Drawing Pencil 101 in HB is also not as soft and smooth as a Noris HB. It is not yet scratchy and certainly  not worse than an average pencil. The graphite is not too reflective and does not smudge, so keeping the price in mind the 101 HB is very good value for money. The 101 in H is also very good for the price, but compared to the Noris in H it is much softer, more like an F grade pencil.

Conclusion

The Chun Hwa Drawing Pencil 101 offers very good value for money. It is not really a great pencil that can compete with good pencils, but it is definitely better than the average no name pencil and better than many cheap branded pencils.

Send to Kindle

You might have heard about this year’s Nobel prize for physics. In 2004 Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov started removing layers of graphite from pencil leads  …which eventually led to the Nobel prize for their work on experimenting with graphene. Here is also an older article about graphene with the catchy name ‘Black Hole in a Pencil’.

From the world of science to entertainment:

Do you remember A-ha’s music video with the pencil drawings? That was 25 years ago (time flies, doesn’t it). In time for this anniversary: an article about this music video.

Send to Kindle

T-Prime and Palomino BW. More in common than the eraser colour.

The 602 after one line

This behaviour is very different to a Blackwing 602, which will keep the point for much longer. The Palomino Blackwing did actually remind me of another pencil I like, the TiTi T-Prime B (previously mentioned here). Both are very dark, very soft, the Palomino Blackwing even more so, but both are not pencils I would like to pick up when I have to write something, just because they use up so fast that they need constant sharpening.

The Palomino BW after one line

Please do no think that this is supposed to be an objective review. Without specialist equipment to replicate the same conditions this is obviously not possible, e.g. applying the same pressure. (In a previous blog post Lexikaliker mentioned two devices that would do just that, the Elcometer 501 and 3086). Despite my unscientific approach: the thickness of the lines in the beginning and the end should give an indication of what I tried to describe. The pencils were sharpened using a Möbius + Ruppert’s grenade. The paper is from Rhodia (Bloc Rhodia Nº 13).

The 602 keeps a finer point longer

The Palomino Blackwing is a great pencil, one of the smoothest pencils I have ever used …I just find it too impractical for writing small text (my lower-case letters are usually 2mm (1/16″) high). It might be better suited for other tasks, such as drawing or writing large letters, where you need a thicker line. Who knows, the Palomino Blackwing might still become a success story despite this problem, maybe it will be the new Moleskine. Moleskine’s paper does not seem to be the best for fountain pens, but we all know how popular it is today. I was told that in Chinese fairy tales the beautiful girl is usually ‘a bit ill’, which is supposed to make her even more ‘precious’. This reminds me of Moleskine and the Palomino Blackwing.



• I would like to thank Sean for the Blackwings.
• I would like to thank Kent for the TiTi T-Prime B.
• The Blackwing 602 used in this comparison is the version with U.S.A. printed on the body, but without the black stripe on the ferrule.
• I referred to the Elcometer and a blog post from Lexikaliker. These devices move a pencil over a surface under a fixed pressure and angle to the surface. The purpose of these tests, scratch hardness tests (Wolff-Willborn tests) is actually to determine the resistance of coating materials or lacquers to scratch effects on the surface, not to test the pencils themselves.

Send to Kindle

Happy Birthday Staedtler!

You might have already read about this exhibition at Lexikaliker (Google translation of this article), but I just discovered that there is an article about this exhibition in Staedtler’s latest newsletter Inspiration No. 176 (from August 2010).

To celebrate this special year Staedtler released a 175th anniversary pencil set. You can read more about it at pencil talk.

1. Even though Staedtler’s history goes back further, 3 October 1835 is the official ‘birthday’ as it is the first day Staedtler can trace their business back to without interruptions

Send to Kindle

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.

Send to Kindle

The other one is from the Wall Street Journal and is looking at the rivalry between Staedtler and Faber-Castell. To be honest I always thought they get along perfectly fine: selling name rights to each other, having joint press statements, …   but the article portraits a much darker image. I am not sure whether they exaggerated a bit to make the article more catchy.


Thank you David O. for posting the links at pencil talk.

1. great because they are about the pencil industry, I am not sure what to think about the content

Send to Kindle

…but did you know that there is graphite on the moon?

Some of the samples brought back from the Apollo 17 mission in 1972 contained graphite!

The Moon festival is just over. Good to know that Chang’e and YuTu, her rabbit, won’t get bored up there. They can build themselves a pencil and doodle.



Send to Kindle

This eraser was originally called the Eberhard Faber Design Artgum eraser/cleaner. Its name changed when Faber-Castell bought EF and it changed again when Sanford took over.

The Artgum eraser is available in two sizes and I bought mine, the bigger one, from Granthams, a local shop that is also selling stationery over the Internet. Their current price is £1.22(~$1.92, ~€1.43), which is a good price for Europe. Manufactum sells them for more than three times this price. On the other hand £1.22 is expensive compared to the price you pay in America. I have seen a pack of two fo these erasers from a US web site for 69¢.



• Dave has a review of the similar looking Boston cube eraser (which does not seem to perform well)
• Lexikaliker has a great review of the Sanford Artgum eraser entitled “Gentle Giant” (Google translation of this link)
• I mentioned the Paper Mate Non-Stop, seen in the photo, in a previous blog post.

Send to Kindle

• Asenft Azu compared how different notebooks cope with ink. One of the notebooks in the test is the Brunnen Kompagnon.
• Palimpsest has an article on SUCK UK’s drumstick pencil.
• I previously mentioned SUCK UK’s musical ruler and their pencil stand.You can find an article about this pencil stand at Lexikaliker‘s blog (Google translation of this link).

Send to Kindle

I don’t want to give the impression that I am a big fan of Tesco’s. When we go shopping we also buy from the other supermarkets (except maybe ASDA) …but I just have to mention this offer as it might be of interest for those of you in the UK (there might also be a similar offer in Ireland).

Tesco is currently selling the right handed version of the Stabilo EASYgraph double pack for 75p (~$1.17, 89c). The normal retail price is £2.70 (~$4.22, ~€3.23).

The EASYgraph is designed for schoolchildren who learn to write. It has a triangular shape, is over-sized and its specialty is its design which includes grip moulds that are supposed to support the fingers in gripping the pencil easily. As the pencil gets shorter through sharpening the next grip moulds can be used until the pencil is used up. There is a clear layer of paint above the wood visible in the moulds to protect the, from dirt. There is also a name tag at the end of the pencil which emphasises that this is a pencil for school children and the wood is PEFC certified.

Stabilo EASYgraph (front) and Lamy plus (back)

Altogether a very nice pencil, but it does feel a bit scratchy. After reading one of Sean’s recent articles I do however think that the sound this pencils makes might be responsible for the scratchy feeling.

As far as I know the EASYgraph pencils are produced in Český Krumlov in Bohemia.

The EASYgraph on a Cherry G80-3000LSC

Stabilo EASYgraph (front) and Lamy plus (back)

In case you wonder about the keyboard in the photo: This is my favourite keyboard. The G80-3000LSC (click tactile) from Wisconsin’s Cherry Corporation. How does it fit into this article? They are both ‘writing instruments’ and they are both made in the Czech Republic.

• You can find a great review in of the Stabilo EASYgraph at Lexikaliker (in German) (Here is a link to the English Google translation)
• Stabilo’s EASYgraph page (UK version)
• Cult Pens’ Stabilo EASYgraph page



I would like to thank Lexikaliker for the Lamy plus pencil used in the photos.


Prices and exchange rates: September 2010

Send to Kindle

Photo by Diana Metzner

Today we have some sort of premiere at Bleistift. The first guest post (..if this counts as a guest post).

Photo by Diana Metzner

Diana, who in 1980 was my first English teacher, read my recent post about the Japan Clips and send me a photo and additional information about some other unusual clips she bought in the past, including the Eckenklammern from ALCO.

Diana wrote:

Here are the “Eckenklammer” corner clips, which I used as in 1,2,3. They are flatter than a normal paper clip and hold the paper tighter. I think they are only meant for 2 or three sheets, though, but they do look really good on “important” papers.

There seem to be at least three different version of the  corner clips available: brass-plated, nickel-plated and made from aluminium. A box with 100 corner clips usually retails for about €1.50 (~$1.95, ~£1.25), a box with 1000 retails for about €9.00 (~$11.70, ~£7.50).

As mentioned before Diana’s Eckenklammern were from ALCO, a family business established in 1906. They are also available from other companies and I assume that all the different corner clips come from the same manufacturer as they all seem to look the same.  They are size is 18 x 18 mm and about  0.25 mm thick.

Prices and exchange rates: September 2010

Photo by Diana Metzner

Send to Kindle

More information about the Edelstein inks from Pelikan.

More information about the Edelstein inks from Niche Pens.

1. Edelstein is the German word for gemstone or jewel

Send to Kindle

The first time I came across Banditapple carnets was when my friend Kent from Pencilog send me a few to try out. A few weeks later I received another envelope with Banditapple carnets, this time from Arnie Kim, the man behind the Banditapple carnets and an acquaintance of Kent. Kent told me that Arnie quit his job in Korea and went to Vietnam to create the perfect notebook. Vietnam was a French colony and was therefore influenced by French culture with the French-style carnet being no exception. Kent also added that Vietnam is the most suitable place in Asia to produce European-style notebooks. When I asked Arnie about his carnets he told me that he designed and planned the whole project and that he spent more than two years to find the right paper, the right “masters” to produce his carnets and the right location to make the carnets. The carnets currently available are the first edition, but he hopes to produce the second edition in a year or so.

Talking about the current edition he added that the paper is acid free paper and that it works great with a fountain pens, because the ink can dry quickly and because there is no feathering.

His Banditapple carnets are now being sold in the large stationery stores in Seoul and are also available in selected shops in Japan. He is also selling them online (contact banditapple@gmail.com if you are interested), with most orders being shipped to the USA and Japan, followed by Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland. The online sales are however tiny in comparison as Arnie does not have an online shop and these orders are based on word of mouth. The carnets are available in the following sizes:

• Peewee size, a moleskine pocket size, 9×14 cm
  for 1,800 KRW (~$1.54, ~ €1.21, ~£1.00)
• Handy Size, a midori traveler’s note size, 11×21 cm
  for 2,800 KRW (~$2.40, ~€1.89, ~£1.56)
• Tablet size, a moleskine large size, 13×21 cm
  for 3,300 KRW (~$2.83, ~€2.22, ~£1.84)

Banditapple left, Muji right

When I first looked at the Banditapple carnets my first impression was that they are very similar to Muji’s passport sized notebooks I bought in the past. If you have used Muji notepads before or read my previous posts about Muji (about their A5 notebook and their A6 memo pad) you know that Muji products look nice and are great for pencil users, but that their paper is not particularly fountain pen friendly. I use their white lined A6 notebooks to keep QSL logs, but I only use graphite pencils (mainly mechanical pencils) for this purpose. The similarities between the Muji passport notebooks and the Banditapple carnets lend themselves to comparing them. Keeping Kent’s and Arnie’s praise for their ability to cope with ink in mind (“The main partner with this notebook is actually fountain pen”) I decided to have a closer look and see how both cope with graphite and ink.

Banditapple carnet, sewn through the cover

Both notebooks are sewn, not stapled, which adds a nice touch to them. While the Banditapple’s cover feels like normal, coloured paper the Muji’s cover seems to be made from impregnated paper, which will probably keep it looking new and tidy for longer. Another difference is that the Muji notebook was sewn with a white thread before the outer cover was glued on, so the seam is not visible from the outside, while the Banditapple was sewn with a red thread through the cover. The paper used in the notbook is also quite different. While the Banditapple’s paper looks a bit rough, Muji’s paper looks extremely smooth, nearly shiny in comparison and with a more yellowish tint.

Banditapple

Muji

Workmanship on both notebooks is very good, but if you are looking hard you can see that the last bit of thread is hanging loose on both notebooks and that the rounded corners of both notebooks could have been cut a bit better.

Texture Banditapple	Texture Muji
Click on the images to see the texture in large.

Writing text using a pencil and erasing is fine in both notebooks, but shading the paper with a pencil does not really work well in the Muji notebook. Shading works much better in the Banditapple carnet, but the rougher paper means that the paper’s texture will be a little bit more obvious than in Muji’s notebook. The suitability for ink was tested with two different fountain pens and inks. I used a Lamy Al-Star with an M nib, filled with Montblanc royal blue ink and a Pelikan Souverän M400 white tortoise with a 14C F nib and Lamy blue-black ink¹. This M400 is usually a very wet writer, but since this ink is very dry this combination overall is dryer than the Lamy / Montblanc combination. While the Banditapple carnet copes exceptionally well with both inks, the Muji notebook has some problems which result in the text being clearly visible on the back of the page.

The back of the page, Banditapple left, Muji right

The Banditapple carnet is the clear winner in this comparison, because of the superior paper. The Muji passport notebook paper does not perform well if you use ink or if you draw with pencils. I have to emphasise that the paper of the Muji passport notebook is performing much better than the paper in Muji’s A5 notebook I have reviewed previously. If you only write in notebooks and you only use pencils, then both will be excellent and the Muji will provide you with a cover that is more water and dirt-repelling.

I would like to thank Kent and Arnie for the Banditapple carnets used in for this post.

Arnie is an avid collector of postcards. If you would like to send him a postcard, please send it to:

Young-jo Arnold Kim
CPO Box 1754
Seoul
Republic of Korea
100-600

Prices and exchange rates: September 2010

1. This is the blue-black ink from the bottle,  not from the cartridge. I emphasise this because the blue-black ink from the bottle is said to be an iron-gall ink, while the blue-black cartridges are said to be just a mix of blue and black ink

Send to Kindle

Dave has a review of Stabilo’s move easyergo mechanical pencil.

A link to other posts at Bleistift that involve Tesco.

Prices and exchange rates: August 2010

Send to Kindle

Delvaux shop in the Royal Galleries of Saint-Hubert

Over the past few weeks I have written posts about two different pencil cases: the Sonnenleder pencil case Berit and the Eberhard Faber Lederetui. Both are made from leather and price-wise both are somewhere in the middle (Berit: €36 / $45 / £29, Lederetui: €15 / $19 / £12). Today I want show what pencil cases are available at the more extreme ends of the price scale.

Delvaux pencil case Prime

I have seen the expensive one I want to present today, the Prisme pencil case from Delvaux, in the posh Royal Galleries of Saint-Hubert in Brussels …on a recent trip to Belgium. Delvaux was founded in 1829 in Brussels and describes itself as ‘the oldest fine leather luxury goods company in the world’. This pencil case is available in two colours and will set you back € 140 (~$177, ~£115) …but you will own a pencil case with (the following is taken from their web site) a triangular profile that is pale Basane leather lined and has a double pen holder in leather stitched to the base. Furthermore the brass accessories have a a brushed palladium or brushed gilded finish.

In case you wonder… I did not buy one

Rheita Schüleretui, closed

On the other end of the spectrum we have cheap pencil cases, pre-filled with pencils, for children. On my last trip to Germany I saw that most of them sell for about €3 (~$3.80, ~£2.50). If you pay a bit less than €3 you can get a no name pencil case filled with ruler, eraser and lots of no name pencils. If you spent a few cents more you can get a much better one, like this 50 piece pencil case (article number 406-0) from Rheita, which I bought for less than €3.50. It includes colour pencils, rulers, an eraser, paper clips, a sharpener and ink cartridges (in Bavarian schools, possibly even in all German schools, children have to use fountain pens).

Rheita Schüleretui

Compared to other German stationery companies Rheita, or Rheita-Krautkrämer, is one of the young’uns. Rheita’s history started in 1948, when the brothers Oswald and Fridolin Krautkrämer established “Rheingold-Tafel”, a company with more than 100 employees, manufacturing school writing slates made from slate and wood. The headquarters were near the river Rhein, hence the name.  The company was later renamed Rhein-Tafel, which became RHEI-TA.

Prices: Delvaux – April 2010, Rheita – August 2010
Exchanges rates: August 2010

Send to Kindle

Last time I was in Germany I discovered a second hand book shop in Würzburg that also displayed stationery in the shop windows. The stationery on display seemed to be a mix of items I have seen in Lexikaliker’s blog and in Manufactum’s catalogue, but there were also a few items I have not seen anywhere else.

Zerkall & Artesanos del Papel paper

Items I saw there for the first time included paper and envelopes from Zerkall Ingres, mouldmade in a paper mill dating to the 16th century, and cotton/linen paper from Artesanos del Papel in Alicante.

One of the items I bought in this book shop is a paper clip from OHTO, a paper clip looking a bit like a picture frame hanger. The informal name seems to be Japan-Clip. It can hold 20 sheets of 80g paper. The standard clip is nickel-plated, selling for 20c each (25¢, 16p), the posh version for 50c (63¢, 41p ) is 18K gold-plated.

Japan-Clips with Faber-Castell eraser on Banditapple carnet

The nice thing about these clips is that they still look good even if they hold many sheets of paper, while ordinary paper clips usually look unsightly if you squeeze too many sheets of paper in. On the other hand ordinary paper clips can hold more sheets of paper and seem to be softer to the paper. When you try to squeeze too many sheets of paper (> 25) into the Super Clip it can damage the paper slightly when you remove the paper clip again.

...compared to ordinary paper clips

After using OHTO’s Super Clips for a while I came to appreciate them as re-usable, temporary clips that hold paper together much better and tighter than ordinary paper clips. The fact that I have two different colours helps to distinguish similarly documents I am working with, e.g. two sets of statistics from different years.

Links:

I found this company selling Zerkall Ingres paper in the USA.

JetPens and Cult Pens do not seem this paper clip and I could not find an American or British online shop selling the Japanese paper clip. RSVP and Modulor are two German online shops that have the paper clip in stock and ship to most countries.

Prices and exchange rates: August 2010

I would like to thank Kent and Arnie for the Banditapple carnets used in the photos.

Send to Kindle

I think I should start this blog entry with a warning. If you expect this to be a pencil case review you might be slightly disappointed …there is something, but not too much to write about this pencil case, so to make this blog entry more substantial I will also talk a little bit about the Eberhard Faber brand and include a little bit of information about the pencils they offer in Europe. OK, let’s start:

When I was in Germany in April 2010 I bought this Eberhard Faber pencil case at the Müller store in Volkach, Lower Franconia. Müller is a drug store chain with shops in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Slovenia, Hungary, Croatia and other countries. The Müller shops I have seen so far had a nice selection of stationery.

Keeping the size of the shop in Volkach in mind they had a rather big stationery section. All the common products and brand were stocked …those that you would find in most shops in Germany, i.e. mainly Staedtler, Faber-Castell and for mechanical pencils the common Japanese brands as well.

You will also find some Lyra pencils, but don’t get your hopes up if you are looking for niche products. You will certainly find sharpeners, but if you are want a specific model not from Staedtler or Faber-Castell, but from Dux, M+S  or Eisen you will be disappointed …but to be fair: not many stationery shops stock these brands anyway.

One of the reasons why I bought this pencil case was to get it while it is still available. Eberhard Faber was an American brand, but was sold to Faber-Castell. Since the 1990s Sanford owns it and as far as I know Eberhard Faber products disappeared more or less completely in the USA. If this is not the case and Eberhard Faber articles are still available in the USA I would be grateful if you could let me know. Not uncommon in such a case: another company held the trademark for another geographic area, in this case Staedtler continued to use the Eberhard Faber name in Europe¹. Recently Staedtler sold the Eberhard Faber trademark, which now belongs to Faber-Castell. My understanding is that current Eberhard Faber products will not completely disappear, but will instead be sold under the Staedtler name in the future.

Eberhard was the brother of Lothar von Faber, the great-great grandfather of Count Anton Wolfgang, the current CEO of Faber-Castell. Originally Eberhard managed the subsidiary in New York and later  he established his own company under his own name (see page 8 of the 2 / 2007 issue of Faber-Castell topics).

If you want to know more about the Eberhard Faber brand: page 5 of the 1/2010 issue of Faber-Castell topics has a great article about the history of the Eberhard Faber brand.

Back to the pencil case. The pencil case was €14.99 ($19.90, £ 12.45) and is filled with 17 pencils (all of them triangular shaped), an eraser, a ruler, a sharpener, 6 ink cartridges and a timetable. The material of the pencil case is real leather, but unfortunately the leather is rather thin. Four of the pencils are the Tricki Dicki highlighter pencils in neon colours: yellow, orange, green and red. The pencil case was available in three different colours: tan, black and maroon, the one I bought. Just for your information: In Germany maroon is usually referred to as “Bordeaux red”.

Eberhard Faber Tricki Dicki highlighter pencils

Although possibly not the best choice of name for English speaking countries, these pencils work very well, but like all highlighter pencils they cover written or printed letters to some extent. They look very similar to the Staedtler textsurfer dry, so I assume the Tricki Dicki and the textsurfer dry might actually be the same pencil. The circles, stars and triangles printed on the Tricki Dicki pencils can also be found on Staedtler’s new learner’s pencil. I could not find a direct equivalent to the other colour pencils from the pencil case in Staedtler’s product range. The most similar pencil seems to be the Staedtler ergosoft, but unlike the ergosoft, the Eberhard Faber 1410 colour pencils do not have ABS coating.

Eberhard Faber colour pencils 1410

The sharpener that comes with the pencil case is the Möbius+Ruppert double hole magnesium sharpener 0211. The white eraser that you get does not have anything printed on it.

Möbius+Ruppert double hole magnesium sharpener 0211

The Eberhard Faber Lederetui is a tri-fold pencil case with the fold-out part containing a timetable on one side and the ruler, the ink cartridges and three 1210 pencils on the other side.

I am not sure whether there is an equivalent pencil that is being sold under the Staedtler name. If there is one it might be the triangular Noris Club.

The Eberhard Faber 1210 pencils are very nice indeed, rather dark and not scratchy. They do however look relatively boring and I have to admit that I am less of a fan of triangular pencils than most other people.

Eberhard Faber 1210 pencil

Conclusion:

The Eberhard Faber Lederetui is great value for money. You get quite a few pencil and a nice sharpener for your money. Compared to high-end pencil cases like the Sonnenleder Lasse it does however feel a bit flimsy and the leather, even though it is real leather, feels quite plasticy. This pencil case is being sold to school children, therefore the thin leather makes me wonder whether the pencil case will survive very long in the real world… Nevertheless I am sure it will last for a long time if you look after it.

Links:

Staedtler press release about selling the Eberhard Faber trademark to Faber-Castell

Price: April 2010

Exchange rates: August 2010

1. This reminds me of Grundig, I mentioned them recently in another blog entry

Send to Kindle

These Carrefour notepads seem to be available in France, Belgium, Switzerland and Italy. The notepads use 80 g paper, are A7 size and have 160 pages.

The orange-coloured cover and the purple (5mm) grid are very similar to Rhodia paper, but even though these notepads are made in France neither the orange nor the purple match the colours of the Rhodia notepad I have at home, so I cannot be sure whether the paper is made by Rhodia or whether it is just a look-alike.

The cover is pre-folded, making it easy to fold it back when writing.

The paper has the same weight as Rhodia paper, but the surface of the paper, as well as the shade of white is also different, making me think it is not Rhodia paper.

Comparison Carrefour / Rhodia notepad

Nevertheless it is very nice paper, it is quite cheap and copes well with pencil and ink.

If you know whether it is made by Rhodia please let me know.

Send to Kindle