I hope blog readers are aware that some effort goes into finding unusual and high quality pencils to write about. They unfortunately don’t just fall out of an office supply cabinet. While there have been some successes in the last three years, we’ve also really just scratched the surface.
As an example of the challenge, much of the “official” catalogue of American manufacturers Dixon, Sanford, General, and Musgrave is inaccessible to me, yet these companies are relatively close. But at least their leading products are available.
There are many more pencil manufacturers serving national or regional customer bases that engage in little or no export activity. There are also national offices of the large conglomerates who make their own interesting pencils, such as Sanford Venezuela, Faber-Castell Brazil, and Staedtler Thailand.
To try and get more coverage of international pencils, I would like to invite readers who regularly use Pax, Tomsk, Fila, Hindustan, Viarco, Shahsons, Colleen, or any other brand not usually seen at this site, to write a review or story about pencils of interest, for publication here. You can contact me by email to discuss details.
Hi.
greetings from south Korea
I’m afraid that I leave my message here, but I couldn’t get to your email for some reasons of my computer. I’ve been collecting pencils just for fun.
if it is ok, I would like to share pictures of some of my pencils.
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=26313&l=58d62&id=810933078
Thank you for sharing the photos. You have many pencils I’ve never seen, including several interesting boxes from India. Are those pencils typically for sale in South Korea?
I bought those Indian pencils while I’m travelling India. One box with 10 pencils and free sharpner is about 60cent.
Usually, I got most of my pecnils from my acquaintances who travel outside of Korea. (I poked them to get those to me : )
Here, I can get Japanese, German, USA brand pencils, cheap ‘made- in -China’ character pencils for kids mostly, rarely including, Turkish one.
Actually I’ve thought about doing a review of some Austrian pencils for some time. Basically there is just one Austrian pencil company anymore,
that owns the factories from the Austrian branch of Koh-I-Noor Hardtmuth, but not the former brand name (now marketed as Cretacolor), and also the Jolly/Brevillier-Urban brand. They do have some very interesting offerings I’ve not seen from other companies yet, like a variety of the red-blue pencil with other colours, actually a whole
box of “two-ended” pencils with different colours.
http://www.brevillier-urban.com/product_info.php?info=p701_JOLLY-Crazy-Buntstift–12er-Kartonetui.html
Ralph, thank you for sharing this – I think many would welcome a review of Austrian pencils.
Staedtler also labels some of their pencils as being made in Austria, don’t they?
I live in Hong Kong (the former British colony in Southern China) so I have access to a wide range of Chinese pencils (of both high and low quality) by different brands that you might not even have heard of – e.g. Chung Hwa, Marco, etc.
After my exams, I aam willing to photograph part of my collection and upload them on the net. If you are interested I may also help you purchase some of them. Keep in touch :)
I am interested in knowing what is the wood used for the pencils & which is the best wood & why, also how can one test the quality of wood.