The website leadholder.com appears offline. My thanks to blog reader Paul for alerting me.
Leadholder was an online catalogue of thick lead leadholders – but also thin lead mechanical pencils and woodcase pencils devoted to technical drawing. It had a collection of historical catalogs that was a great reference for anyone interested in pencil history. The website was also a technical marvel, having many navigational features that were not commonly available back in 2001.
Oh no – this is sad news.
This is a real loss…Andrey, the owner of the Andrey’s Pencils shop on eBay has the whole site backed up in a way that can be used offline. I’ve been trying to persuade him to copy me a version. Maybe we could get it restored!? You can also get most of it through the waybackmachine website archiving doohicky at http://www.archive.org but it’s slow to load and some bits are missing links etc.
After poking around on archive.org I was able to find pages 20-27 of the 1980 Pentel catalog. it was a matter of looking for the page http://leadholder.com/cat-pentel-1980-p20.html and looking at the crawl from 2 July 2011. Hopefully this will be useful to someone now or in the future.
By incredible coincidence, I have a “httracked” copy also, from 16 june 2017…
The html content works, the database entries logically don’t work.
Let’s hope somehow David gets his great database back online. If I can help, let me know.
Cheers!
Hi,
I was an avid reader of his website when I was starting out in my collection of Staedtler Leadholders and I am sad to see that this site has closed down. His site was a well of information that led me in the direction I needed to go. This information saved me many years of work if I had to start over again. Thankfully I have save a text copy of his Staedtler Leadholder information to my computer and have added many more to this document over the last 10 years or so.
For anyone looking for his work I have located the “Leadholder.com” main index on the “Internet Archive WaybackMachine”. Most of these links appear to work.
http://web.archive.org/web/20170617140127/http://leadholder.com:80/index.html
Regards,
Lance.