I have been trying to find a good stationery box subscription for a while. The perusal of available candidates online easily identifies most as overpriced or of minimal utility, and unfortunately the Papergang offering from Ohh Deer was no different. Alas, my filter let this one through and I lost a couple months’ subscription fees before I found this out.

Stabilo is another European brand that is very difficult to get here in North America. I guess I should qualify that their pencils are hard to find, but their pens are everywhere (and not very good). For this haul I relied on Amazon.de.

One of my favourite pencil blogs is Bleitstift: regular commentary from a German pencil and stationery lover living in Britain. I’ve learned a lot reading his posting history and one thing I love seeing is his occasional posts on European Disney illustrators.

Viking stuff is devilishly hard to find in North America. CW Pencils occasionally carries an item or two, but nothing close to their wider product line. Specifically, their artist pencil line, Rollo, is the only one produced in multiple hardness grades.

What will probably be my last mail of the year arrived, today from CultPens, with a bunch of new Staedtler supplies for my collection.

My quest for specimens from various pencil manufacturers has landed me a large number of artist sets. I use my pencils about 50% for writing and another 50% for drawing, but never particularly used a wide variety of hardnesses. I like to draw with the same kinds of pencils I like to write with: not too hard, making a strong black line while still giving me some amount of feedback from the paper texture. Softer than a 4B typically means not enough feedback, and harder than HB usually means not dark enough. I generally pay attention to these both when I draw and when I write.

There are a peculiarly large number of stationery subscription boxes out there. Most of them seem like something a suburban grandma in North Carolina might think is nice, but not a lot have tempted me. Until I landed on Rad and Hungry.

I got my latest batch of Russian pencils and a stack of notebooks from Ozon.ru, with some good and some bad.

If you’re a fan of groovy music, this 2017 project from Eirik Glambek Bøe of Kings of Convenience and Skog fame will be right up your alley. I recently acquired the vinyl, itself a nice paper white like a good sketchpad, and saw to my delight that it’s covered in lovely stationery.

I purchased another US-made batch from CW Pencils, this time with a focus on General Pencil Co. I got a box of Cedar Pointe #1s and Semi-Hex #1s, which seem to share the same fair-quality soft lead. It’s quite a smooth write and the Cedar Pointes are very attractive and feel great in the hand for an unvarnished wood. I also got a pack of Kimberly Bs, which feel a little softer than the latter two.

My current favourite coloured pencils for art are from Cretacolor. Cretacolor makes a stellar line of pigment-rich, beautifully-marking sticks. Their graphite offerings are something I’d more like to discuss today, however.

La Compagnie Francaise des Crayons (CFC), France’s only remaining pencil manufacturer, produces the lovely Graphite 601 line of art pencils for Conté à Paris, as well as a wide range of other woodcase objects for that brand, and still manages a handful of bespoke imprints like Calepino. But the former - the namesake of the modern pencil-making process - still manages to sit at the top of my list of the best pencils I’ve ever used. What’s the secret to these amazing matte grey pencils? Let’s take a look.

I have long had an interest in Russia. It’s such a giant interesting country with so much history, all of which is constantly blocked from access by politics. I took a couple years of Russian lessons as a distraction a dozen year ago after a big breakup, and continue to hold fantasies that I’ll put it to use someday…

Eager to avoid another mistake on my next shopping spree, I have started to verify the origin mark of what I want to buy before I commit. At least as much as possible. I realize global supply chains mean it’s likely that anything that says “Made in Germany” has parts from a dozen or so other countries, but the label still has to be worth something, and I wanted my consumer choices to focus on that.