Staedtler is what I would call the “everyone brand.” They make really nice stuff, none of which looks or performs especially exceptionally, but still much better than the average stuff used by the vast majority of stationery users, particularly in North America.

I used to use mechanical pencils much more than I do today. My earliest memories of mechanical pencils were the Staedtler 2mm clutch pencils (and the fancy canister pointers) sitting around the drafting room at my dad’s office when he would take me to work on weekends as a little one. I was fascinated by the clutch mechanism, and I think this is why I took a drafting/engineering class in middle school. When I became a pencil collector, this also became the first non-woodcase pencil I bought: both the Staedtler of my childhood and a Caran d’Ache Fixpencil. They look very nice in my pencil jar, but rarely see use.

There is a precedent for stationery-adjacent music reviews here. Whilst this one is not exactly stationery-related, as I’m a collector of European pencils I can’t avoid being somewhat plugged into European consumer culture, and the Eurovision Song Contest probably best encapsulates European culture. Unlike European political institutions, Eurovision is pretty much open to any country that wants to join the European Broadcasting Union, a pseudo-private corporation funded largely by governments and broadcast license fees. This makes it more geographically and culturally inclusive than other European institutions. As one would expect considering the population and national borders of the region, these days the majority of acts are Slavic, making “Dobry Vechir” the most common greeting heard over the evening.

Almost all of the Canadian-made pencil brands that were produced prior to the industry’s exit from the country were local operations of major American players. I’ve managed in recent months to score quite a few fun examples of these, as well as some possibly more local pencils that have me stumped.

In terms of general quality of their everyday retail products, I consider Faber-Castell to be the best pencils on the market. They pay attention to detail and consciously source for quality and sustainability, both for their brand and for wider social ends. On top of that, their pencils are a great value considering the quality you get without having to rely on gimmicky artificial scarcity tactics or manipulative marketing like we’ve seen with Blackwing and Caran d’Ache - both brands that carry great products but you feel a little dirty when you buy them.

I am not the type to write recurring narrative about the daily activities of my life. At least not right now. Rather than a reflective diary, I keep an “everything journal,” in which I write work and class notes, drafts of my academic writing assignments, and ephemera like pencil test swatches, stamps and stickers, book and other reading responses and lists of things I want to explore or check out in the future.

Extra points to those who catch the Swedish reference in the title. Today we’ll talk about sharpeners. Honestly there are few more frustrating things than trying to keep a pencil going through long periods of writing or drawing, and constantly revisiting a sharpener that either gives a poorly-shaped point, fails to actually shave the wood away, or repeatedly takes big chunks of the pencil core with it. Here I profile all the sharpeners I currently use, none of which I find 100% satisfying.

An Argentine auction find back in December finally arrived after four months of COVID-related flight delays, and it contains some very interesting stuff. The first were some vintage Conté pencils in a lovely dark blue, enclosed in a handsome branded plastic box. The 3B leads were smoother and darker than the average 3B, and the pencils were marked as made in Argentina.

Viarco is a Portuguese manufacturer currently most famous for their lovely box set of vintage reproductions. This box set is quite beautiful and contains a whole slew of very nice HB pencils and a box of unsharpened copying pencils which will never be sharpened or used if I can help it. Like fellow Iberian manufacturers Milan, they generally work the low-end of the market, which means you can get a ton of their stuff for very low cost. It also means that justifying transatlantic freight requires filling quite a sizeable box.

I’ve been slowly filling my collection with the various Caran d’Ache pencils currently on the market, with the exception of their various limited editions. Honestly, between Blackwing and Caran d’Ache, limited edition pencils are something I’d rather just ignore. I fell for it with Blackwing, joining their quarterly subscription once, and after a few days writing with my first specimen realizing it’s honestly nothing special, and I’d rather use my Staedtler eraser than a fancy one mounted on the tip of the stick.

Whilst browsing Artistica, a Swedish stationery site, I came across a brand called Renesans. A Polish brand with two lines of Polish-made graphite pencils, one of which is only available in artist sets of 12, some extra digging brought me to the site of Polish art supplier Dekoret, who offered to ship me some of these.

In a recent Ebay find, I landed a batch of vintage German pencils from Faber Castell, Eberhard Faber and Staedtler. The package arrived from Cyprus, so I assume this is a friend of Stuart Lennon’s. The vintage packaging was in beautiful shape and the seller even included a few extras. The pencils hail from a variety of eras, from the pre-war Eberhard Fabers wrapped in a simple paper belly band, to the more recent Staedtler Traditions packaged in a decorative tin.

Stabilo seems to be one of those under-appreciated brands, especially in North America, that puts out an excellent product but isn’t often seen as a quality pencil compared to its neighbours in Central Europe. Manufacturing most of its woodcase pencils in Czechia right next to Koh-i-Noor, they have several lines of pencils, mostly aimed at the student market, which I guess is quite lucrative. I feel their pencils match or surpass equivalents from Staedtler and Koh-i-Noor.

I have been wanting to write a bit more about the Voskresensk Russian pencil brand ever since I bought my first few specimens from Ozon back in the fall of last year. I had an awful experience with their aquarelle coloured pencils (nearly all the leads were shattered in the woodcases on their journey from Moscow). But the graphite pencils were amazing - heavy, dark and draggy leads the likes of which I would gladly pay the hefty exchange and transport fees again.

One of the first sites I found when researching the batch of pencils that started me on this road to hoarder ruin was Pencil Revolution. Written by Erasable podcast co-host Johnny Gamber, I shortly discovered he also had some fun zines in his Etsy store. They’re quite inspirational and soon I may even try my hand at something like this too…

In addition to my sizeable collection of modern Russian pencils, I have started acquiring some vintage pencils from Soviet times. Brands like Krasin were producing before the Soviet Union and continue to produce today after it is gone, and others like the recently-demised Tomsk were in production early in Soviet times and survived the fall but couldn’t compete with capitalism itself.

Milan is a Spanish stationer with a very large product catalogue but without much North American presence. I’ve managed to find their products from various European sellers such as Nero’s Notes, Deskstore of Sweden and The Journal Shop, and Amazon’s Spanish site also carries quite a few Milan items, especially if you have an EU dropship address.

When I was searching for my Yule cards to send out to friends and family, I stumbled onto the work of Scottish artist Catherine Redgate on Etsy. I adore her “spirit” characters, who are adorned in various guises, from sun to winter to forest to water. I proceeded to order a whole slew of her cards. The spirit character sort of resembles me. Fat and hairy with lots of tattoos and plants growing from my hair. Well, not really the last one.

Most countries have their own peculiar school exercise book systems and histories. Rad and Hungry has even made a whole business out of finding and distributing them. I have the benefit of living in a country within a country, so can find two overlapping nationalities’ worth of school exercise books in my vintage searches.

One of the first sets of Russian pencils I bought was from the Tomsk pencil factory in Siberia, simply branded “Russian Pencils.” They were very similar to the Krasin and Voskresenskaya clear-laquered pencils I bought around the same time. Unlike the latter, the Tomsk pencils were slightly thinner than standard, and seemed to have a better quality core, though they were all quite off-centre. I loved the packaging, and had spent quite some time in the past few months searching Russian online retailers for more, all to no avail.