I haven’t usually had good luck with electric sharpeners. I generally find them overpriced compared to their manual counterparts, especially as so many of them are not of the best quality. The last one I tried out also sharpened pencils with a quite short and convex point which challenged even my best firm pencil cores. And it stopped working after three months. Though I haven’t had my latest that long, it has proved my favourite sharpener I’ve ever used.

It’s no secret that I like stickers. I do a lot of journaling and letter writing and enjoy adding interesting decorations throughout these efforts. I saw an ad in my Instagram feed a while back for a shop that sells little else, and this shop just happened to be near where my family home in San Luis Obispo, California. Pipsticks is a sticker shop that collects many of their products into monthly subscription packs, so I ordered a couple of these, as well as a couple rolls of washi tape, and some postcards and greetings cards.

Chambers, the world’s cutest little pencil factory, has a new product in stock: two sets of branded HB eraser-tipped packs, one in pastels and the other in a range of goth colours. I’m not a huge lover of eraser-tips, but I was quite tickled to get another batch from this maker. Like many small-run makers (most notably Viarco), I found a graphite dust coating the product, which is either a homely touch or a quality control issue, depending on your perspective.

I am sure I’m not the only stationery enthusiast who has a little trouble using up all the acquisitions I make. Avoiding excessive hoarding and storage overflow (and subsequent domestic unrest) is a typical part of this hobby. Luckily, there are various ways out there for adding to ones stationery output, and a great one is penpals.

I’m always on the lookout for new sources of journaling notebooks. My preferred format are A5, soft-cover, thread-bound and saddle-stitched, with quality lined paper that can hold ink from my stamps but write well with my pencils. I prefer less than 100 pages as this allows me to put them into my notebook holder and still have room for adding lots of journaling ephemera and art inside, which tends to puff them up a bit. Something I really like is finding unique and interesting sellers, and a recent one I found was Little Bird Singing.

Lately I’ve been trying to solicit more local stores and businesses, especially Québec shops that have a stationery flair. One that passed through my Instagram mentions was Pigeon Atelier Letterpress.

My dislike of extruded pencils is fairly well-known amongst my pencil-friends. As much as many of you love your Staedtler Wopexes, I have tried even the best and highest-priced brands’ wood-polymer blends, to no avail. From Staedtler to Lyra, and my typical complaint is that the core is too hard and requires too much pressure to get a decent mark on the page, though I say this as an admitted soft-grade lover. This core’s polymer composition also means the feedback is different, which makes me tend to press harder because I’m not feeling the drag of the paper grain. Finally, the case is also polymer-based and tends to bend and warp in an uncomfortable way, especially in the presence of all this increased pressure I give to the point.

I did my democratic duty (doodie?) and voted. They let us keep our pencils (in fact, required it), which was nice, though I find I can’t really write for long with golf-length pencils. The kind lady working the table said “C'est à vous - un souvenir !” and indeed that’s what it will be. I wish they’d have had them custom printed though. Only I will ever know this is what it’s a souvenir of…

True to its name, this shop has an extremely wide selection of washi tape. I don’t know why I latched on to this specific type of stationery, but recently this has become my favourite kind of decorative journal amendment. Finding both a variety of interesting designs and some large sets to beef up the collection and make it easy to do a lot of decorating and fill up a lot of journaling with it.

My favourite store in the world (so far) is a bigger-than-it-looks papeterie in Montréal called Nota Bene. It is a stationery and art supply paradise, with a huge selection of notebooks of every kind, letter-writing papers and envelopes from all over the world, art paper, sketch and watercolour books, and even storage solutions. Plus a very large spread of mechanical pencils (and significantly more pens, if you’re into that) behind a special counter independently staffed by a knowledgeable fellow.

Montréal’s St-Armand Pateterie is a decidedly low-tech affair, making unique and custom papers in the basement of an old industrial building since 1979. Run by an Anglo Monttrealer veteran of the pulp and paper industry (once huge in Canada but now mostly relegated to the shipping of timber stock to Asian manufacturers), St-Armand mostly makes paper from cotton rag, both virgin and recycled from old clothes.

I’ve been searching for a larger variety of analog artifacts to help me “up my game” with my letter-writing. Some creative people design letters filled with ephemera to show off their artistic and design talents. In my case, most of the page is reserved for text. This is somewhat related to my lack of design skills, but also to the fact that I use pencils and somewhat sloppy hand-writing, rather that gorgeous fountain pen calligraphy.

The Soviet Union had a fairly strong pencil industry, with production in three of the eventual successor states, from what I’ve found in my research. This compares to today, when only one of those states still produces pencils, Russia itself. In searching to learn more about Soviet and Russian pencil history, I’ve found lots of intriguing information, but numerous gaps in the record as well.

Likely one of the most prolific pencil brands in the world, Koh-i-Noor has a massively wide range of products, most still made in their home country of Czechia (why I call it this). They have at least six lines of finely-graded artist pencils, several other lines available in multiple medium/writing grades, and hoards of HB student lines with wacky printed designs and colours. They also make dozens of mechanical pencil lines and leads, as well as numerous art supplies.

Because finding vintage Canadian graphite pencils is quite rare, I’ve had to content myself with grabbing coloured pencils as well when I find them. These often also shed some light on the pencilmaking industry in Canada even if they’re not my preferred tools. As far as I’ve seen so far, most of the pencil manufacturers with Canadian operations produced a line of coloured pencils. Eagle (later Berol) probably had the best ones, with their Verithin line. Unfortunately, I have found none of the latter at reasonable prices thus far.

Via Instagram, I saw these Stabilo beauties posted and was quite curious. They are Stabilo pencil models offered only for customizing by advertising pencil printers. Normally these kind of pencils contain no branding from the manufacturers, but those manufacturers do limited branded runs for the purpose of providing sample product to prospective customers. I was fortunate to be permitted to grab some of these samples myself!

Derwent is one of the first lines of artist pencils I was exposed to, in the from of a well-used, worse-for-wear tin of medium-graded pieces my husband had been using for sketching and writing for years. Later when digging through moving boxes in our new house, we found another set, this one completely unused but already a bonafide vintage collection. In response, I explored a bit what Derwent offers today. The best place I’ve found for buying Derwent for delivery to Canada is CultPens.

I recently received the “final touches” on my Viking collection. Gorgeous in their branding and design, Viking does not have an especially wide line of pencils. Where many larger brands tend to have a line for artists, a line for technical drawing, a line for writing and a line for school kids, all with various grades, Viking focuses on doing HB right, and likely understands that honestly a normal human can’t tell the difference between an 8B and a 7B.

Chambers Pencils is one of many pencil manufacturers without a brand. In the US, there is Moon pencils (whose domain recently expired, forebodingly), and China is saturated with such concerns. Chambers like these function to provide bespoke and novelty pencils for other businesses, and rely on this strange brandless ghost market where nothing is what it seems.

I’m sure most pencil manufacturers don’t actually fabricate their own packaging, but for some reason about 50% of my love of pencil collecting is related to the boxes and packages they come in. I enjoy seeing how this reflects the marking and merchandizing choices the company makes, love seeing the evolution in the language and graphics used to enhance the aesthetic experience of a product. In the Amazon age, this is changing a lot, as stationery items need to be merchandized through product photos rather than aisles of stock. Packaging is playing a reduced role as a result.