Austria-Argentina

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.

Also included were some Austrian-made Koh-i-Noor 2mm leads, and labeled obviously for sale in the Argentine/Hispanophone market. These 2B leads also made some beautiful dark marks and worked fine in my Cara d’Ache Fixpencil despite being much longer than the spares I’m used to.

Another set of mechanical pencil leads were housed in a cork-stopped glass tube, these ones appearing to be 1.1mm or 1.3mm (they are smaller than will work in my 2mm Fixpencil but too big for my Pentel Graphicgear .9mm). As with the 2mm leads, these are labeled for sale in Argentina but marked as Austrian in origin.

A final curiosity were my first set of pencils from the elusive TOZ Penkala/Grafos factory in Zagreb. In this case it is a set of violet copying pencils, which I’ll likely not use, but that I wasn’t going to turn down, as I don’t know when I’ll find another specimen from this place. TOZ remains the only current European manufacturer from which I’ve yet to acquire a sample of current production. This particular box seems to hail from the 70s or 80s, marked as made in Yugoslavia when the factory was in that particular former nation-state.

Anyone with leads or sources for scoring some of TOZ’s more recent products please get in touch!