Direct from Nürnberg

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.

One interesting thing I found was that the Faber-Castell pencils were made in the era of the German Democratic Republic, and thus these pencils indicate “Made in West Germany,” though I’m not familiar with any pencil production in the GDR states at any point.

This is one of the things I love about pencil collecting: the fact that so much history is contained in the object itself - it really makes you feel like an archeologist: examining the human tools and ephemera of the past to deduce what exactly was happening. In this era where most global brands outsource their production to contractors with no brand footprint, I’m curious what crumbs are being left behind for tomorrow’s history detectives?

In the case of some Lyra pencils, this is especially true, as I believe today the entire brand catalogue of Fila and (and Royal Talens and numerous others) is produced outside of Europe. I’m quite curious if the Chinese and Indonesian factories that churn out most of the product for these European brands will always be happy leaving such a large sum of the product profits to what is essentially a marketing office, and won’t eventually try to establish their own global brands?