The Pile of Goodies that Started It All

This is the pile of mostly-made-in-Canada wonders that I found in the garage when first looking for some pencils for my class notes. The fact that so many were Canadian-made was curious to me, as I don’t think I’d ever seen Canadian pencils before this, sadly. This itself is odd, from the amount of, you know, wood, we have up here (and that we sell in unsustainable quantities to the rest of the world).

The first one I used was the Eagle Mirado HB without the eraser. Light and resonant and dragging on the page with amazing traction, I was immediately hooked and started my research to find more of them. Other Canada-made Eagle pieces in the pile included some Mirados with eraser, one of which was sharpened and identical in feel to the sans-eraser (unsurprisingly), a well-used Eagle Express HB, three Eagle Royal Canadian HBs, three Eagle Turquoise in hard grades, and one particular pencil which made my life difficult one day: an Eagle Manifold copying pencil. I had no idea what a “copying” pencil was. All I knew was that it was labeled “hard” but made a surprisingly nice mark on the page.

A mark that I couldn’t erase when I went back to edit about 6 solid pages of notes.

Two other Made in Canada sticks were a Venus Velvet H, which felt more like an HB, and a Barwick Barlim, marked Made in Montréal, which was nice to see. Three oddball non-Canadian pencils in the pile included a Made in China Crane, which was actually really nice and still had a functional eraser, a US-made Mirado under the Sanford brand, and a US-made Venus (no model).

And there you have it, the story of my entry into the world of pencils.