Made in Canada: The Accent of America
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.
Probably because they were marketed well and affordable, the Mirado was among the best-selling pencils on both sides of the border. I love watching the progression of the brand from an imprint of Eagle with beautifully designed packaging to a part of the Berol brand, as the boxes get busier and slightly less attractive.
I do not, fortunately, have a modern version of the (Mexico-made) “Black Warrior” Papermate Mirados - the only remaining product using the imprint, but I assume this trend has not been reversed, alas.
Royal Canadian was an imprint of Eagle that I assume was not produced in the US, whereas other brands like Venus just had a carbon copy of their US stock produced in Canada before the era of Free Trade. The Turquoise also has quite the storied history here and an evolution in packaging design to show for it, but in quite the opposite direction of the Mirado.
Early Turqoise were part of the Eagle brand, with lovely but rather crowded and complex boxes, as well as pencils with some sort of printing on three of the six sides of the hex.
Later versions of the same line included a substantial improvement in the varnish, the use of a premium-feel ferrule on both eraser-tipped and untipped lines, and absolutely awesome hinged plastic boxes the likes of which only some premium Japanese brands do today.
Before it disappeared, after being absorbed into the Berol family, the Turquoise and the Mirado reflected almost identical package design, though the Turquoise maintained a markedly superior premium look to the pencil itself, including that untipped ferrule, these days matched only by the General’s Kimberly, I think.
One acquisition that speaks to this blending of American brands with Canadian manufacturing is this oddball proudly displaying its advertisement pedigree: a set of Empire Pedigree pencils in a box advertising Made in the USA but with pencils featuring a Canada imprint.
We’ve seen this before with Chinese-made Russian pencils in a Russia-made box, as well as it being a common occurrence in the latter days of Laurentien coloured pencils (more to come on that in another post sometime).
Canada did have the odd national brand and quite a few British brands produced here, but I’ve found very little in the way of specimens of these.
One item that came with the husband was this Barlim from Barwick, Ltd, which also states specifically that it was produced in Montréal, something quite rare in what I’ve found. No online searches return much, except for some UK-registered companies that appear unrelated.
UPDATE 2021 June 27: Erick from Pencils, eh directed me to the Québec national archives site, and he had this to say: “Intrigued by the Barwick pencil. I did a quick search … and found an article from 1920 showing a list of new companies in Montréal. It listed "Barwick Ltd., de'Montréal, papeterie, capital de $99,000." from La Tribune, mercredi 15 décembre 1920.” I’m now curoious whether they were an actual manufacturer or if that pencil is just a bespoke imprint for their papeterie from one of the various other Canadian pencilmakers present in Montreal at that time.
I grabbed a big cache of Berol Cavalier pencils from an eBay auction a while back, and found this Dixon Sovereign, perhaps a later incarnation of the Eagle brand, and likely another excessively loyalist imprint not used in the US. One very peculiar specimen was this correcting pencil labeled with “GFM,” which also returns no information in my searches.
Want to fill me in on any missing info or help me find some more Canadian stuff? Drop a line!
