Viarco

Viarco is a Portuguese manufacturer currently most famous for their lovely box set of vintage reproductions. They’re also the subject of a gorgeous recent German photo essay on Slanted.

This box set is quite beautiful and contains a whole slew of very nice HB pencils and a box of unsharpened copying pencils which will never be sharpened or used if I can help it.

I couldn’t personally tell the difference between any of the HBs, but they’re all quite lovely.

Viarco is unusual in that its website contains a retail boutique complete with all their current catalogue offerings. This makes it wonderful for collectors and completists like me.

Like fellow Iberian manufacturers Milan, they generally work the low-end of the market, which means you can get a ton of their stuff for very low cost. It also means that justifying transatlantic freight requires filling quite a sizeable box.

Nearly all their pencils are called “Desenho” regardless of design, or the fact that they are located under “office” on their website. Nearly all are HB. Something odd about just about all the standard retail boxes I got was that they were slightly warped - like the wood slats had not been fully kiln-dried before manufacture. Their small selection of specialty products include the aforementioned vintage box, and some very cute and curious “scented” pencils. The latter have a very pleasant level of scent - not too overpowering but convincing and unmistakeable nonetheless. I am curious how durable this scent will be as the pencils age.

Additionally I grabbed a big counter-top box of cheap novelty HBs for my classroom, but alas the display box was crushed in transit.

I’m so happy to have all these wonderful Portuguese cuties, marking the 10th European country from which I’ve found current-production pencils. Time to work on adding a dynamic European map to the site, perhaps!