Stationery Traffic

Stationery Archeology 10

2012-02-12T20:09:00.009Z

This artefact has been dated by experts to 1978. It is my late father's diary for that year, and I guess he received as a member of the Automobile Association, back when it was owned by its members.

Most of the diary entries are records of his shift patterns at work - he was a policeman. Shifts were early (E - 0600-1400), late (L - 1400-2200) and night (N - 2200-0600). "CSH" is the particular building where he worked, and "PH" means "public holiday". I am not sure what "PIL" means.

Most of the writing in the diary is in blue ballpoint, with occasional fountain pen ink here and there. I recall he carried a Parker Flighter ballpoint pen, so I guess he used that to write in his diary. I wish I knew where that pen was, now; I guess one of my brothers inherited it.

One interesting snippet in among the phone numbers and addresses is this, a formula for calculating the volume of a barrel. I have looked around the 'net to verify this formula, but without success. Perhaps someone who knows better may be able to help? It was no surprise for me to see this, however. Although my father left school aged 14, he was intellectually curious and was always reading books about many different subjects. I remember him talking about this formula, in fact, although I am ashamed to say that I did not pay much attention at the time. Ah, the folly of youth, etc.

Chung Hwa 6903

2012-02-12T20:04:00.006Z

Writer's Bump

2012-01-29T12:33:00.005Z

There was a blog post in the Guardian this week which claimed that humanities students now have problems completing handwritten examinations because they are not used to handwriting for long stretches.

I can sympathise with this. As the survivor of 11 O-Levels, 3 A-Levels, a bachelor's degree in Sociology and International Relations and chartered management accountancy examinations, I still have mine. I have spent literally days in exam halls. For example, when I sat my final exams for my degree, I had to sit eight exams in just over one week. As each paper was three hours long, that meant 24 hours of furious essay-writing, culminating with two in one day - and a Saturday, to boot. Back then I did not use a fountain pen, but instead the good old Bic Cristal. This, I feel, is the reason why I now loathe them, because if I have to write for a long spell even today, I get some discomfort from my writer's bump, the callous over the distal phalanx of my right-hand middle finger.

This is also one reason why I prefer steno pencils or pencils with rounded profiles such as the Chung Hwa 6903 kindly sent to me for review by Matthias of the Bleistift parish. (It will appear soon, honest.) The standard hexagonal pencil tends to dig in a bit to my writer's bump, making a long writing session moderately uncomfortable. It is also one reason why I decided to use fountain pens when I decided my handwriting had deteriorated too far after years of neglect.

When I studied for my accountancy exams, the training college I attended insisted that students submit their homework assignments in handwritten form. They could easily have accepted computer-based work, to save themselves the trouble of having to decipher the students' scrawls. However, they required us to hand-write our work as a training programme for the exams which loomed at the end of the course. This was eminently sensible. The three-hour timed essay under examination conditions is a stern test of the student's knowledge, and also their physical stamina. It takes time to build up sufficient strength to hold a pen to paper and keep going for that long.

So the students of today have my sympathy, as the proud owner of that particular T-shirt. As computer-based assessment becomes more common, the problem will, I suppose, be replaced with students suffering WRULDs instead. The writer's bump will likely die out along with its owners.

Black Brown and Blue

2012-01-10T22:40:00.007Z

I never seem to settle on one colour for my fountain pens, but I have found that I don't like to carry around too many or with a very large range of colours. However I have just added a new colour to my daily carry: brown ink. Specifically, Pelikan Brilliant Brown.

After numerous experiments using various shades and makes of ink, I've ended up carrying four fountain pens, two of which hold blue ink, one holding black ink, and the last holding brown ink. How on Earth did that happen? I'm nearly back where I started; I could have saved a small fortune in ink if I hadn't tried all those other colours. For example, I own three different shades of turquoise and two of purple, which now seem surplus to requirements unless I have yet another change of mind.

I find it difficult to escape the conclusion that coloured inks - outside the narrow palette I have described - just look too fussy on the page. I tend to do most of my writing at work, and have happily used any colour I liked; and nobody seemed to care. So much for much of the hand-wringing one finds on the Fountain Pen Network where people fret whether their favourite inks look "professional". The only comment I have received was from one colleague who saw a note I wrote in Diamine Woodland Green, and that was a compliment. But it can be distracting, looking at large volumes of manuscript in violet or orange. I needed to cut down the number of colours I have in daily use.

Black was an easy one. I have always used black ink in fountain pens and the first bottle I bought when I returned to using them five years ago was a bottle of Diamine Onyx Black. Now I use Pelikan Brilliant Black (sic) in a black Lamy Safari, with an EF nib. The line is thin enough not to overpower the page, and the colour is serious enough to be considered "professional". I use this pen only occasionally, however...

...because my favourite pens use blue ink. Blue was always a "problem" colour for me. At school, I hated blue ink - particularly washable blue. It was just so bloody boring. I avoided it for a long time, and it wasn't until I saw some manuscripts by JG Ballard online that I decided that I needed to use blue ink - after all, Ballard is my favourite author and if it was good enough for him etc. Knowing that he used locally-available materials from the stationers and newsagents in Shepperton, where he lived, I guessed he used Parker Quink Permanent Blue. (I have no idea what ink he actually used, and nobody seems to know or care.) I tracked down a supply manufactured in the 1970s and used it for a while. It's probably a life-time's supply unless I take up writing novels in manuscript. I think that age has altered the dye in the ink's chemistry somewhat, because it is much greyer than the ink Ballard wrote with, if the online sources are to be believed. My Quink is closer to a Prussian blue, and not the classic Quink blue I remember from my father's pens. It's very nice to look at and behaves well in the pen, but it's not the same. So I tried a number of other blues, and settled on a couple, those being Diamine Sapphire Blue and Waterman Florida Blue. I use the Florida Blue in my Pilot M90, and although it looks washed-out when dry, it is a fine writing ink. I think this may be the one permanent pen and ink combination, at least until I change my mind - again.

The "other" blue that I use at present is a mixture. I have mixed up a 50/50 concoction of Diamine inks: Imperial Blue and Imperial Purple. The resulting colour is similar to Richard Binder's famous "Blurple" and is a pleasing darkish blue with a definite purple tinge. I am using this mixture in my Pilot Capless. It's good and I am very pleased with it; whether it will stay permanently, well, only time will tell.

As for the brown ink, I had the idea of using it again after seeing a talk at my local astronomical society the other week. The subject was Sir Isaac Newton, using his own words, taken from his letters and notebooks. Having looked at some of the digitised notebooks online at the Cambridge University Library website, I was intrigued to see that many of the notes were written in what seems to be brown ink, perhaps sepia. As I own only one bottle of brown ink, I have used that, and although the Pelikan is much redder than a sepia, it's still very easy on the eye. It looks good on creamy paper in particular, particularly on Moleskine paper stock judging by the test page I have tried out, even though it bleeds through horribly in the Mole's revolting thin paper stock. I will probably put this brown ink into the Capless once the current ink in that pen runs dry; at the moment I am using it in another Lamy Safari, a limited-edition pink model with an M nib that once belonged to my eldest daughter. (Nobody's asked me why I use a pink pen.)

So, I hope that I have narrowed things down to three or four good pens with good ink. You may note that none is filled with Noodler's ink. The reason for that is I have found that Noodler's and certain other boutique inks take a long time to dry on the page, especially with the cheap paper stock I use at work. I loathe smudging, and have come to appreciate inks with fast-drying properties. It is a pity, as I adore the Noodler's inks for their colours; Navajoe Turquoise is a particular favourite but it is too cumbersome to use on a daily basis. They are, however, good for special occasions: this Christmas I wrote cards using Private Reserve Plum, another top-ranking ink for colour and shading but which takes an absolute age to dry.

Or I could, of course, just forget about it and use a pencil.

Papermate Mirado Classic HB/No.2 Pencil

2011-12-25T11:31:00.005Z

Daycraft Slab Notebooks

2011-12-21T12:19:00.011Z

As I mentioned in the last review, the recent package I received from Daycraft included more than just the Astrology Notebook. I also received a pair of Slab Notebooks, one finished in gold and one in wood effect.

Like all the Daycraft products I have reviewed, these are quirky and fun notebooks. Each measures 108mm x 157mm and holds a hefty 360 pages (180 sheets) of 80gsm paper, bound with stiff board covers. Each weighs around 270g - over half a pound if you still use US or Imperial weights and measures.

The Gold Slab looks particularly impressive, although it is rather loud for my personal taste. Clearly, it's designed to resemble a gold ingot. It may not be very clear from my poor photography, but on the front cover it reads:

FINE
GOLD

999.9
PURE THINKING

Inside, the cream-coloured pages are printed with 7mm lines. On closer inspection, they turn out to be fine chains across the page.

The pages are glued and stitched together into the block. The spine on the cover separates from the pages, which enables the pages to be laid quite flat on a desk surface. All the pages are edged in gold.

The Brown Slab is covered in a wood-veneer material which is textured. The picture below illustrates this well, I think:

There is no print on the cover at all. This material reminds me strongly of the birch veneer used on Ikea furniture, although it is a bit darker, closer to beechwood colour. It would not appear out of place on a Billy bookcase. If you have an Ikea birch veneer desk this notebook could be camouflaged easily; as it is, it hides nicely when photographed against a piece of MDF. The edges of the paper are also finished in a wood effect; the attention to detail here is such that the woodgrain on the edges is in line with that on the covers.

The pages are also lined, but this time, the Brown Slab has a surprise in store: the lines are not straight, but slightly wavy as though they had been drawn by hand.

It's little details like this which make this a delightful notebook for daily use. Given the choice I'd probably opt for the stealthier Brown Slab, but I can see why the Gold would be a popular choice. Over time, I can see the corners becoming dog-eared and the surfaces becoming marked and scratched, but these are notebooks which are so much fun to own and use they should always raise a smile. Recommended.

Thanks again to Mr Foreal Lee for the review samples.

Note: since I posted the review of the Astrology notebook I have been informed by Daycraft that they now have a UK distributor for their products, so readers in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland should hopefully see them on the shelves and online in the next few months.

This is the EDC

2011-12-07T23:45:00.004Z

Recently I bought a Maxpedition EDC Pocket Organiser online to organise my EDC (Every Day Carry). I spent a lot of time recently, reading about EDC and watching videos on Youtube on the subject before getting the organiser, pictured above. Regular readers will notice a couple of familiar items in the picture. From left to right, they are:

Pilot M90
Spare Pilot ink cartridges
Pilot Capless
Laser pointer (since replaced as EDC by a black Lamy Safari)
Uni Kuru Toga pencil
Black Sharpie permanent marker
County Comm 4-inch prybar
Cheap ballpoint pen (although I despise ballpoint pens they can be useful sometimes)
Nitecore D11 LED flashlight
Small scissors
Cheap disposable lighter
Victorinox Sportsman folding knife
Carton 10x power jeweller's loupe.
Not pictured, but in there: a red Inova micro LED flashlight and a wad of 3x5 index cards.

Since the picture was taken, I have changed things around somewhat. I don't usually carry the laser pointer (which I use for astronomy) or the loupe, and instead carry a Snow Peak titanium spork and a couple more pens - a Pilot 78G filled with Private Reserve Plum ink and a Pilot V5 rollerball pen. Do you think I like Pilot pens much?

The EDC Pocket lives most of the time in my briefcase, or on my desk at work. There's only the one pencil, which I have not used so it may be rotated out. Pencils tend to live in a separate pencil case along with my eraser and sharpener. I usually move things around dependent on what I find most useful: hence the preponderance of fountain pens. If I worked somewhere other than an office, I'm sure the tools would be different.

One other thing I have done is to have an embroidered name-badge made which is stuck by Velcro to the hook-and-loop field on the front.

Anyone interested may like to check out a few videos on Youtube: here, here and here.

Lions Fair 2011

2011-12-06T23:35:00.004Z

Last weekend, the local Lions held their annual charity fair in the town's Corn Exchange. There wasn't much to write home about on the stationery front, although I did notice an Adler Gabriele typewriter for sale. It sold, but not to me.

I did buy a nice Rexel stapler of 1970s-1980s vintage which works perfectly, and which still holds some staples in it, for GBP0.10 (yes, ten pence), and a self-inking rubber stamp making kit for GBP0.50. This one comes with letters in 6mm, 5mm and 4mm sizes. When I think of a suitable slogan other than that under which this blog labours, I'll post pictures. I'm not feeling particularly inspired right now, however, so it may have to wait a while. Suggestions most welcome.

No pictures this time; sorry folks.

Daycraft Astrology Notebook

2011-11-29T22:39:00.013Z

A few weeks ago I received another nice parcel from Daycraft in Hong Kong, some of whose notebooks I reviewed a few months ago. It contained three pocket notebooks, the first of which I review here. This is the Astrology Notebook.

Open the packaging, and out comes a very handsome pocket notebook indeed; it has black PU covers, adorned with a fairly accurate rendition of the constellation Gemini set out in Swarovski crystals. The shape of the constellation is picked out by fine grooves between the stars.

At the time of writing (end of November 2011) Gemini is well-placed low in the Eastern horizon in the evenings. It's a bright constellation and not easily missed once you recognise Castor and Pollux, which are represented on the cover by the two largest crystals, towards the top left in the picture.

Naturally, as an amateur astronomer I must dismiss astrology as pure superstition; and of course I do think it's complete hokum. But I couldn't say the same for the Astrology Notebook. It is beautifully made. The stiff board covers look robust, and in strong light, reflections ping off the crystals. You could easily lose track of the time playing with it to see all the different colours. On the day I took these photos, the Sun was shining, which allowed me to take advantage:

The Astrology Notebook measures 148mm by 102mm (roughly 6 inches by 4 inches) and holds 176 pages of what appears to be Daycraft's usual 100gsm paper stock. Every page is printed with a cross-hair design in feint grey which gives you a choice of orientation: you could use it as a regular notebook, or perhaps as a reporter's notebook, which would be my preferred option.

There is a clear sheet enclosed in the inside cover which shows the twelve constellations of the Zodiac, which looks like it could double as a window sticker. The inside cover also has printed on it the astrological symbol for Gemini, and some character traits attributed to Geminis (Versatile and clever. You're someone with sense. You can also be nervous and sometimes too tense. )

Like all the Daycraft notebooks I have reviewed, this is a well thought-out and executed notebook. It looks too nice to write in, almost; it would certainly make a nice Christmas present if you were looking for a stocking-filler. I wonder how robust it may be, however, and how long it may take before the crystals were knocked off. Anyone buying the Astrology Notebook may be well advised to keep it in the smart presentation case it is sold in if they intend to use it as an everyday carry notebook. Would I use it? Of course, but I'd have to prise it from my daughter's hands as she's already claimed it for herself.

Recommended.

My thanks to Mr. Foreal Lee from Daycraft for the review samples.

Stationery Archeology 9

2011-11-17T22:29:00.005Z

The ninth entry in the stationery archeology strand features another gift from my penfriend Richard in Georgia, USA. (Thank you very much!) This pair of moulded glass inkwells appear to date from the late nineteenth Century, or perhaps the early twentieth. I cannot see any markings or date on them, so that's my guess.

The bottle on the left is very delicate, and seems to have been sand-blasted or weathered somehow to leave a matte finish. The bottle on the right is sturdier, but has a number of bubbles in the glass and a pronounced ridge where the two halves were mated at the factory. Both are moulded from the same green glass.

No No No NaNoWriMo

2011-10-31T18:34:00.004Z

Best of luck to all those brave souls who will participate in this year's NaNoWriMo. I won't be joining you. I've simply got too much else on my plate during November to worry about getting 1,667 words down on paper every single day, or, more likely, saving it all up for the weekends. To be honest, writing a blog sometimes seems like too much work.

It's not that I don't want to write a novel; indeed I once did, back when I was a student and I had a lot more spare time. In fact I have an idea for a novel which would make a fine subject for a crack at the coveted title. But not this year.

Are any readers here about to take the plunge?

Palomino Blackwing 602

2011-10-30T16:32:00.006Z

Postscript: I forgot to mention in this review that due to the softness of the lead, the pink eraser on this review pencil worked very well. Mike sent me a second Blackwing, this time with the black eraser, but I've not used that one.

Stationery Archeology 8

2011-10-29T21:21:00.005+01:00

Next in this increasingly infrequent series is this, a bullet pencil kindly sent by my correspondent in Georgia, USA, Richard. Bullet pencils are largely unknown here in England - although I have found some examples on the interweb - so it was a lovely surprise to receive one in the post. I understand from reading about them that they were often given as promotional items by small businesses - this one being a fine example.

This one has clearly been used a lot, for the pencil component is now little more than a stub. The eraser end has hardened to a rubber bullet in its own right. It is probably about four inches long in total.

Thank you Richard.

General's Semi-Hex 2/HB Soft

2011-10-04T20:31:00.006+01:00

Special Autograph

2011-09-11T10:43:00.007+01:00

I have mentioned before on this blog, that one of my hobbies is astronomy. I have been interested in it since I was 11. Here is a short story describing how astronomy and stationery collided for a moment.

Sir Patrick Moore is known internationally for his books on astronomy and here in the UK as the presenter of the long-running science television programme, The Sky At Night, which he has presented monthly since 1957. To say that he is something of a childhood hero of mine is an understatement. I had never actually met him, although I did see him once at a British Astronomical Association meeting in the mid-1980s.

So, when a friend who is also a keen amateur astronomer suggested that we drive down to Selsey to visit his house, I jumped at the chance. He was to open his large garden for the afternoon in aid of charity, and there would be stalls selling books, bric-a-brac, tea and cake, and so on. He is 88 now, and confined to a wheelchair, and was unable to join the crowd for most of the time the event was taking place. One of the organisers of the event told me that he would come out of the house at four o'clock to draw tickets for the raffle. I was hoping to get an autograph or perhaps a peek inside one of his observatories.

At the appointed time, Sir Patrick emerged from the house to draw tickets for the raffle, and auction a few books for charity, which he was to autograph. He did not sign them with a pen, however: I saw his personal assistant sign one of the books on his behalf - with a self-inking rubber stamp. I quickly asked for an autograph for myself; fortunately I had some 3x5 index cards handy in my bag, and quickly produced one, which was duly stamped:

He apologised for being unable to write the autograph personally; arthritis has robbed him of his ability to play music, write and do other tasks. I assured him that this was just as good, however, and it is. It's not that often that my interests intersect like this. I will treasure this autograph, and have already framed it.

Afterwards, he did show me and my friend his observatories, and we left for home very happy indeed.

First Steps in Rubber Stamping

2011-09-09T22:42:00.010+01:00

Things have been a bit quiet on this blog so I really should post about something. Some may remember that I mentioned becoming interested in carving my own rubber stamps; here are a few of my early efforts.

A few months ago, I ordered a block of Speedball Speedy-Carve and carving tools from a US-based seller on eBay, but whilst waiting for the goodies to arrive, I made a couple of attempts using what I had to hand, my old Stabilo Legacy eraser and a Swann Morton number 11 scalpel. The first effort was this, an aircraft stamp based on the UK road-sign to warn motorists of low flying aircraft:

You can see from the stamp that my carving left a bit to be desired, but I thought this was OK considering the lack of proper materials. The Legacy had a bit left over, so I then created another stamp, this time based on another UK road-sign, a direction arrow:

I had very little eraser left for this stamp, so the arrow is somewhat truncated compared to the original. This is a simpler shape to carve than the aircraft, as it has no curved edges; I was able to cut the lines cleanly with the scalpel and a steel rule.

By now my parcel had arrived from the States and I was able to start carving with the Speedy-Carve. I decided to keep things simple so I carved another version of the arrow, this time in the correct proportions:

The rubber compound in Speedy-Carve is different to that in the eraser material. For one thing, it's nowhere near as porous as the eraser. You can see it above with the slight marbling effect in the stamped image, when the Tombow Brush Pens are used for the ink. On a larger area, the effect is even more pronounced. (It is much less pronounced when a stamp pad is used.)

My next project was a hexagon, one of the symbols used by a favourite band of mine, Boards of Canada.

As one of their best-known pieces is called Turquoise Hexagon Sun, the hexagon had to be turquoise, obviously. Actually, I like the effect this has on the stamped image.

Having had some practice on this, I felt a bit more confident and carved a favourite symbol of mine. Growing up near Heathrow, I saw many old airliners and airlines. Among them was BOAC, one of the two airlines merged to form British Airways, whose symbol was the beautiful and iconic Speedbird. (The rubber on the stamp is blue because I tried stamping it using a Sharpie permanent marker. I am sure that will wear off in time.)

Speedy-Carve is very easy to carve, and has the consistency of a firm cheese like a Cheddar or Jarlsberg. I still have a fair bit left over, and have a few ideas of what to carve next. Actually I have already carved another stamp, but have not mounted it on a block of wood yet. I also have one failure, an attempt to carve this stamp from a Texas Instruments scientific calculator operator's manual which Gunther at Lexikaliker had made into a professionally-made stamp, and which he very kindly sent to me. The design is too intricate for my ham-fisted efforts; I have learned to keep things simple, and go with bold designs. Corporate logos and road signs offer much potential for this medium of expression, but I am sure I'll branch out into other areas such as portraiture.

The stamps shown above are glued to a wood block, with a layer of rubber from an old mouse-mat in the middle to absorb pressure, as the Speedy-Carve does not compress much.

It's been a lot of fun doing this - I hope you don't mind this minor diversion from the core mission of this blog: pencils and pens.

Return of the Green Ink Brigade

2011-08-11T22:03:00.003+01:00

I'm looking at a mid-green ink, to go in my Pilot Capless. I want something in between the two greens I currently own: Diamine Woodland Green (too dark) and Diamine Kelly Green (too light).

The front-runner so far is J. Herbin Lierre Sauvage, followed by Caran d'Ache Amazon and perhaps Waterman Green in third.

I would be grateful for any views on the relative pros and cons of these inks. I can get Pelikan Brilliant Green locally, but only as a last resort.

Riots

2011-08-11T20:58:00.006+01:00

I'm sure by now many readers will have seen the appalling riots that took place a few days ago in my home town, London, and elsewhere in England. The authorities are dealing with the problem; Parliament even sat today in a rare emergency session (during the Summer Recess, no less) to discuss the matter. Residents in the affected parts of town have responded by cleaning up their communities.

The violence is confined to the cities; the small town where I live is completely safe. Watching the live television coverage of the looting, it was clear that only certain stores were being targeted for robbery. I looked in vain to see if any stationers had been raided. Consumer electronics, branded sportswear and training shoes, jewelry and alcohol were obviously high on the wish-lists of the looters, but not stationery. There were no people filmed with arm-fulls of lever-arch files or pockets stuffed with Staedtlers. Palimpsest, living closer to the action, confirmed as much with this post about a local branch of Ryman which was unscathed.

As she says, "a riot is a complex beast" and I'll not offer any explanations about it here. It now emerges, though, as the first defendants appear before the courts, that many of those arrested and charged for alleged crimes were not feckless youths but in fact people who should have known better, such as a teaching assistant, university graduates and even a graphic designer: the kind of people for whom stationery might have been an attractive target.

"Having a Lovely Time, Wish You Were Here"

2011-08-05T21:24:00.006+01:00

First, let me apologise for the long gap since my last post. It was over a month ago, on 30 June. I have no excuses for this; I just needed a break from blogging, as I was busy at work.

That's not to say that I have not been busy on the stationery front. I made my first visit to a local branch of Staples where I bought a Stabilo Boss 40th Anniversary highlighter set (eight Boss highlighters in a mug), a Colop S120 mini self-inking date stamp and spare ink pads, and some sealable plastic storage boxes from the Really Useful Box company. The Boss mugs come in three colours: green, yellow and orange. Mine is the green mug, with the message "I AM THE BOSS" (see link). I intend to use it as a desk-tidy. Perhaps I'll get the others, too.

The boxes I bought were a 4-litre flat box for storing some astronomical equipment, and a 0.55-litre pencil box. I liked the latter so much I bought some more, in order to store a collection of pencils I was very kindly sent by Gunther in Germany. I have four of them now, but I need more, in order to organise my burgeoning pencil collection in a sensible way.

As for Staples itself, it pretty much met my expectations: all the basics covered well enough, some special offers, lots of stock, but not much exotica. That's fine by me, it's another outlet to peruse from time to time when I'm in the area. Their stores are some distance away (about 25 miles from my house in each direction) so I doubt I'll make special journeys to go, but the prices are reasonable, certainly in comparison with the Stationers That Shall Not Be Named.

But on the main point of this blog post. It was this post in the Guardian that piqued my interest yesterday. I am a part of the Fountain Pen Network postcard exchange scheme, and have three correspondents around the world, in California, Australia and Shetland. I regret to say however, that I am very lax about keeping this up (as my penfriend Richard in Georgia, USA would probably agree) so I send probably only two or three times a year. The last time was in April, just before the Royal wedding. Like blogging, I have to be in the right mood to do it. The process of selecting suitable cards, writing the message and sending them is not the problem, but remembering to do so in the first place. I try to make an effort on the rare occasions I travel outside England, and certainly sent postcards when I went on holiday in Turkey in 2009.

The reasons for the decline in postcard sending probably lie in a fatal conjunction of convenience of electronic media, the rising cost of postage, and postage delays. Many was the time that my postcards arrived after I did; it happened after that Turkey holiday, and previous Mediterranean holidays within and outwith the EU. I don't know about the inefficiencies of overseas postal services, but I could guess they have gone the same way as Royal Mail, which has certainly reduced services over time. A first-class stamp was once a near-guarantee of next-day delivery; now it's merely an aspiration.

In Britain, postcard designs are as typical as anywhere in the world, with heavily-doctored photography a common theme (check out the work of John Hinde for example). However, we do have one speciality, which, although copied by others around the world, is not matched by any other: the saucy postcard. And in this area, one name is king: Donald McGill, who practically invented the genre and whose work may still be found at the seaside to this day. Here is a typical example, which landed him in court on an obscenity charge. His work sailed close to the wind in deeply conservative 20th-Century Britain, but was firmly in our satirical traditions such as this or this or perhaps, bringing proceedings to the present, this.

Cursive Handwriting Gets Short Schrift in Germany

2011-06-30T19:48:00.008+01:00

I found this article in the Guardian about a campaign by German primary school teachers to abandon teaching young children to write in cursive script very interesting indeed. When I lived in Germany, I noticed that handwritten notices often looked as though they had been written by the same person. I've noticed this in France, too. (The tell-tale for me is the way French people often write the numeral nine with a dog-leg.)

I should have guessed that they are taught how to write in a prescriptive way, using an officially-approved method of handwriting, hence the similarities. I don't remember anything like that in my own primary education; by the time I started school in 1972, British educationalists had already abandoned copperplate script training. I learned my letters and words and wrote them in printed form, then wrote them in script. I used a pencil to start with, before moving on to a (fountain) pen. By the time I moved on to joined-up writing, I was a bit haphazard in how I joined up the letters, and my script was barely legible. I changed it back to a printed form following school reports from teachers who could not read my handwriting easily, and I have stuck with it since. Over time, my handwriting has become joined-up again for speed, and progressively more italic; examples of my own handwriting from school and university show that I began straighter than the definite slant I show now. That said, I have developed some bad habits, such as not differentiating between the letters "l" and "t" clearly enough.

So I have some sympathy for the members of the Deutscher Lehrerverband when they say that abandoning the Schreibschrift will make their job more difficult. Although I am sure my seven year old self would have hated having to copy out letters laboriously in the classroom, in retrospect I would probably have benefited from having to follow such a system for education. On the other hand, I would never have felt the need to change my handwriting to be better understood, and experimented with a way of writing that suited my needs.

On reflection, I think it is probably better to let children work out how to express themselves in print by working out their own handwriting style, than to dump officially-sanctioned script praxis on them. The teacher's job becomes one where they guide the student into forming their own letters, and away from mere "talk and chalk". It is also more difficult, I would think. What do readers who were educated in countries which insisted on cursive writing think? (I'm thinking of you, Matthias and Gunther.)

Mind you, I have often thought of getting a copy book and learning how to write in copperplate style to complement my fountain pens. And then I'd have to get a nice pen with a really flexible nib...

Monsieur Notebooks

2011-06-25T12:33:00.022+01:00

A few weeks ago I was sent these attractive leather-bound books from Hide Stationery, a recently-established English company that sells them under the Monsieur brand. These notebooks are hand-bound in India, by craftsmen paid fair wages, and have a definite "hand-made" artisanal feel about them; you can see from the occasional loose fibre on the edges of the leather that they have been cut by hand. These are not high-end leather goods as you might see in Smythson's, but a practical alternative for the rest of us. (That said, I really must replace my Game Book before the start of the grouse season as my current one is nearly full. ;-)) The leather is very rigid on the small black notebook, but has more "give" on the larger, A5 book. Monsieur state that the leather used in the binding is vegetable-tanned, and it shows in the patterns you see in the leather. As this is a natural material you will notice slight blemishes, marks and wrinkles which I think is part of the charm. See below for a close-up of the finish on the A5 brown leather notebook.

The books are stiff when new, and take a little bit of effort to open. They are perfect-bound, and don't lay flat when opened. Over time, I should think it will be easier to make it lie flat, as the leather in the spine is broken in. They have that leathery aroma, as another reminder of this book's cover material.

The black notebook is around A6 size, 145mm high by 110mm. It has 192 6mm ruled pages of 90gsm ivory paper. I have no information to hand as to the origin of the paper used, but hopefully this is also obtained from sustainable sources. Taking my fountain pens and a few pencils out, I tested the paper to see how well it handles fountain pen ink and graphite.

As you can see, the paper can handle my inks fairly well. There's a bit of feathering on the Diamine Imperial Blue from my M90, perhaps some also with the Kelly Green, but that is all. My M90 is a wet writer anyway, which is why I use it to test paper in these reviews. When you turn the page, you do notice some bleedthrough, though it's not excessive by any means.

This is a classic "little black book" for writing down your innermost thoughts, or perhaps just notes from a boring business meeting. With this cover, it should last for years in your handbag or briefcase. I like this little notebook a lot, but for me the winner in this pair is the larger, brown leather bound A5 notebook. This one also has 192 pages, this time of plain paper of the same off-white stock as the black notebook. As I don't draw very well, I did not test the paper on this book, but I imagine it behaves as well as the paper in its smaller cousin. This is the proper size for a leather-bound notebook, I think. It's big enough for sketches, for which the plain paper helps. It's not far removed from the kind of notebook you would imagine Charles Darwin scribbling in as he wandered around the Galapagos islands.

Both notebooks have the regulation Moleskine-style elastic closure and bookmark ribbon, though they lack the Mole's inside-pocket. Good; Monsieur seem to have decided to keep things simple, and the pocket introduces more complexity to the design. The name and address plate on the inside is there however, printed in the art nouveau style. It's also styled in French as it says simply, "Nom, etc."

Both notebooks also have an embossed Monsieur logo on the back cover, complete with moustache and monocle. To my eye also harks back to the belle epoque, and makes for a nice finishing touch:

I think these notebooks are excellent, and should become more interesting over time as the material ages; by the time you've filled it up with your jottings, it'll look like the diary in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Some people may find them a bit rough-and-ready, but I like that quality, and they fill a niche for hand-made leather notebooks which would otherwise be satisfied by more expensive products. The A6 retails for up to GBP9.99 and the A5 for up to GBP12.99.

They are available at a few stationers' in the UK, and online at Papernation.

My thanks to Tom at Hide Stationery for the review samples.

Guardian Pencil Discussion

2011-06-24T17:53:00.007+01:00

Pencil fandom becoming mainstream? The Guardian has a discussion about contemporary pencil usage.

Personally I don't consider myself to be a "commodity fetishist" when it comes to pencils, but I enjoyed this article and the comments beneath. I'll be commenting later, when I get back from an engagement I have this evening....

Cult Pens gets a few mentions in the article and the comments, as does Dave's Mechanical Pencils. Nice to see pencils get a discussion.

It would be great if some of the pencil bloggers could contribute to the comments, too.

Staedtler Wopex 2B

2011-06-18T20:47:00.007+01:00

Apologies for the first picture - if anyone can't read it, let me know at the usual address.

Stationery Archeology 7

2011-06-16T23:28:00.004+01:00

It's been a while since I posted anything in the Stationery Archeology slot, so here's a bumper picture post. This is my old boxfile, rescued from a skip in west London around 1985. I normally keep some old back copies of 2000AD in this. It must date to the 1960s at least, and despite showing its age, it's still sturdy. You may recognise the cover design as the wallpaper on this blog, and some may recognise the wonderful rubber-stamped manufacturer's mark inside, with the slogan "SUPPLIED FOR THE PUBLIC SERVICE", from my Google profile.

Here's a close-up shot of that stamp. W. Smith Bermondsey Ltd. is long gone.

Dixon No. 2 Pencil

2011-05-30T19:05:00.005+01:00

I meant to add that this pencil sharpens very nicely because of the cedar wood used.

Daycraft Signature Notebook

2011-05-30T11:35:00.008+01:00

Last in the series of Daycraft notebook/sketchbook reviews, I come to the Signature Notebook. This is an A5-sized, 176-page, soft cover notebook finished in Daycraft's signature (pun not intended) Italian PU, this time in a plain, textured, rosy pink hue. The texture is that of a fine-grain leather, and there is a Daycraft logo embossed discreetly on the back cover. This notebook also has black-paper inside liners.

The pages are the customary 100gsm notebook paper, ruled with 6.5mm lines, which is handy for people with small handwriting. The paper is cream-coloured and edged with black. I tried to take a photo of this but my photography is rubbish, so the resulting picture was blurred. Notebook Loves Pen did a much better job of it, and I suggest you look there if you need an illustration. This notebook has a black ribbon page-marker, but surprisingly, no elastic closure or rear pocket. I don't miss these features, but many people might; personally, I find it refreshing that this notebook does not try to copy the Moleskine design. Daycraft have kept this design simple and elegant and should be praised. Like the Skinz and Animal Pals notebooks I reviewed earlier, it can be made to lie flat if required, though it will not lie flat on its own.

Unlike NLP, I found that, in my tests on the back page using a battery of fountain pens, rollerballs and pencils, the paper held up pretty well. There is no discernible feathering from the ink that I can see with the naked eye, and only slight bleedthrough with my wetter nibs, the M90 and the Capless.

Of all the Daycraft notebooks I have reviewed in this series, this is my favourite, because of its simple design. It is unfussy and begging to be used, if only for shopping lists or for writing down notes at a boring work meeting. The cover should hold up well inside a handbag or briefcase if used with care. Recommended.

It is available, as with all the Daycraft range, at stationers' in Asia and Australia, one or two places in central Europe, and also online. My thanks once again to Daycraft for the sample.

Data:

Dimensions: 151mm x 212mm
Pages: 176
Cover: Fine Italian PU, case bound
Content: 6.5mm ruled lines, cream coloured paper
Other: Inkjet printed edges

Daycraft Decoder Sketchbook

2011-05-27T20:56:00.006+01:00

Fourth in this series of reviews of Daycraft products, this is the Decoder Sketchbook. This one, the Semaphore, is one of a range of four A5-size wire-bound sketchbooks, the others being Braille, Morse Code and Sign Language. This comes with a handsome board cover in dark chocolate brown which has UV-spot printed semaphore symbols on the front in glossy paint, and an elastic band closure. Being wire-bound it will lie flat for drawing and it has 100 pages of 120gsm art paper.

I have not been able to test the paper, because as you can see in the picture below, it is made in the same dark brown as the covers, so it is clearly meant for people who sketch white-on-dark with coloured pencils or chalk, which I do not do. The paper has a matte finish, with enough tooth in it for pencil drawing. I can imagine someone rendering lunar craters or maria, or perhaps a cathedral spire, using this sketchbook. Despite my inability to use it, I can still see that this is another high-quality book. I had problems photographing it properly, as these photos do not do it justice. In reality, this is a darker brown than illustrated - think Bournville or Hershey's chocolate for an approximation of the colour.

There is a key to the different symbols on the back cover, and a blurb on the inside, on the first sheet, describing what semaphore is and how it could be used: according to this, it is still acceptable internationally to use semaphore for telecommunication.

This is a fine, if unorthodox, sketchbook.

Thanks to Daycraft for the review sample.

Data:

Dimensions: 148mm x 210mm
Pages: 100
Cover: Wire-O bound paper
Content: Plain brown paper
Other: UV spot semaphore cover

Typecast 3

2011-05-27T16:39:00.006+01:00

With apologies for the spelling and grammatical errors...

Daycraft Cookie Bookie Notebook

2011-05-22T14:28:00.008+01:00

This isn't just any old cheese cracker, this is the Daycraft Cookie Bookie Notebook.

It seems blatantly obvious now, that someone should make a notebook based on a biscuit. (Note to anyone from the USA: here in England we use the French name - biscuit or bis cuit - twice cooked - rather than the Dutch name koekje to describe small, hard, sweet wheat-based products.) The cream filling you see below, is in fact the case-binding of the Cookie-Bookie, which is exposed for all to see...yum...

In common with the previous Daycraft products, the covers are made from "Fine Italian PU", in this case with the fine pigskin-texture of the Animal Pals notebook but with added upholstery-stitching to suggest the shape and texture of a baked biscuit. Underneath, the board used is rigid, just like a biscuit, in fact.

This notebook is 125mm x 125mm in size, ie about 5 inches by 5 inches. It feels a bit strange using a perfectly-square notebook, but this is so well-made that it doesn't matter. On to the paper, which is a lovely, bright and cheerful pumpkin-orange:

This paper is as good as any, anywhere. I found almost no bleedthrough with my fountain pens:

The edging is darker than the rest of the paper, which I suppose is the result of the manufacturing process. This notebook is great fun, and forms part of a small range which includes an Oreo clone and a lemon waffle (or wafer, as we would call it here). There are 144 pages to play with, which should be enough for anyone.

Highly recommended. (I'm keeping mine.)

Data:

Dimensions: 125mm x 125mm
Pages: 144 pages, 6.5mm ruled, orange paper in this case
Cover: Italian PU
Binding: Case-bound

Thanks again to Daycraft for the samples.

Daycraft Skinz Notebook

2011-05-21T11:33:00.010+01:00

Second in the series of Daycraft notebook reviews, this is the Skinz notebook, finished in silver with a curious "tattoo"-style design on the front cover. I have just checked the Daycraft website and can find no reference to this line, so I guess it is new for 2012. There are two notebooks in this line, the other sporting a beige cover with crossed Colt .45 revolvers.

This notebook is slightly smaller (102mm x 146mm) than the Animal Pals notebook, and finished in the same Italian polyurethane soft leatherette, though the finish has a definite cow-leather grain to it, rather than the fine pigskin grain on the Animal Pals notebook. The material is a bit thin, so you can see in the picture where it has been folded in and glued to the boards if you look carefully. It is shipped with a sheet of temporary tattoo stickers, complete with instructions on how to apply them:

The paper is white, ruled with 6.5mm lines, and decorated with a "tattoo" design at the top of each page which would not be out of place on a motorbike or the small of a rock-chick's back. This paper is excellent - there are 128 pages of 100gsm stock which takes fountain pen ink very well. There is barely any bleedthrough at all with my fountain pens at any rate, and no feathering detectable in any of the ink samples I tested it with. (Sorry, I forgot to take a pic of the reverse, but believe me, there's barely a trace.) The covers are board-like, much stiffer than the Animal Pals notebook and more like a Moleskine.

This notebook is case-bound, and the pages can be made to lie flat for writing on. The styling is not to my taste, but then again I don't think I am in the target audience for this one - I'm guessing it's really for teenagers, and there's nothing wrong with that, especially to introduce young people to fine stationery. My teenage daughter was impressed with this notebook, at any rate.

This is another fine product and I can recommend it. As with all the Daycraft range it is likely to be available widely around Asia and Australia.

Data:

Dimensions: 102mm x 146mm
Cover: Italian PU cover, board
Pages: 128pp, 6.5mm ruled with tattoo design in light grey
Paper: 100gsm white paper
Binding: Case-bound
Other: Includes tattoo sticker

Thanks to Daycraft for the sample.

Daycraft Animal Pals Notebook

2011-05-20T21:27:00.010+01:00

Recently I received a small consignment of notebooks (and one sketchbook) from Daycraft, a Hong Kong-based manufacturer. I shall review them over the next couple of days, and I thought I would review this, the Animal Pals notebook, first.

It's an A6-sized pocket notebook with soft covers, and designed with this cute abstract animal design stitched into the lilac-coloured "Italian PU" (sic) cover. Have you guessed what it is yet? Actually this one is a hippo, and is one of a range of five designs, each with a different animal from every continent. The others on the website are penguin and baboon; sheep and panda versions should be available in 2012, if I read the catalogue correctly.

First impressions are that this is a very nicely-made notebook indeed. The cover is soft and flexible, unlike the small Moleskine hard black notebook. At A6 size, it is also slightly larger than the Mole (106mm x 150mm, compared with the Moleskine's 90mm x 140mm). I wonder how hard wearing this cover actually is, though, inside a briefcase or handbag, because from experience, I have found the Moleskine to be pretty tough. I'm also slightly surprised that Daycraft have chosen Italian-made material to cover their notebooks, but they make a feature of "imported" materials for their range. It feels very similar to a soft leather, and only the plastic smell betrays its hydrocarbon roots. There's the regulation pocket inside the back cover for ticket stubs, stamps and receipts, and a baby-pink page-marker ribbon, too.

The paper, which is probably 100gsm stock, is printed with 6.5mm ruled lines. There's also a subtle animal print on some of the pages - you may be able to spot a monkey's tail curling across one of the pages below. The animal prints are very subtle, as I did not notice them at all until I began to write this review; they are more apparent on the photographs.

As far as the paper is concerned, I did not test it in quite the same way that AK from the superb Notebooks Loves Pen blog tested it when she reviewed Daycraft's Signature Sketchbook a little while back. She used a variety of pens including a felt-tip and found some significant bleedthrough. I am a fountain pen user, however, and tested a page with various pens and pencils I had to hand, and found very little bleedthrough. Some of my pens are a fairly stern test of the integrity of certain papers, so I am pleased to report that I could detect no readily-visible feathering or other defects, at least from the paper. I did note some minor changes to the lines of the fountain pen ink where the FP ink met the printed animal designs on the pages, where the printer's ink used (I'm guessing it is oil-based) forms a barrier to the fountain pen ink to bond with the fibres in the paper. This is the most minor of quibbles, probably of no interest to anyone but FP fanatics, and one I only noticed when editing this review. With a ballpoint or pencil, it is not an issue, but on the photo below you can see some thinning of the lines, for example on the sample I wrote with the Kelly Green ink:

With the fountain pens, drying time is normal, though as usual, the Noodler's Bulletproof Black took the longest to dry, hence the smudges on the page. The creamy paper is very pleasant to write on and the 6.5mm gap is a sensible size for most handwriting. It is case-bound, so whilst it does not lie flat on the desk, you can flatten it out to write in.

Overall, this is a fun, very well made notebook, which I think would appeal to children or adults who are young-at-heart. It appears to be available widely around Asia and Australia, and Poland, but nowhere else yet in Europe as far as I know.

Data:

Dimensions: 106mm x 150mm
Pages: 128 cream colour pages, 6.5mm lined, animal pattern printed
Cover: Italian PU (polyurethane)
Binding: Case-bound, with pocket inside back cover

My thanks to Mr Foreal Lee at Daycraft for the samples.

Typecast 2

2011-05-15T16:10:00.006+01:00

Epi Hartou Notebook

2011-05-11T23:37:00.008+01:00

I was actually working on Saturday when this lovely little thing arrived in a padded envelope:

It is the Epi Hartou notebook, purchased recently from the Evripidis stationers by the author of the excellent Palimpsest blog, Lito Apostolakou, and sent to me for a recent comment. Many thanks!

It's a smart little memo book or notebook, smaller than I had been expecting, but nicely staple-bound inside this grey marbled card. I know very little Greek (in fact, I only really know the lower-case Greek alphabet because it is used in astronomy to name stars in order of brightness, and even then I am a bit hazy with the letters after iota as they are used for the really faint stars) but I can read the word "Tetradio" on the cover, and the name "Epi Hartou" beneath. A quick shufty on the internets tells me that τετραδιο translates as "Note". I like the little frame around the title, and I like the creamy paper, too, which I tested with a few of my pens and pencils:

There's a bit of bleedthrough from some of my pens, particularly the M90 and the Capless, but nothing to get upset about. There's barely any bleedthrough showing from the finer nibs, as you can see from the other side of the paper.

I am really pleased with this delightful little notebook, which I hope to use in the near future for various lists and notes. My thanks again to Lito for this prize.

Decluttering

2011-05-11T23:20:00.003+01:00

Readers (May I use the plural? Oh, alright then) might notice that the page view counter and the "defunct" blogroll are no more. I've been thinking of simplifying the layout of this blog for a little while, and neither seemed fit for purpose. After all, who wants to see a list of dead links and moribund blogs, or an odometer count?* So I've binned both of them. I will probably use the space to lengthen the blogroll and tinker around the edges. As always, the focus will be on blogging about my exploits in the world of stationery and "dead" media.

*That is a rhetorical question, by the way.

"New" Typewriter

2011-05-10T23:18:00.008+01:00

The other day I picked up a new typewriter which I had won in an auction on eBay. It's a Brother Deluxe 1350, which I bought for GBP4.99. The low price is due to it being sold as pick-up only, and as it wasn't far from my home, I thought it was worth a punt.

I've had a quick turn on it, and taken a few photos which I do not have the time to upload just at the moment, and it's a lovely machine. I'm delighted with it, especially when I see that a similar typewriter sold for GBP37. It seems to have a nice, smooth action, and although I have not mastered all the keys yet, I hope to shortly. I particularly like the fake wood panelling on the front, which reminds me of the fake wood on old American station-wagons (here in the UK we had real wood on our cars). The font is a standard "Elite" typewriter font, but I'm no expert on these matters (I'm trying to find out more about different fonts). My wife is already concerned that I may get fixated on amassing a large collection of typewriters, but in fact I only want a few more (at least I tell myself this). If I could get hold of a nice script-font model, an Olivetti Lettera 22/32 cheaply and one with a Techno Pica typeface, I'd be happy...for a while, at any rate.

Another feature on this Brother is the fact that a previous owner, who I guess must have been a student, stuck a number of football stickers on the side. Apart from the team's sticker (Manchester United) there are stickers of a few players from the team which won everything in sight around the turn of this century: Ole Gunnar Sokskjaer, Ryan Giggs and Peter Schmeichel . I found this amusing, because Brother were the shirt sponsors for United's local rivals Manchester City in the 1990s.

Back to stationery: on eBay, as in football, you win some and you lose some. I had bid on a printing set but I was unsuccessful this time around. I'll keep looking.

Another typecast to follow soon...

Typecast 1

2011-05-07T23:29:00.005+01:00

"Alternative" Uses for a Pencil 2

2011-05-05T23:17:00.005+01:00

No pictures this time, but today I used a pencil to mark a ballot paper at my local polling station. Today is an election day in much of the United Kingdom, with national government elections in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and local authority elections in England. I voted in none of those; instead I voted in a referendum held concurrently, the first referendum held across England since 1975.

The referendum was to vote on whether or not to introduce a new voting system in Parliamentary elections. I won't go into the details of our electoral system but the choice was between retaining the current First Past the Post system and introducing an Alternative Vote system.

Readers may be slightly surprised to see that the voting process in Britain is still very simple. I mark the ballot with a pencil according to my preference with an X in the box. And that's it. No machines are used in the count; we still employ teams of people to count the votes at town halls across the land.

So there's your alternative use for a pencil: democracy. Not bad for a cheap HB stub on a bit of string....incidentally I voted for AV.

Carved in Rubber

2011-05-04T21:40:00.013+01:00

Apologies for the light blogging, I've been a bit busy lately. Despite a near-fortnight off work thanks to the fortunate conjunction of public holidays here in England recently, I've been gardening and decorating, and too tired to blog...

Recently I've become interested in another weapon in the stationer's arsenal: the humble rubber stamp. It started off a few years ago when I picked up a cheap self-inking rubber stamp kit from my local branch of Lidl. It is the sort which is a tabula rasa: a blank slate onto which you put your own message. Rather predictably I put my name, address and telephone number on it. I used it a few times, and then put it away in the desk and forgot about it until recently. When I dusted it off the other week, the ink pad had dried out, and my efforts to re-ink it with a bottle from my local unnamed stationers were unsuccessful.

I bought a Colop date stamp from the stationers, but I really wanted an address stamp, so eventually and after much procrastination I ordered one from customstampsonline.com. I used their online stamp designer, and had a traditional rubber stamp made up, the sort which requires a separate ink pad. It's very good indeed and I'm delighted with it. I've already used the new stamp on correspondence and for putting my name and address on various books in my library. I hope you don't mind, but I don't wish to show it here as, even though I don't hide my name on this blog, I don't want my home address plastered all over the internets. Needless to say if I send you a letter or card, you'll see it!

Now that I have my fine new stamp, I was left with a redundant self-inker, albeit one I need to use with the ink pad. What to do? Another recent interest of mine is in mail art and stamping, after stumbling across this website from Fluxus mail artist Ruud Janssen from Breda in the Netherlands, who curates an archive of rubber stamps. With a bit of work in swapping the letters and numbers around, my old stamp could now have a new purpose, and reproduce any slogan I wanted. Again I chose the obvious message, and here it is in all its inky glory:

I suspect I will change it in time, however. One candidate for the space is one of my favourite quotes, from an old Prefab Sprout song, "Couldn't Bear to be Special":

All words are trains for moving past what really has no name

Which fits in nicely with another element of mail art which interests me, that of asemic writing. Whilst writing this post, it struck me that this entire blog post is probably meaningless, a collection of words with no content or message at all. Oh, the futility. But then, I remembered the tabula rasa. So I leave it to you, Dear Reader, to impose your own interpretation on it...

It's Official

2011-04-20T23:45:00.014+01:00

I couldn't help but notice this on the Guardian's website the other day: the Dutch photographer Jan Banning, has published a book, Bureaucratics which profiles portraits of public officials around the world.

This one attracted my attention: the piles of old papers dumped on the filing cabinets, the tatty desk, an overwhelming sense of the sheer pointlessness of it all. Most of the bureaucrats depicted are in mundane roles, such as town clerks, notaries or local police officials. They have to deal with members of the public. State symbols, such as flags, coats of arms, portraits of the founding fathers or current presidents line the walls of the offices. Desks are littered with stationery obviously, the occasional desktop PC or laptop, and all sorts of bric a brac. The offices are usually plainly decorated as you would expect public buildings to be.

I work as a civil servant and found that I related to many of the people in these pictures. I would take a photo of my office if I could, but my employer forbids photography on the site. Needless to say the open-plan office I work in is as dull as any of these places. Although officially, as a Crown servant, I work for the Queen, not the government, there are no portraits of Her Majesty on the wall. Sometimes the Union Jack is flown from the flagpole outside, but not every day. A visitor would be hard-pressed to know that this was a government building (except perhaps for the peeling paint on the walls). The buildings are old, but the furniture and equipment is modern, and I spend all day using a PC. Many of the old trappings of officialdom are out of use; for example it has been years since I filed a document in paper form, or stamped a document. In a way, I miss the old fashioned office ways. In my first job in the civil service, I was a clerk and had to do all those things: typing out documents, obtaining signatures, stamping them, filing them. I will have to post some more reminiscences of those days, which, despite being less than twenty years ago, feel a lifetime away.

In some months, my job will relocate to a nearby large city, and I'll be working in a modern office building. The move will mark the end of an era; I'll be coping with a longer commute and alternative working patterns and doing everything electronically. In the office there's a box full of redundant rubber stamps. I hope I can rescue them for posterity if not actually get to use them officially.

Pencil Spotting 1

2011-04-12T22:44:00.009+01:00

Watching Neil Oliver's series "The Age of Iron" on BBC2 the other evening, I could not help but notice another Staedtler user:

This is Steve Brooks of the Natural History Museum. He is a research entomologist who researches climate change from midge larvae found in lake bed sediments.

Whilst he counts Chironomid midge larvae in the eyepiece of his microscope, I count one pencil with distinctive black and red stripes, white band and black end-cap.

These Staedtlers can be found everywhere - in the laboratory, and perhaps even in ancient lakebed sediments.

2B or Not 2B?

2011-03-27T20:45:00.005+01:00

Apologies for the terrible pun in the title; it was to be the name of this blog fortunately, someone else had beaten me to it. Anyway...

I suppose that everyone has their favourite grade of pencil lead. For most, it's probably the plain old HB or No. 2 because that's all they can get - and probably all they need. Others may appreciate the silvery line of a harder grade like a 4H, not to mention the durability of the point. Still others may go the other way and opt for a soft, dark lead like a 6B.

For me, it's simple: 2B. It's not so soft that it needs sharpening every two minutes, and not too dark, but just dark enough for my tastes. Since returning to pencils, I've tried a few brands, some of which I've reviewed here. Of all the pencils I've tried so far, there are some which I keep returning to, for various reasons. Staedtler traditions are cheap, easily available and highly reliable with excellent lead. Tombow Mono 100s are beautiful, have super lead but I can only use them for short periods because of their razor-sharp edges. My favourite pencils of all are almost certainly Faber-Castell 9000s (and thanks to Matthias at Bleistift who kindly sent me some 9008 Stenos). But I ration my use of them because I can only get them by mail order, especially the wonderful Steno which I save for occasional use. I've never seen the F-C 9k range on sale in a bricks-and-mortar shop.

I bought another Staedtler tradition 2B the other day for everyday use (I've got several knocking around here). I began writing with it, and it just felt right. I should add that one of my hobbies is music; I play the tenor saxophone in the local community band. I have a Staedtler Noris 2B in my saxophone case, ready for marking band parts. It's darker than a HB, which makes it easier to read my jottings between the dots, especially where the lights may be low.

Other grades have their uses, and I'm not criticising them, but for some reason I keep returning to 2B. Incidentally, at junior school in the late 1970s I had a friend who liked telling the following joke:

Have you heard about the Hamlet pencil? (You can guess what the answer is.)

Alternative Uses for a Pencil 1

2011-03-26T18:12:00.007Z

Watching Gardeners' World on BBC2 last night, I couldn't help but notice this gentleman, Ken Stock, and his novel use for a Staedtler tradition 4B pencil.

Mr Stock grows dahlias (pictured top) in his garden in Bournemouth, and he uses his Staedtler as a dibber when planting his cuttings.

But whilst this may be news to stationery fans, it's not to gardeners, apparently. When I pointed this out to my wife, who is the gardener in our household, she wasn't surprised, and said that she'd used a pencil as a dibber, too.

Still, it's always nice to see a pencil on the telly, and Mr Stock's dahlias are beautiful.

Olympia SM3 Manual Typewriter

2011-03-20T15:56:00.014Z

For my 50th post here at Stationery Traffic, I have decided to post a few pictures of my Olympia SM3 manual typewriter, in grey crinkle-paint finish with chrome trim. This is the one I bought for three quid from the local Lion's Christmas Fair in December 2010, and which has already served me well for a couple of projects. I have been using it to type some notes on 3x5 index cards, and have found that I can get eight or nine lines of text on each card before I run out of paper.

I guess this machine was built in the 1950s. It was certainly made for the UK market, as you can see from the GBP symbol on the 5 key. Interestingly, the keyboard has no symbol for the numbers one or zero, but it does have a few fractions, particularly fractions denominated in eighths (1/8, 3/8, 5/8, 7/8).

This machine is most definitely Used. There are various ink ribbon stains here and there, but the mechanism works quite well despite a tendency to jump forward by one space when I use the shift key. (I attribute this to user error, not a mechanical fault.) I have wondered a few times who may have owned this machine before me: perhaps an author or script-writer, or some other professional who used it for correspondance. Maybe it belonged to a student who wrote their dissertation on it, or a copy typist. I'll never know, of course.

Here's the detailed photo of the Tipp-Ex stain on the front; it's been partially filled in with ball-point pen. I thought about removing it, and started to pick it off with a fingernail, but I decided to leave it where it is, as a battle-scar on this old warhorse. It looks like a bird dropping!

Above is a closer pic of the dealer's/repairer's decal. I had assumed that Clough's Typewriters had disappeared from the Swindon business community, but I googled the name all the same. I was surprised and delighted to see that - apparently, as I have been unable to travel to Swindon to check - it's still in business. They've still got the same telephone number, though with an extra digit added at some time in the last 30 years. (Most urban telephone numbers in the UK have been six digits since the 1980s.)

Before I sign off, here's a picture of the carry-case it was supplied in. It's very sturdy and covered in two-tone grey leatherette with white piping, which wouldn't be out of place inside a Ford Anglia, though I suppose a VW Beetle would be more apt. And it's still got the key.

I'd love to take the SM3 back to Clough's for a service some time, though a more pressing need right now is to replace the ribbon....

Palomino Blackwing

2011-03-06T19:54:00.011Z

Thanks to Mike for his generosity in sending me, amongst other classic pencils, a brace of Palomino Blackwings for review. "Hype" is probably too strong a word to describe the interest there has been in the reincarnation of this classic pencil, but there certainly has been a lot of discussion on this pencil around the blogosphere. To sum it up, briefly: Eberhard Weber in the USA manufactured the original Blackwing 602 from around 1933 unti 1998, when for a variety of reasons, including declining sales and raised manufacturing costs, production was ceased. After a period in which original Blackwing 602s soared in price, CalCedar relaunched the design in 2010 to much acclaim from fans of this classic.

I followed the relaunch with much interest, but held back from ordering some for myself. In a way, I am glad that I did, because now CalCedar has announced the forthcoming Blackwing 602 Classic which is closer to a functional office pencil, as I will explain.

The Palomino is supplied unsharpened. It is a bit longer and wider in girth than a standard office pencil (definitely thicker than a Staedtler Noris, for example) and is presented in a satin black finish, with gold accents. Apart from the all-gold lettering and distinctive ferrule, there is a gold band painted around the circumference, close to the ferrule. It's a masculine pencil; it would not surprise me to learn that this pencil had been designed by Hugh Hefner, though without his trademark rabbit's head. Although the lettering has been applied cleanly, as Palimpsest pointed out, there is also a scattering of gold flecks on the paint, clearly a side-effect of the process used to imprint the pencils. You can just see this in the top photo. This detracts from the overall image of the Palomino Blackwing, which otherwise oozes quality.

When I started to write with it, I was surprised to find the lead on the Palomino Blackwing to be so soft; obviously I was aware that it was softer than HB, but when I did use the Palomino, I found it to be closer to a 4B. Indeed, it's as soft as the lead in my Woerther Shorty. Whilst this makes for a lovely sketching pencil (which is why I bought the Shorty) it's not much use as an office pencil, which is where I use pencils most.

Where the original 602 had a Pink Pearl eraser, the 21st Century successor boasts a white plastic eraser. I used it a couple of times, as a test. It works well enough, though it leaves a noticeable line on the paper afterwards. I would only use this if I had no other eraser handy, because a vigorous erasing would probably wear most of it out. I like the fact that the eraser can be detached from the ferrule, and used for close-quarter erasing, however.

I wish CalCedar every success with the reinvigorated Blackwing line. Launching any kind of premium-grade pencil in today's market is probably highly risky, to say the least. Initial sales seem to be good, though, and hopefully this is the beginning of a successful line.

Finally: as an art pencil, the Palomino Blackwing is very good indeed, and I hope my misgivings about this pencil's use as an office writer will be solved by the forthcoming Classic. This pencil is well worth a try, if you haven't, already.

Thanks again to Mike for the review pencils.

In Search of the Elusive Crackerjack Pencil

2011-03-04T19:40:00.006Z

(Thanks to TV Cream for this cap)

Most of this post will be meaningless to anyone not from the UK, or under the age of 40. But then again...

Crackerjack was a children's entertainment television programme made by the BBC. It ran for nearly 30 years from 1955 until December 1984 and had a "variety" format where pop music and short comedy sketches were punctuated by competitions for members of the audience. As that audience was made entirely of schoolchildren, you can imagine how frenetic each show could be. It was rooted in England's music hall tradition and even in the 1950s must have seemed old-fashioned. (It certainly was when I watched it in the 1970s - see below.)

Inevitably, as with all competitions, there were winners and losers. Winners would be showered with games, toys and trinkets. Losers would receive a Crackerjack pencil, which was the idea of the show's producer, John Downes.

And it was only by losing at those games that you would obtain a Crackerjack pencil. Unlike the common Blue Peter badge, the supply of Crackerjack pencils was very tightly controlled. One (probably apocryphal) story has it that a BBC executive asked for one and was turned down flat, though the BBC did not turn the Queen down when she asked for some!

Since 1984, no new pencils have been given away. I've often wondered if there are any Crackerjack pencils left in the wild: perhaps as a stub languishing in a drawer somewhere, or someone's prize souvenir of their 60 seconds of fame. I've tried in vain to search for a picture of one, but Google Images gives me only pictures of a Cracker Jack Pencil Topper, which is not the same thing at all. Sometimes people put out plaintive requests on the internet for one. One of these things would command an astronomical price if it were to be put on the market - perhaps not as much as an original Thoreau pencil, but not far off. The Crackerjack Pencil is a culturally significant object to many adults here in the UK, an elusive butterfly, a reminder of lost youth.

(If you have one handy, let me know and I'll give you a fiver for it.)

Stationery Archeology 6

2011-03-02T23:06:00.001Z

A red WH Smith 6x4 index card box, complete with cards and index tabs, c.1990s.

Perfect Notebook Found?

2011-02-25T12:22:00.004Z

The excellent Office Supply Geek website recently published this review of the Field Notes Steno Pad. From my computer monitor, it looks like it meets my criteria for the ideal shorthand notebook which I mentioned a while back.

The covers look robust enough, and the "useful" information printed inside the covers can liven up a dull meeting. All I would have to do is to punch two holes in the covers for the Steno Pad to meet my specifications.

It's available in the UK too, from The Paperie. The sting in the tail? Just the price, GBP8.25 (over USD13). Ouch.

Silvine Memo Book

2011-02-24T16:10:00.010Z

This post about indexing, by the miserablist “Nemo” on the Mobilis Ink Mobili blog, reminded me of the existence of the Silvine brand of stationery, which has been a staple of British newsagents’ stationery shelves for years. I remember that often, they were the only affordable notebooks available in the local Lavells or Martins in the days before Moleskine. Established in 1901, the Silvine brand is owned by the Sinclair company, based in Otley, West Yorkshire. Silvine is one of the few British stationery brands left in operation, but seems to be run on 21st Century lines: for example, it boasts ISO 14001 and FSC certification. Silvine’s red jackets stood out a mile and their Memo Books were commonly used for all kinds of quotidian jobs: shopping lists, to-do lists, aircraft spotters’ lists of airliner registrations, and so on. Silvine was never seen as a premium brand; it was just an everyday brand of stationery.

Recently,I popped into the local stationer’s and picked up two of Silvine’s classic products: the Exercise Book, and the aforementioned Memo Book.

It's been many years since I used one of these: and the quality is surprisingly good. It has 72 pages, and measures a firmly pocket-sized 158mm tall by 99mm wide. On the cover it proudly proclaims that it is "BRITISH MADE". It is also very cheap at GBP0.71, or just over one USD. The cover is flimsy, but the paper is fine to write on. I used a variety of fountain pens, pencils and different Stabilo Point 88 felt-tip pens, and found that there was only minor bleed-through on one of my pens, the Pilot M90, which for this test was loaded with Diamine Imperial Blue ink. There was no discernible feathering where I've written with the fountain pens. See below for the results:

The paper is feint ruled - I don't believe they produce either plain or squared versions - and comes in a cash-book variant as well. In 2008, Silvine changed the brand logo: the one pictured above is the old one, which I prefer. Its replacement is just the name, without the laurel wreath, in a serif font.

This is a cheap, handy-sized little memo book with no frills at all. With a bit of care, it could be a constant companion on shopping trips, or even a trip to the local airport for a bit of aircraft spotting, like this for example:

South West Pen Show Redux

2011-02-24T13:15:00.014Z

South West Pen Show

2011-02-13T19:13:00.003Z

Today I went to the third South West Pen Show. This event, held in a hotel deep in Bristol's light industrial hinterland and close to the M5 motorway, is a small but friendly gathering of fountain pen enthusiasts and vendors. I arrived fairly late on, but managed to have a chat with a few of the stallholders and one or two punters. I did not buy anything today, although I was tempted by one or two gewgaws and of course some beautiful pens, such as the Sheaffer PFM.

I took a few photos, and hopefully I'll get the chance to upload them later.

Dixon Ticonderoga HB Pencil

2011-02-12T00:16:00.000Z

I begin this review with an old British television clip: the opening credits and introduction of an episode of Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected. Although best known around the world for his children's stories, Dahl also wrote wicked short stories for adults. He did this using the original predecessor of the pencil I review now: the Dixon Ticonderoga. The introduction on this episode of Tales of the Unexpected was typical: Dahl talking to camera from what purported to be his study, fiddling with a pencil as he spoke.

He was particular about the pencils and paper with which he wrote. The Ticonderoga was not, as far as I know, available in Great Missenden, England at the time, and I guess he stocked up during his frequent visits to the USA. Writing sessions would begin with sharpening six pencils, and he would change pencils rather than stop in mid-flow to sharpen a dull point. When I bought the review pencils from Cult Pens, I was tempted to purchase a box of twelve, so that I could put them into a cup and admire them by the dozen. Ticonderogas appear best in bulk: there's a scene in one episode from the last season of Mad Men where Joan Harris is seen extracting a number of them from the false ceiling. I've not had a chance to watch much that season again yet, but the Ticonderoga plays a small, but important role in Season Four. (And I recall another similar scene where Mulder has done the same in The X-Files basement.)

The Ticonderoga, long established as an American-made pencil, is now produced in Mexico and China. The Dixon name is part of the Fila stable of companies (it acquired Lyra a few years ago). It has very little currency here in Europe and until last year I had never even heard of it. When I saw that Cult Pens had begun to stock it however, I was keen to try one for review.

The pencil itself is finished in what might be called US Standard Office Pencil Yellow. This isn't the golden yellow of the Staedtler Noris; it's closer to the colour of honey, Bath stone or even mustard. It has a slight reddish cast to it. Unlike most contemporary pencils, this one bears no barcodes, country of origin stamps or any extraneous marking except the simple "Dixon Ticonderoga 2 HB" in green foil blocking. The ferrule, stamped from green-painted metal, bears two yellow stripes. New in the box, it comes unsharpened. This pencil certainly looks as though it means business. But how does it write?

Surprisingly well, I found. If this lead is anything like the old American leads used by Roald Dahl, I can see why they were his favourite pencil for long spells of writing. The wood is cedar, and the lead is a medium slate-grey shade. The point lasts a long time and during a week where I used the Ticonderoga exclusively, I found that quite long spells passed between sharpenings. It sharpened very nicely as well. The eraser, being a bog-standard pink pearl type, will do at a pinch if nothing else is to hand, but I prefer to use my modern white plastic erasers.

However it was noticeable that some shortcuts have been taken in production. This is, after all, an everyday office pencil. Quality control is questionable. One of my pencils was bent; not quite a banana, and not as bad as some examples out there, but certainly deviating from straight and true as can be seen in this photo (taken indoors):

It was this pencil that I used as my sample for this review.

Overall this is a good pencil for everyday use, though the Staedtler Noris 122 is a better overall pencil in my view, largely because of the QC issues.

Metaphys 44113 Blanc Notebook

2011-02-04T21:05:00.010Z

Note Booker Esq. kindly sent me his Metaphys 44133 blanc reporter's notebook after I "won" the giveaway he held late last year. Held up on its trans-Atlantic trip by winter weather and Christmas, it finally arrived here on 11 January 2011. My children were fascinated by it, mainly by its size: it measures a mere 104 millimetres long by 65mm wide and 9mm deep. It will fit completely within a standard 3x5 index card (see above).

One advantage of this small size is that it will fit comfortably in my shirt pocket, alongside a Uni Kuru Toga or my Pilot M90. Japanese pens and pencils seem to be a natural partner to this small but well-designed little notebook. Or is it a memo pad? The Engrish message on the front says:

METAPHYS Blanc is designed for drawing and taking a memo on the move

You would certainly have a hard time writing lengthy notes in this memo pad, unless you had really tiny handwriting. It's niche is, I feel, the quick note, telephone number, email address and so on. It is exquisitely made, though I agree with NB that it is expensive ($10.50 at Jet Pens). For that money you get a soft, fabric-clad cover, and a large number (I couldn't be bothered to count, ah wait a minute, the Metaphys website says 70) of white plain sheets of thin paper which is made seemingly from linen or cotton rag. This paper is, by necessity, very thin, as shown by the amount of bleedthrough in my fountain pen samples:

You should be able to see that the Diamine Woodland Green sample written with my M90 showed a lot of bleedthrough, more so than the Noodler's Bulletproof Black sample from my Pilot Capless. I tried out a number of types of pen and pencil, and concur with NB's findings that fountain pens can bleed a lot, and rollerball and felt pens less so, and ballpoints not at all. But the best partner to this memopad is a good old pencil, as the lines will not show through the thin paper.

One thing which struck me in this age of Moleskine and its assorted copies, is that the Metaphys Blanc lacks two of the essential elements of the classic pocket notebook: the page marker ribbon, and the elastic band closure. I find this a bit surprising. First, the cover does not close fully, but stays ajar; look carefully at the first picture. Second, this opening allows foreign objects such as crumbs, bits of fluff, hair, leaf mould etc to accumulate inside the notebook. I suppose the lack of these features marks out the Blanc as sufficiently different to all the Mole knock-offs on the market today, but I found that I missed them. The elastic closure is the most useful feature, in my opinion. In addition, the fabric cover also attracts hair and dust. In fact, I've just brushed off more biscuit crumbs from it.

In summary, then: this is a high-quality pocket memo pad for people with tiny handwriting and who need to keep a memo pad in their shirt pocket. It is pricey, but nonetheless a fine item, even if it could do with an elastic closure. I'll be using it in future.

Thanks again, NB.

Dave Turns Five

2011-01-30T13:49:00.000Z

Congratulations to Dave on the fifth anniversary of his Mechanical Pencils Blog. His was one of the first pencil blogs I found in the internets, and it sets the standard which I have no hope of matching.

Thank you very much for your contribution the pencilblogosphere, Dave!

Pointless Milestone 1

2011-01-18T22:51:00.000Z

The page-view counter has ticked over to 10,000 views, not all of them my own. Thanks for looking.

I have more posts in the pipeline. I still need a new ribbon for my Olympia SM3 so no typecast from that yet; needless to say, though I will anyway, The Stationers That Shall Not Be Named did not have a ribbon in stock. I have been using it to type notes for a work project onto 3x5 index cards, with some success. Even though the notes are strewn with typos and are not perfectly aligned with the feint ruled lines, it's a pleasure to read them.

Soon I will post some notebook-related blogposts, once I've thought of something to say. Note Booker, Esq. kindly sent me his Metaphys 44133 notepad memopad to review, and I've already had a bit of a play with it. My children were fascinated by it, when the Metaphys arrived in the post last week. It really is tiny.
.

Linex WP100 HB Pencil

2011-01-15T19:27:00.000Z

Denmark is known for many things: bacon, the world's oldest national flag, and Lego spring immediately to mind. It has a long-established stationery industry which has provided the world with Viking pencils, and of course Bantex everything else. Less well-known however, is the Linex company. This is rather surprising as it was, according to the company's own website, established in 1935. After a period of ownership by Bantex in the 1990s, it was spun off again as an independent company by Groupe Hamelin, which acquired Bantex around the turn of this century.

Linex manufactures well-made plastic stationery goods, principally rulers, stencils and templates, and geometry tools. I own a few of them, including a very nice circle template, a metal eraser shield and a 5mm lettering stencil. Linex also specialises in tools for marine navigation. Woodcased pencils appear to be a sideline, and I suspect production of the Linex WP100 (pictured above, with apologies for the poor quality) is sub-contracted to another company. I can see no evidence either on the net or on the pencils themselves that the WP100 is made in Denmark; I guess it is made in China. Neither have I been able to find a review of the WP100 on the internet, so I believe this is the first online review of this product, which I bought from The Stationers That Shall Not Be Named some time in 2009.

The WP100 is a standard office/school woodcase pencil and is available in five grades, from 2H to 2B. It is finished in a distinctive bottle-green lacquer, which is finished off with fine silver lines, a white band and a black end-cap. (Green is the Linex company colour.) It is the same length as a standard pencil, but is noticeably thicker in the hand; at least a millimetre or two thicker than a Staedtler Noris, for example. Whether this is due to the thickness of the paint used, or wider slat of wood, I do not know. You may have trouble locating this pencil, and I certainly know of only one retailer which carries it, but if you can find it for sale, this pencil may be worth a punt.

The WP100 is quite cheap, and occupies the middle ground in pencil cost: it costs GBP0.45 in the local stationer's. For this I got a pencil made from cedar, and one that will withstand sharpening with my KUM steno sharpener. However, after a few days using this exclusively at work, I found a number of drawbacks with the WP100. First, the finish is not as good as it could be. The paint may be thick, and show no sign of woodgrain, but the silver lines are unevenly applied, and the white band is at a slight angle on one of my examples. The white band is on another pencil is not even and there’s a bulge in the paint (see below).

In the hand I found the corners dug into my fingers in a similar way to the Tombow Mono 100 I reviewed a while back, and the extra girth of the pencil contributed to the general discomfort of using this pencil.

However the weakest part of this pencil is the lead. I have HB and B examples of this pencil. The B is actually not too bad; it is dark and writes well on paper, though it feels less gritty than the HB. The HB I used was more troublesome because there must have been a problem with mixing the lead. In addition to the grittiness of the lead on the paper, there were also what felt to be lumps of clay in the mix. The line left by the HB pencil occasionally became much lighter, and the lead harder. This was unfortunate because otherwise, it was fairly dark; perhaps as dark as the Stabilo 4908s I reviewed last year. Both erased well with my Stabilo eraser, however.

So, the WP100 is a curate’s egg of a pencil: good in parts, bad in others. The unevenness of the lead is the deal-breaker on this pencil, which is a pity because with a higher-quality lead, this could be a true competitor to the established brands. However, I’ll be sticking to my Staedtler and Faber-Castell pencils.

Stationery Archeology 5

2011-01-15T12:31:00.001Z

Number five in this occasional series is a Staedtler tradition HB pencil stub, which I found when cleaning the dust/cobwebs/other detritus from under the computer desk. This one celebrates ~~300~~ 150 years of Staedtler pencils, dating this pencil to 1985 (see second pic). Note the joined D and T on the "EDTLER". I definitely used this pencil at school. Apologies for the ham-fisted sharpening as I used a knife, not a sharpener, on this pencil for a DIY job years ago. (Edited for correct date.)

The World's Most Expensive Pencil Sharpener?

2011-01-13T21:26:00.000Z

...and he even made it a long-point too.

Happy New Year

2011-01-01T18:01:00.000Z

Happy New Year! I hope 2011 is an improvement over its predecessor.

This time of year has special significance to me. My parents were from Scotland, where New Year celebrations are taken very seriously - it is called Hogmanay and you can read about it here. Every Hogmanay my parents hosted a party which began at midnight; much of New Year's Eve was spent cleaning the house before the party (a custom which I understand is also followed by the Chinese). The post-party clean-up would occur once people had recovered from the festivities. January is a month of looking forward: the nights begin to shorten again after the dark months of November and December, and the Christmas break is over. I've done very little other than eat and drink too much this Christmas as I have been unwell, but the enforced break has allowed me to recharge my batteries; I'm even looking forward to getting back to work next week.

During 2011, I intend to continue posting from time to time on pencils and pens, with the occasional foray into typewriters and other subjects. I intend to post one or two typecasts from the Olympia SM3 once I can work out how to darken the text on scans, or obtain a replacement ribbon. There are some pencils I have yet to try - still no Blackwings or Dixon Ticonderogas here for example, though the latter is now available at Cult Pens - so perhaps I can get my hands on those, even with the rise in VAT due on Tuesday.

So, here's to the new year, and a new decade in stationery. Again, Happy New Year!

Staedtler Noris HB

2010-12-22T17:19:00.000Z

It's about time I posted about pencils again so this latest post is about the Ford Mondeo of the pencil world: the Staedtler Noris HB school pencil. Looking around, I see the Noris being used frequently; it's probably the most common pencil in England. It helps that this pencil is cheap and widely available, often in supermarkets.

It is used a lot instead of carpenters' pencils. Back in September 2010 I went to a green woodworking demonstration near my home. One of the bodgers was using a Noris to mark the wood for turning into a bowl. In addition to marking materials of all kinds, the Noris is also commonly used for jotting shopping lists or making random notes; it is commonly seen in musicians' instrument cases, for writing on their printed music parts.

I suppose I should continue here with a series of sub-Proustian reminiscences about using this pencil, which has armed generations of schoolchildren here in England. The trouble is, I don't have any. I think I used Noris pencils when I was a boy growing up in west London in the 1970s and 1980s, but I have no clear memories of this. I do remember using the more up-market tradition pencils at school, but when it comes to the humble Noris there's a big blank at the centre of my schoolday memories. This could be a sign of the sheer ubiquity of this design of pencil that I have no memories of it at all: an object so common it literally faded into the woodwork.

In an effort to make up for ~~temps perdu~~ lost time I have been using a Noris HB at work. For a child's school pencil, this is remarkably over-engineered; to be honest it's just too good to waste on children. I have a variety of made-in-Germany and made-in-GB versions here before me, many of them chewed at the end by my eldest daughter (see photo). There are some variations - on some this is described as the "Noris school pencil", on others, simply, "Noris". This is a pencil aimed squarely at the lucrative educational market and is a tough, no-nonsense product. Sculpted from light, porous European wood (no cedar here) and with one of Staedtler's durable graphite lead cores, this is equipped for the rigours of the school day (namely being dropped from a desk, having the tip snapped off when drawing a circle in maths, writing a graffito in the back of an exercise book, illustrating the water cycle in the Ice Age, poking a classmate and being dropped from a desk etc).

The overall appearance is as would be expected: a yellow-and-black striped pencil, topped off with a painted endcap in a variety of colours in its non-eraser tipped variant, Art. Nr. 120. The eraser-tipped version, the 122, can be found in stationers' such as Rymans, but is much less common.

The Noris is manufactured in five grades: 2B, B, HB, H and 2H. In the wild, the most common sub-species sports a red endcap, this being the HB variety. I have two blister-packs of these common birds, in a multipack option offered by Staedtler in supermarkets, probably with the start of the school year in mind. Here, a pack of ten Noris HBs, bundled with a Mars eraser and a functional Staedtler sharpener, is sold in my local Tesco for the bargain price of GBP2.50. In my local stationers', the eraser alone is a quid. Tesco also offer a pack of five assorted Noris grades for GBP1.40, and a three-pack of 2Bs for a pound. All offer astoundingly good value for money.

The lead is fairly dark, though not as dark as the tradition's HB. It is slightly harder than the tradition as well, probably to enable less frequent sharpening. On the paper, it leaves a slate-grey line which allows the user to vary its width. I found that I could write for a long time between sharpenings. At one point I managed to sharpen a Noris successfully with my KUM Long Point sharpener. This was good news, but turned out to be a one-off only; when I tried to use the Long Point again, I found my old problem of broken leads had returned. After three or four attempts to sharpen with the Long Point, I abandoned the idea and went back to using my standard KUM sharpener, which left me with a three-inch long stub and a pile of yellow-and-black sharpenings.

The lead smears a bit on the paper, though less so than the tradition HB lead. I have not tried using any grade of Noris other than the HB, so I can't report how those perform, but the HB certainly does a fine job of writing, drawing or marking as you require.

Swimming in it

2010-12-10T22:33:00.008Z

Like most fountain pen enthusiasts, I own far too much ink.

I keep my ink collection in an old, wooden first aid box, the kind that would have been stationed on the wall of a warehouse or factory back in the 1980s. It's large enough to accommodate my bottles, some 20-odd strong. Looking through them, I see that I own three different brands of black ink. Why? After all, black is black, right? Well, not exactly. I bought one bottle of black ink (Diamine Onyx Black), then I bought a bottle of Noodler's Bulletproof Black, and some Pilot IC50 black cartridges for my black Capless. I am settled on the Noodler's now because of its water- etc resistance, and because it works quite well in the Capless. It is my ink of choice for those situations where I have to complete an official form. But then I bought a bottle of Sailor Jentle Grey ink. This fluid does not seem to like any of my pens, so there it sits, unused, and I haven't the gall to pour it down the sink.

Mostly the inks remain unused because I initially liked the colour, but then lost enthusiasm. Diamine Imperial Purple is a case in point, here. Purple is the colour of my old university and I had the bright idea that it would be nice to write in purple ink. Imperial Purple was suggested to me by my colleagues on the Fountain Pen Network so I bought a bottle. It is a nice ink, though I have since found that it fades to a dusty purple colour. This was not what I was looking for. I have since replaced it with another purple, well actually it's called violet on the bottle: Pelikan Violett. This is also the reason why I own several bottles of blue ink (Quink, Waterman, Pelikan, Diamine, Pilot).

Sometimes the inks remain unused because I love the colour but they take too long to dry because they are highly saturated. Private Reserve Plum is a good example. It is beautiful, but takes forever (seemingly) to dry on the page. As I detest smearing this is a big disadvantage.

Sometimes they are unused because they don't work in my pens or I simply haven't tried them in the right pen. Pelikan Turquoise springs to mind; it's a cool colour, behaves well, and yet it's yet to find a happy home in my pens. As a colour, it's a blue which reminds me of glaciers; it's the colour of icebergs. At the moment it lives in one of my Lamy Safaris.

Sometimes there are colours which I enjoy and then don't use for no particular reason. Diamine Orange is the one here. It is a genuine eye-popping orange colour, reminiscent of 1970s orange squash. I really ought to put this back into one of my pens, and soon.

Some inks I buy simply because I like the bottle. I bought Caran d'Ache's Sunset for this reason, but also because it filled a gap in my colour wheel and it is one of my favourite colours.

And then there are inks which I buy, try out, then forget about for a while before trying them again and wonder why I had forgotten about them. Here the winner is Diamine Woodland Green. After all the experimentation with colours I have found that green ink has the most calming effect on me of any of them. Here in England, people who write with green ink are seen as either eccentric or just barking mad, though there is also a century-old tradition of senior military and intelligence officers using it to sign documents and memos. Or are they just the same thing? When I first became enthused with fountain pens, in 2007, I bought a small bottle of Woodland Green. It was lovely, but it was probably too soon in my journey into inks to settle on it as a core colour. I soon put it away to try others.

I suppose I ought to be pleased to join the green-ink brigade because writing in green ink brings me back to one of the reasons for writing with a fountain pen in the first place - to enjoy the sensation of seeing a page fill up with a beautiful colour, even if the text is as quotidian as it gets (and believe me, at work, it is).

Looking again in the box I note that I own only two shades of green ink. How could this state of affairs have come to pass? My favourite colour and only two shades? Right, time to check out some J.Herbin shades. Vert Empire looks very nice though Lierre Sauvage and Vert Reseda are on the want-list too. Argh.

Goodies

2010-12-04T17:19:00.003Z

Today was the day of my town's annual Lions Christmas Fair. This is held in the local Corn Exchange, and is used by the townsfolk to recycle stuff. The quality of much of it is surprisingly good and the fair is a chance to pick up some bargains and Christmas presents. Sure enough I managed to bag a few goodies myself including:

a Marksman wooden ruler (which was made in England, but graduated only in metric units)
a yellow-and-orange Fila Temograph H pencil (stamped "Florence Italy") which looks completely unused
a few other pencils including a no-name primrose yellow round pencil and two Conté Evolution HBs
a black plastic 3"x5" card index box full of blank cards and indexed dividers
a genuine Anglepoise fully-articulated desklamp complete with low-energy bulb
and last but not least, an Olympia SM-3 portable (if you have a team of porters) mechanical typewriter in grey, complete with carry case.

The most expensive items were the lamp and the typewriter, which both set me back a princely 3GBP. The pencils were a giveaway - ie, completely gratis and free. I am delighted with this haul, particularly the typewriter, which I have already played with. The Olympia is in full working order and the ribbon looks fine. I had gone with the intention of getting the desk lamp but as I'm always on the lookout for interesting stationery, I had hoped to find a few other bits and pieces for the collection.

The Olympia looks well-used; it has a Swindon dealer's decal (complete with five-digit phone number), not to mention a correcting fluid stain, which has subsquently been lined with blue ball-point, presumably by a bored typist, or perhaps a novelist. This brings my typewriter "collection" to two: the other being a 1970s Olympiette, a present from my mother-in-law. My wife thinks I am mad to entertain such beasts when I already possess a PC, but sometimes it is nice to get the manual typewriter out and bash out a few lines of meaningless prose. I have an idea of typing notes onto 3"x5" cards - have another look at the picture which adorns this blog. This would be useful if and when I ever get around to persuing academic research again, perhaps for a master's degree. After all, if it's good enough for the historian David Starkey, it's probably good enough for me. I use index cards a lot to write down to-do lists or just notes in general, because I don't like Post-it notes much. (The paper is crap and it doesn't take fountain pen ink at all well.) The 3"x5" card is an ideal size, I think; big enough to write quick notes on, but small enough to fit inside a diary, Filofax or book. I keep a bunch of them held together with a large clip.

Obviously, a good day; and I'll be back again next year.

Stationery Archeology 4

2010-11-28T17:16:00.003Z

A bottle of Parker Quink Permanent Blue ink, manufactured in England in the 1970s. One of three I bought this year as a job-lot, after seeing this online. It seems to be the ink used by my favourite author JG B*ll@rd. I've used this recently in the Pilot M90 and it's still good, it dries out to a very respectable darkish blue with no purplue tinge.

I've since departed from the blue-ink policy in the M90 by filling it with Diamine Woodland Green. (See last post.)

In Praise of the Pilot M90

2010-11-13T23:40:00.007Z

Don’t expect any impartiality though, because it is about what is probably my favourite pen, the Pilot M90.

I bought this pen in the summer of 2009, from a Japanese seller on a well-known internet auction site. I am fascinated by Japanese stationery, paper, pens and pencils; it all seems to be exquisitely designed. In particular I am fascinated by the products of the Pilot Corporation, whose pens are innovative, beautifully designed and well made, even where they are mass-produced such as the V series rollerball pens. I don’t think I have used a Pilot pen which has been anything less than good, and the M90 is more than that: it’s excellent.

My route to this pen was circuitous. I started off with a green Pilot 78G which I bought from His Nibs .com.

I was impressed enough with that to move on to a black Capless (called the Vanishing Point in the US) which I bought from Cult Pens. I used the Capless as my main pen for over a year and filled it with all sorts of ink, from Pilot’s own black and blue ink in cartridges, to various Diamine and Noodler’s inks. Now it is filled with Noodler’s Bulletproof Black ink and I use it for making notes, particularly astronomical observations as I mentioned before here.

I first learned of the M90 whilst looking around the Fountain Pen Network. 2008 was the 90^th anniversary of the founding of Pilot, and in keeping with previous significant anniversaries (not to mention custom and practice throughout the pen industry) they issued a limited-edition pen. What I found fascinating about this pen, was that it was not covered in gold or fancy decorations, but instead was a re-interpretation of a Pilot classic, the Myu 701, which is mentioned here.

The M90, like the Myu before it, is a pocket pen – a pen which by design has a shortened body and a long cap, and which only achieves operating length when the cap is posted. Before reading about the M90 I had never seen or heard of a pocket pen, but it seemed to me to be a unique solution to the problem of how to carry around a pen without a pen case, which most European pens appear to demand. By habit I carry pens around in my shirt pockets, but I have found that a standard European fountain pen – a Lamy Safari, for example - can sit proud in the pocket and be a bit cumbersome. The M90 sits discreetly in my shirt pocket, ready for deployment to take notes at any time.

When capped, this pen resembles a small, stainless steel pod. When posted, it transforms into a stainless steel quill. The sleek lines of the pen are spoiled somewhat by the ring which separates the nib unit from the barrel of the pen, but this has not irritated me, unlike some others who have lamented this where the original was more streamlined.

Some have complained that this pen is “only” a cartridge pen. The cartridges are Pilot’s own proprietary design; standard “international” cartridges will not fit. Pilot sells a press-bar converter separately, the CON-20, which fits snugly in the space available in the barrel. For over a year I used a Pilot cartridge, filled first with Pilot’s own ink and then refilled using a syringe and other manufacturers’ inks. Having used both the cartridge and the converter, I have to say that I prefer the converter partly because it is less of a hassle to do, and partly because I have less explaining to do if I use the syringe at work, where I do most of my writing. However the downside to using the converter is that the CON-20 does not tell you how much ink remains in the bladder, which in any case holds much less than the 1.1ml capacity of the cartridge. I have had the pen run dry unexpectedly on me on a couple of occasions, usually in meetings where I have forgotten to bring a back-up. I may well switch back to the cart, so I can see how much ink I have left.

On the subject of filling systems, I have to say that I cannot bring myself to be very excited by them. It would make no difference to me if the M90 was a piston-filler. To me the essence of a fountain pen is its nib; this is the point of contact with the paper, and the one part which is in use all of the time, unlike the filling system which is used only every few days or weeks. And the nib on the M90 is superb: one of the most striking things I found about the M90, and one of the reasons for buying one, was the integrated nib. Reading around the internet it seemed that this stainless steel nib was very stiff: definitely in the nail class of nibs. I was not bothered by this, and still I do not find it to be a problem, though I have yet to buy a pen with genuine flex, which I know have their fans.

I had been a bit wary of the stainless steel, however. I had childhood memories of my father’s stainless steel Parker pens. I’ve never liked the Parker “Flighter” pens much, probably because of the feel of them. They felt rough to me. But I need not have worried. The M90 is finished with great finesse, and brushed with more care and finer buffing than those old 1970s-era Parkers. The clip and the central ring are not brushed, and add a bit of contrast to the rest of the pen. With use, and constant uncapping and posting of the cap, the steel gathers fine scratches. The moral is clear: do not use this pen if you wish to have it looking perfect! But this pen was made to be used. I tolerated the microscratches at first, but now I celebrate them. This is MY pen and these are the scratches I have left on it. More disconcerting for me though was the dent I found on the barrel. How it got there, I still do not know. Even though I take care with my pens, and wrap them in a suede leather pen-wrap I made myself, this dent was still inflicted on my precious. To begin with, I wondered how to have it removed; I posted a question on FPN about it. One of the replies, which said that I should leave the dent and treat it as a battle-scar, made me feel better about the situation. The dent will stay, a reminder that once I was careless with this pen and to take better care in future (which I do).

My M90 has a M nib. M90s are available in either F (fine) or M (medium) nibs, though it should be remembered that these are Japanese standard thicknesses, which are finer than European widths. I have found though, that it leaves a line closer to a European M I think, and not as fine as I had been expecting. In a way I regret not buying one with an F nib, because as I use fountain pens, I find that now I favour finer lines to thicker ones.

The design has been tweaked a little bit to differentiate it from the Myu, most notably the small blue gemstone mounted in the top of the cap, the engraved M90 logo on the clip, and the design of the ring. In keeping with the blue gemstone, I decided I would only fill my M90 with blue ink, a resolution I have so far mostly kept, although I did once try it with purple ink. I reserve the right to change my mind; at the moment I’ve been using a lot of green ink. I have tried a variety of blue inks in this pen, which caused me a bit of a problem at first because one of the reasons I took up a fountain pen again was the fact that I could change colours easily. I tried to avoid blue ink, in fact. However blue seemed to be the only appropriate colour for this particular pen. The ink I use now is some old Quink Permanent Blue; before that, modern Quink Blue and before that, I used Waterman South Seas Blue. Quink gets short shrift from most fountain pen users but I think that is unfair; to be honest I was a bit sniffy about it myself, because I was more interested in using fine inks from the likes of Noodler’s and Diamine. But having tried some of those inks, I have returned to using Quink. It’s probably something to do with childhood memories of my father using it in his Parker fountain pens, and then using it myself at school. I have always liked that squat bottle. Quink behaves well in the M90, with a slight tendency to run on the dry side.

Even though the design is basically a 1970s design, the M90 looks thoroughly modern. This is a pen for people who enjoy modern design and fine writing. Every time I use this pen, even for the most mundane of purposes, my heart is lifted. I really wish that Pilot would produce a version of this pen not as a limited-edition but as a regular model.

Looking for The Perfect Shorthand Notebook

2010-11-10T19:41:00.004Z

Years ago, in an earlier job in the civil service, I had a shorthand notebook which was just about perfect. It was made by HMSO (Her Majesty's Stationery Office - now called The Stationery Office after privatisation in 1996). In all senses this was a conventional shorthand notebook: it was wire-bound, and had feint lined paper. But the reason I liked it, was this: it had thick cardboard covers, with a hole cut into each, near the bottom. When the covers were turned inside out, and a 8cm treasury tag attached to brace them, it could be stood up to enable the typist to read what they had written whilst typing the text on a PC. I particularly liked this function, but also the light-blue cardboard front cover. The cardboard used was robust so it could be used anywhere dry and could withstand a battering in the briefcase.

Recently, I have been looking around for a similar shorthand notebook but to no avail. Most have the thick cardboard back cover, but the front cover is usually a thin sheet of glossy paper which simply is not robust enough to be used as a stand for anything at all. Even Clairefontaine's version is not up to spec (though the paper is as nice as ever).

If anyone could point me in the direction of a shorthand notebook which is similar to that old HMSO notebook, I'd be grateful for the information. I only wish now I'd ordered a few more and created a stash of them.

Stabilo GREENlighter 6007

2010-10-30T20:01:00.004+01:00

I was intrigued enough by this review at Pencil Talk to search out the Stabilo GREENlighter highlighting pencil at a stationer's some distance from my home. I've used Stabilo Boss highlighter pens for years, but the idea of using a pencil for hightlighting text made more sense. I've found all highlighter pens dry out unless you replace the cap, and of course the process of highlighting demands the reader to use it intermittently, which means having to take the cap off and replace it numerous times during a spell of reading and highlighting. Another reason for using a pencil is that I have found highlighter pens to smear fountain pen ink, and as I use a fountain pen I wanted to avoid that if at all possible.

Based on the Pencil Talk review, I purchased only the yellow version of this pencil; the green and pink variants aren't as good, apparently. It takes a little getting used to, because more effort is needed to leave a useable layer of highlighter than a pen. The hightlighting is more subtle than a pen's. The highlighting core has a smooth, deep waxy feel and glides over the paper, though as I say, it needs more pressure and multiple passes to leave a healthy line.

The barrel of the pencil is triangular in section and painted in dayglo yellow with thin white lines. All information is printed in black, as is the FSC logo.

I've really enjoyed using this pencil and it has found a place in my pencil case. This one is a winner, in my view.

Stabilo GREENgraph 6003

2010-10-25T22:25:00.006+01:00

Another quick review of a Stabilo product, this time their "green" pencil, the GREENgraph 6003. This HB pencil, which comes in eraser-tipped and non eraser-tipped versions, is Stabilo's effort at developing, manufacturing and marketing a pencil which is produced from wood managed in a sustainable way. This pencil, along with others in the Stabilo stable, is designed to conform with Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) rules on woodland management; Stabilo as a company has been registered with FSC since 1998. It claims to be "first FSC-certified writing instruments manufacturer and hence a pioneer in the industry". All well and good, though I have just tried (unsuccessfully) to confirm this. Penciltalk tried to check the Chain of Custody for a review of the GREENlighter highlighting pencil, but found the online documentation to be less-than-helpful.

In any case, this pencil is a conventional hexagonal HB pencil, finished very nicely indeed in a cheerful spring-green colour with white stripes. There's a bit of user info, including the FSC logo to remind the user this is an eco-pencil, but no country of origin information. The reverse has a stock number and barcode. Mine does not have the eraser.

This pencil writes in similar fashion to the Stabilo Swano 4907 I reviewed a while back. It's OK, not unpleasant, though it has that grittiness I mentioned before. It's fairly dark and leaves a dense line on paper; it's slightly lighter and firmer than a Staedtler tradition HB, but without the smoothness of the latter. In the hand, it's actually quite comfortable, though I did not use it for extended writing. I've put mine in my bag as an everyday pencil, which I feel this is. It's really a competitor to the Staedtler Noris, and is a good quality, workaday pencil. Stabilo has produced a nice one here, and I'd be happy to own and use more in the future. This one cost me 50p in a stationer's here in England (no, not the one I complained about recently). I reckon this could be difficult to find as it struggles to find shelf-space in the shops; most stationers here sell either Staedtler or Derwent.

In summary, then: a good everyday pencil, though still more expensive than a Noris.

Stationery Archeology 3

2010-10-24T00:35:00.006+01:00

Third in this series, I'm really excited by this find. It is a Staedtler Shorthand pencil, HB and made in Great Britain. I found this on 22 October 2010 in a stationer's in Southampton. It is salmon-pink with a white band and a red painted end-cap, and the lettering (stamped in red) says:

GREAT BRITAIN STAEDTLER SHORTHAND JET BONDED

I love the stylised typography of the words "Staedtler" and "Jet Bonded". The model number is obscured by the price label - but I think this was model number 114. This pencil is a bit scuffed from years languishing unloved and unwanted in the stationer's pencil rack, but I'd like to think that has now ended and it has found a welcome in my modest collection. I've not tried writing with this pencil, so don't ask yet how well it writes.

I did not even know that Staedtler made stenographers' pencils here in the UK, so this was a delightful surprise for me. This clearly is one of the predecessors of the rare-as-hens'-teeth Stenofix. As it happened, I found this just around the corner from where I used to work, and shared an office with a shorthand typist called Joan. That office is now a hairdresser's.

This pencil was a bargain, as it cost me only 50p! I feel like I've just unearthed Sutton Hoo. What a shame they only had one in the rack, as I'd have had the lot. Never mind, I also found a somewhat beaten-up made-in-GB Staedtler tradition 2H too.

Stabilo EASYgraph Right-Handed Pencil

2010-10-19T19:51:00.006+01:00

Another quick review, this time of Stabilo's EASYgraph learner's pencil. I bought a twin-pack of these from my local stationer's for £2.00 in September 2010.

This pencil is an over-sized "ergonomic" pencil aimed at the early learner's market and is clearly in competition with Staedtler's Noris Ergosoft range. The idea here is that small children have difficulty holding a conventional pencil when learning to write, but can grip an oversize pencil more easily. Ergonomic pencils usually also feature some form of textured grip surface in addition to the larger diameter. Both pencils have the fashionable triangular cross-section pioneered by Faber-Castell. The Ergosoft pencil has a non-slip finish; the EASYgraph is painted in a cool, dark blue with a greenish tinge, and has a series of gouges in the wood, set at around 45°, to guide fingers to holding the pencil at the right angle when writing on paper. These depressions are set so that the pencil may only be held comfortably in the hand it was designed for, so that a right-hand pencil may only be held for a period in the right hand, and the left-hand model held in the left. The right-hand model has the end dipped in red paint; the left-hand model has a yellow dip. The EASYgraph also has a small panel in which the owner can write their name (presumably in ball-point pen).

The HB lead on this right-hand model has a bit of resistance to it, but leaves a dark, thick line: perfect for small children. It's not too shabby for adults who should by now know how to write, either. Some people have criticised the lead for being scratchy but I've not found this to be the case in the short time I've used this pencil.

I would probably not send my children to school armed with one though, because the EASYgraph stands out a mile compared to a conventional school pencil such as the good old Staedtler Noris HB. It would either attract ridicule from classmates for being a "learner's" pencil or would be stolen or hidden; either would be distressing. Children can also be a bit fussy about their pencils as well, and the ergonomic grip may not suit everyone.

This is one of Stabilo's more interesting pencil designs, and shows that there's still new things to be done with the wood-cased pencil. I doubt that I would use this pencil regularly, but I am glad that Stabilo have taken the risk with this design and I wish them well with it. Oh, and it works well for adults, too.

Local Shops for Local People?

2010-10-17T20:25:00.005+01:00

The town in the South West of England where I live is a small but lively market town with a good range of shops. One of these is a stationery store which appears to do good business; they're usually busy when I visit, at any rate. I suppose I ought to be grateful that my small town can support such a place when other towns in the district cannot. This shop sells a wide range of products with brands such as Caran d'Ache, Parker, Pilot, Staedtler, Tombow, Woerther, Letts and Clairefontaine available in stock. The shop is crammed with goods.

However, I'm ambivalent about the place. A visit to a stationers' should be a moment of joy, but there are always reasons not to celebrate. Here is a summary of the reasons why:

They never seem to have quite what I want in stock. There have been many occasions when I have asked the store manager about goods which simply are not in stock. For example:

Staedtler Mars Lumographs?. “I’ll have to order them specially. That’ll be £13 for a dozen. If you want a mixed tin, I can only order them in tens and I can’t sell them because customers think they’re too expensive.”

Highlighter pencils? “We used to have those, but I’ve not seen them for years.”

Pelikan Violett ink? “Oh, they’ve stopped making that.”

And so on.

The prices. I realise that a retail premises is likely to incur higher overheads than an online business and will therefore charge manufacturers' recommended retail prices for goods. Fair enough. The mark-ups are consistently high, and there’s no discounting that I can see. I’ve never seen this shop offer bulk discounts for anything. (I've never asked though, for fear of causing offence.) A boxed dozen pencils, for example, costs the same as twelve individual pencils. Inflation here is higher than elsewhere – understandable when most of the goods are imported and the value of Sterling is weak compared with the Euro, and most of the goods are brought in from Eurozone countries. But prices are never revised downwards. When Value Added Tax was lowered to 15% here during 2009, none of the prices dropped. However I have no doubt they will increase once it is raised to 20% at the beginning of 2011.

They’re never open when I can get there. This is one of the few shops in my town (indeed, perhaps the only shop) which, in 21^st Century England, still closes for lunch. Every day this shop closes between 1pm and 2pm, even on a Saturday, which generally is the only day of the week I can get to it. I’ve lost count of the number of occasions I’ve been unable to buy something or have had to change my plans, in order to be around when the shop is open. On one occasion I waited until after 2pm on a Saturday, only then to discover the place was closed for the afternoon for staff training. I’m only glad I do not have to make a long journey specially to visit the shop because I would be angry if I found the shop was closed if I’d come from out-of-town.

Fortunately I do not have to rely on this store for my stationery fix. It’s nice to go in and browse, when I can get in, and perhaps pick up a Tombow Brush Pen or a box of ink cartridges, but I probably buy more stationery from supermarkets than from this shop. I can get basic supplies such as pencils, index cards and notepads from my local Sainsbury’s or Tesco. For exotica I can go online to internet-based suppliers. Shops such as the one I have been describing I feel will have a hard time surviving in a retail environment experiencing a pincer movement from supermarkets on one flank, and niche internet sellers on the other. This shop seems to survive on its photocopying and printing business, which is just as well because if it had to live on its retail sales alone, I suspect it would have closed years ago.

Pencils and Music no more?

2010-10-14T23:30:00.003+01:00

Regular visitors may have noticed Pencils and Music on the blogroll. It was one of the first pencil blogs I found on the internet, and very entertaining, too. It has been taken down; not for long I hope.

Stabilo Swano 4907

2010-10-14T20:15:00.006+01:00

Quick review time, again: this one is for a pack of four Stabil Swano 4907 pencils. I bought this pack in a branch of Ryman's (a chain of stationers' here in England) for £1.69, which is about 43 pence per pencil.

They come in bright - almost livid - fluorescent colours. The four colours used - yellow, green, pink and orange - match the four basic colours used by Stabilo for their famous Boss highlighter pens. Each pencil is armed with an eraser tip in the same colour as the paint on the pencil, attached by an aluminium ferrule.

In the hand, the Swano handles like any other hexagonal pencil. The wood is good quality and sharpens well, and the eraser does its job adequately enough. The edges are slightly rounded, so it does not dig into fingers. The painting is nicely done and markings are understated; no foil blocking here, just the name, barcode and some serial numbering, but there is no country of origin information printed. I guess these pencils are made in Stabilo's factory in the Czech Republic, but if anyone knows better, please let me know in the comments.

I used one of these pencils for a day or so to write notes at work. The lead is a dark and soft HB. On paper it does not feel scratchy, nor very smooth, but gritty; I can liken the feel of it to writing on sandpaper. It's not unpleasant, but it does not glide on the paper, if that is what you want. This utilitarian pencil is clearly designed for school in mind, and a four-pack should last a whole school year.

In short, the Swano 4907 is a decent-quality pencil that is fun to use but which you would not lose sleep over if it was stolen from your desk in class.

Sainsbury's Moleskine Reporter Notebook Knock-Off

2010-10-03T17:55:00.007+01:00

I have picked up several of these Moleskine knock-offs on sale now at Sainsbury's. They have 96 sheets (192 pages total) made from 70% recycled material which is finished in an off-white colour. All sheets are detachable, by the look of it. The paper is ruled and looks reasonable quality; a quick test with my Pilot M90 and Parker Blue Quink showed no sign of feathering or bleedthrough, and it takes pencil well enough, too. There's even a little pocket at the back for ticket stubs, receipts, postage stamps, and other kipple. This notebook is covered in black polyurethane, which has a satin finish that picks up fingerprints and grease marks.

The best thing is that they are on sale at 75 pence each, making them less than one-tenth of the price of a Moleskine equivalent, which costs £8.99 and is certainly not ten times better than this. I suspect the low price is a close-out, so if you can get hold of one of these, give it a go.

New design...again

2010-10-03T13:17:00.004+01:00

This blog is still in a "development" phase so I've changed the design again. I found the bookshelf background to be too busy and distracting, and I've changed it to the plainest possible. I've also changed the title picture. Let me know what you think!

Stationery Archaeology 2

2010-10-03T09:53:00.003+01:00

Second in this series, a set of WH Smith dry transfer lettering, c. mid-1980s.

Uni-Ball Kuru Toga

2010-09-29T21:21:00.005+01:00

I've not got much time to blog just now but I wanted to post quickly about my new mechanical pencil, a Uni-Ball Kuru Toga which I got recently from Cult Pens. (More technical info about this pencil at that site, but also here and here.) This one is finished in a smart azure blue (one of seven colours Cult Pens sell). I haven't used a mechanical pencil for some time - my Pentel P205 is gathering dust - but this may make me change my mind. The lead is good and dark, even for a 0.5mm width, and the proprietary mechanism inside prevents it from becoming chisel-shaped because it rotates the lead 9° with every contact with the paper. I used this to take notes during a conference with our auditors last week and it worked reliably and of course, never needed sharpening, just an occasional press of the button to advance the lead. I've also been using it in the office to take the copious notes I often have to write.

The Kuru Toga's rotating lead mechanism is, of course, this pencil's main selling point and they display it for all to see under a transparent window section so you can watch it turn as you write. I'm not so convinced by this, and would rather have a sleek, all-blue barrel, but that is a minor point. Eventually other lead widths should become available, but I understand that there are engineering issues to overcome before a 0.7mm model comes out, but if one does I will certainly get one. It would be wonderful to see a 0.9mm and a 0.3mm to complement the 0.5mm.

I don't think this will replace any of my wood-cased pencils as I like them too much, but for pencil writing on the move, this seems to be a fine candidate, and at the price Uni-Ball wants for it in the UK, it is a bargain. The price at Cult Pens is £5.60 and even my local stationers' has this for £5.99. Buy the whole collection - I may well do myself.

Tombow Mono 100 HB and Faber-Castell 9008 Steno 2B

2010-09-26T16:52:00.006+01:00

I was asked in the comments to the Faber-Castell Grip 2001 to write a review of these two in tandem, because, although they are made for different jobs, they both leave a similar mark on paper. Before I start, though, I must express my thanks to Matthias Meckel who sent me the pencils in this review.

These two need little introduction to those who enjoy fine pencils, but just in case you don’t know about them, here’s a bit of background information. The Tombow Mono 100 is a top-quality drafting pencil (it even says so, on the side). It is reputed to be a favourite of animators and manga artists. The Faber-Castell 9008, in contrast, has a much more quotidian purpose: it is a stenographer’s pencil, designed for writing shorthand. It is one of the few high-quality round-section pencils made today, but for how much longer is anyone’s guess as shorthand writing has fewer practitioners now. I lamented the lack of round-section pencils recently in this post but I’ll repeat myself here. There must be many users who find the conventional hexagonal or triangular section pencil uncomfortable to use for long spells, so why the major manufacturers do not market round pencils more, is a mystery to me.

Before discussing the performance of these pencils I want to mention their physical characteristics. The Mono is supplied unsharpened, and is painted in a gorgeous, glossy black lacquer. It is topped off with a black endcap with a white line in the centre. All the lettering is gold-blocked, and is a riot of typography with various fonts shouting Engrish statements in addition to the essential information. It also has an outline picture of a dragonfly, after which the company is named. The dreaded barcode is printed on this one though I have another Mono 100 on which the barcode was applied as a sticker. The 9008 is painted in Faber-Castell’s trademark dark green lacquer with a silver band at the end. Gold block lettering with the country of origin, model number, manufacturer, the word “STENO” and the name “CASTELL” are printed. 180° away is printed the grade of the lead and, presumably to reinforce Faber-Castell’s environmentally-friendly credentials, the German word “Wasserlack” (water-based paint). I should note that I was so impressed with the 9008s Matthias sent me that I bought some more , in B grade. Clearly, the two versions of the 9008 I have were made in different batches as the 2Bs have all gold lettering, whilst the Bs have the reverse lettering printed in primrose yellow. There is also a slight difference in the green paint: the 2B is darker than the B.

In use, the pencils are remarkably similar. Both leave lovely, dark lines on the page. The 9008 is perhaps slightly darker: not surprising, considering this pencil is two grades softer than the Mono. The Mono 100 is slightly smoother on paper, but really not by much; it glides along as though lubricated by a coat of oil, and though the 9008 has a bit more tooth, it could never be described as scratchy. When writing, I found that neither pencil required much pressure to write darkly.

Given that the lines left are dark enough for anyone’s purposes, any differences really come down to how the pencils feel in the hand. For me, there is no contest: the 9008 is the hands-down winner. Why? The circular section is simply far more comfortable in my hand than the hexagonal Mono 100. Indeed, I found the edges of the Mono to be sharper than other hexagonal pencils I own, such as the Staedtler Mars Lumograph. I suppose this is due to the lacquer Tombow use; on the Mars, the edges are softer, probably a product of the number of layers of paint used. A close examination of the Mono 100 does not show any sign of woodgrain, so the lacquer must be fairly thick. I can only surmise that it is the way in which Tombow applies the lacquer on the pencil: fewer layers, but denser paint (and most definitely not “Wasserlack”). Whatever the paint used, I found that the Mono 100 dug into my fingers after a short period of time. The 9008, by contrast, was a joy to use because, with no corners or edges, my fingers would mould themselves around the pencil’s barrel.

Both pencils are excellent, either for writing or for drawing. I have found my favourite pencil so far in the 9008, but the Mono 100 is not far behind, and I’ll use the Mono for astronomical sketches.

New design

2010-09-20T19:20:00.003+01:00

I have changed the design of the blog, becuase I wasn't entirely happy with the dark grey background it had. It's only one of the Blogger templates; I hope the bookshelf wallpaper is not too obtrusive.

The design is likely to change again if and when I become bored with this template.

KUM Long Point Sharpener

2010-09-20T19:09:00.004+01:00

I recently bought a KUM long-point sharpener from Cult Pens, but I've had very mixed results using it. Some pencils sharpen well - such as the Staedtler tradition HB - but others break leads almost as soon as I turn the pencil. For example, the Faber-Castell 9008 Steno kept breaking.

I'm still new to this game so it may well be my own fault for being too rough or turning the pencils with too much force. On this design there seems to be a lot of pressure at the narrow end, more so than a conventional sharpener.

If any readers have tips on using this stenographer's sharpener, please let me know.

Faber-Castell Grip 2001

2010-09-18T21:47:00.007+01:00

For my next review, I thought I would try a competitor to the Staedtler tradition: the Faber-Castell Grip 2001. This pencil is widely available here in England, and is marketed as a high-quality pencil which is produced in two variants: one with an eraser, and one without. This blurb from Cult Pens gives an idea of the market for this design:

The Faber-Castell Grip 2001 series is a traditional wood-case pencil redesig

ned for the 21st century. Winner of numerous design awards, the patented soft-grip zone provides a secure, non-slip grip, while the ergonomic triangular shape aids tireless writing and drawing.

The eraser-tipped version costs 99 pence in my local WHSmith’s, an

d the non-eraser version (the more common of the two) costs 89 pence, which is about half as much again as the Staedtler tradition. My local WHSmith sells this pencil only in HB, though a quick check on Cult Pens shows it to be available in up to five grades: 2B, B, HB, H and 2H. This suggests to me that the Grip is really optimised for writing, rather than drawing.

The Grip is a striking-looking pencil. For one thing it has a triangular section, not hexagonal, is finished in a smart silver-grey matte lacquer, and sports 26 rows of raised dots painted on in black along each side of the barrel. Their purpose is to provide a non-slip surface for the user. On the non-eraser version I used, the end-cap is painted in a gloss gull-grey. The shade of the end-cap varies from black for the 2B to a light grey for the 2H. The lettering (which occupies only two sides of the pencil) is crisp and the barcode is tastefully printed and unobtrusive. The eraser variant sports a ferrule and eraser in black, to match the lettering.

The wood used is not cedar, but I am not sure what it could be. It has a pronounced grain with easily visible pores, and there is no odour from it. In my KUM sharpener it sliced the wood very easily.

I used this pencil exclusively for a few days, and my overall impression is that this is indeed a quality pencil for writing. The HB lead is lighter in colour than Staedtler’s, and requires sharpening less frequently. For example, during a two-hour meeting at work I wrote some five sides of notes and needed to sharpen the Grip only once. The point stays sharp longer, and even when it has worn down it still lays down a good, legible line. It is not so prone to smearing as the Staedtler HB, nor to breaking; using my KUM sharpener I could get a very sharp point which would not yield under moderate writing pressure. Even when the point has worn down, and provided I did not press too much into the paper, it would leave a thicker, though still silvery, line. F-C’s HB standard is harder than Staedtler’s, for example. I would estimate that F-C’s HB is at least one if not two grades harder than Staedtler’s so the HB on a Grip 2001 would equate to a Staedtler H.

The triangular grip is reasonably comfortable, but I am not sure it is any more so than a traditional hexagonal pencil. However the main problem I experienced using the Grip was that the raised dots would dig into my fingers, so that after a fairly short period of time I would feel some discomfort in my writing hand where the pencil rests on my middle finger. This is not a problem for writing notes but for extended periods I think it would be. To be honest the Grip idea seems to me to be a gimmick, a way of differentiating this design of pencil from its competitors. I do not have a problem with slippery pencils, but I find the Grip to be uncomfortable after a while.

Furthermore I wonder if Faber-Castell has practical difficulties manufacturing this model. Close inspection of the few Grip pencils I have, shows the dots to be unevenly applied. Some are rounder and more pronounced than others, whilst some are not even full circles, but have a slice taken out of one side.

But any gripes I may have are very minor. Overall this is a high quality pencil – and a very modern one, too. It is not a favourite of mine because of the comfort issue which I mentioned above, which is odd considering that this pencil is marketed as one which can be used for long periods. Its price puts it almost in the premium pencil class – nearly as much as the Mars Lumograph, for example, or F-C’s own 9000 series. I don’t think it’s quite as good as that and I would rather use a 9000, but this is still a very nice pencil for the money and well worth trying.

Stationery Archaeology 1

2010-09-13T19:31:00.005+01:00

This is the first in an occasional series on old bits of stationery I find on my travels: number one, a Faber-Castell eraser which I found whilst clearing stuff out of the loft.

Bleistift

2010-09-10T22:51:00.003+01:00

Thanks to Matthias from Bleistift for linking here.

And welcome to new readers to this new(ish) blog.

Cahiers

2010-09-10T21:42:00.015+01:00

One of my hobbies is astronomy. It's been an interest of mine since I was eleven years old, on and off. For some time I've been making observations of variable stars for the British Astronomical Association's Variable Star Section. If you don't know what a variable star is, here's a link to Wikipedia which gives the basics.

For a few years now I've used a Moleskine Cahier notebook to record my observations and now, finally, I've run out of space. I have already started the replacement, this time a Clairefontaine notebook with much nicer paper and a slightly bigger size. I've also changed pens: after using a Uni-Ball rollerball pen I bought a green Pilot 78G to use with the Cahier. Then I found the Pilot V-Pen (known as the Varsity in the US) which I emptied out of the original mint-green ink and replaced with black ink. Now, with a new notebook I have redeployed my Pilot Capless and filled it with the same black ink.

Although I have changed pens, I've not changed ink. I use Noodler's Bulletproof Black to record my observations, and at the rate I use this ink, my 3oz. bottle should last me years. I use bulletproof ink for its permanence; these observations probably are the only things I write which are worthy of preserving for the future, even though I have to write them subsequently on an Excel spreadsheet before they go into the BAA's database which starts in 1890. I also use it because of its waterproof quality as the nights can get quite damp here in England. But this is the only use I have for bulletproof ink; most of the time I use blue Quink or a pencil, even though, like many fountain pen users, I own a glut of ink in various colours from a wide variety of manufacturers.

Looking through the log, I see I started this notebook back in 2007. It doesn't have my earliest variable star observations, those are in another Moleskine I bought when I worked in London in 2005 (pictured, with the natty Duck Tape binding).

I own a few Moleskines, but I don't buy them now. I admit, I was taken in by the hype and the marketing ("the notebook of Picasso, Hemingway and Chatwin") but this was before I rediscovered fountain pens, and the fact that fountain pen ink bleeds like mad on the trademark yellowish Mole paper. The quality of the paper used is a constant source of angst on the Fountain Pen Network; I eventually found a nice replacement in the Clairefontaine, which I can buy locally too. Sometimes I wonder what Picasso or Hemingway would make of today's Moleskine notebooks. Would they complain about the quality of the paper or the fragile binding? Were they really that fussy about their paper or notebooks?

I've still got a few pages in the Duck Tape Moleskine but soon that will be history too. I also own a large plain Mole which has only a few pages filled in. I bought that to make sketches in but found the paper too thin, even for pencil sketches. Finally I have a small ruled Moleskine which serves as my general-purpose notebook and in which I write all kinds of things. When both notebooks are finished it's highly unlikely I'll buy Moleskines to replace them, however.

On the subject of Clairefontaine, I have several of their cahiers and an A5 pad of their drawing paper. Here's a picture of my new variable star logbook, this orange one being a handy size, with a cheerful colour (not that I can see it in the dark). The paper inside is superb: smooth and white, nicely-printed feint lines, no feathering, no bleedthrough. Couple that with a top-quality pen and ink, and the mundane business of recording a scientifc observation becomes a pleasure in itself.

Barcodes

2010-09-08T20:36:00.012+01:00

Reading around the pencil blogosphere it seems that some consider a printed barcode on the pencil's barrel to be alien to the character of the pencil. Here's an example of a pencil review where the reviewer has welcomed one manufactuer's efforts to avoid printing a barcode on the side. In that case, the manufactuer, Caran d'Ache, has resorted to a removeable plastic sleeve with the barcode printed on it. This seems to me to be an elegant solution, though probably a relatively expensive one. Others have tried to use a sticker - Tombow comes to mind here - but too often that leaves a sticky residue on the pencil once the sticker has been peeled off, which is unpleasant to use.

Whilst it is nice to see a clean, clutter-free design on a pencil, I do like to see the various pieces of information the manufacturer has put on it. Whether the manufacturer's name and trademarks, country of origin, a model number, the grade of the lead, those mysterious little codes embossed in the side but not painted, and indeed the barcode, they all add to the character of the pencil.

The problem of fixing a barcode to a pencil so that it can be scanned at a shop's till really has only one foolproof solution - print it on the side of the pencil itself so it cannot be peeled or picked off. This is what Staedtler and Faber-Castell do. I don't think they detract at all from the character of the pencil, and those manufacturers make them as discreet as possible anyway. I am sure that in future, if the pencils produced now are collected or used by pencil lovers, they will appreciate these symbols of our industrial society. Here's to the barcode.

Staedtler tradition HB

2010-09-06T22:50:00.016+01:00

I thought that I would begin the reviews with an unsung hero of the pencil world, a pencil which, if not quite ubiquitous here in the UK, is probably the most widely-available: the Staedtler tradition HB.

This pencil - at least in its 110 form without an eraser on the end - is pretty much the benchmark in the UK today. (The 112 model which has the eraser at the back, is less commonly seen though recently I bought one in Ryman's.)

Many other pencils are deemed to be higher quality but those aren't often found in your local newsagent's, or stationer's. These cost around 60 pence each (about $1). The closest competitor is the Faber Castell Grip 2001 I suppose, though the tradition is more common. I will get around to reviewing the Grip some time soon.

The tradition is available in 14 grades - from 6B to 6H - though the HB grade is by far the most common, and is used for both drawing and writing. I use it only for writing.

The HB lead is fairly soft and leaves a nice, dark line when pressed hard into the paper. Even when less pressure is used, the line is dark enough to read easily, even when it is sharpened to a fine point. The price paid for this is of course fairly frequent sharpening, and I found I needed to resharpen the tradition once every page or so in my A4 notebook. The lead sharpens up easily, though it will break very easily if you use a lot of pressure. Sharpening is also helped by the quality wood used, which appears to be Californian cedar (though I am no expert on this) which has a tight grain and a pleasant aroma.

After three days in the office using this pencil exclusively to take notes and write messages, I learned to use less pressure and to rotate the barrel of the pencil as I wrote, to keep a smooth even line. It erases very easily with a Stabilo white eraser. Being on the soft side, the lead is prone to smearing, which I found when I leant on my notepad.

Appearance-wise, the tradition is finished in the familiar Staedtler red and black stripes, with gold foil-blocked letters which read:

MADE IN GERMANY STAEDTLER tradition HB

The other side has a barcode and some inventory data on it - sorry, I forgot to take a picture. These are printed on and the barcode is already showing signs of wearing off. Many bemoan the presence of barcodes on contemporary pencils, but I quite like them; if the barcode had been invented fifty or 100 years ago I am sure they would be present on the pencils of yore and today collectors would be proud of them. In the future, the barcodes on today's pencils will be treasured as a feature.The finish is smartly done, with clean demarcations between the stripes. One thing I noticed on the rear end of the pencil however, is that the red and black lacquer show through the white lacquer on this current pencil. Perhaps Staedtler have changed the formulation of the paint? I have some old traditions and a couple of Noris which were made in Great Britain, where the white paint is opaque, not translucent. The lacquer used now is probably less toxic, but I would not know. Anyway, here's a close-up, with the white paint showing a distinct pink tinge:

Production of the tradition has since ceased in Great Britain and Australia, and now it appears to be made only in Germany. Here is an excellent review done by memm on the Bleistift blog which compares traditions made in Germany, GB and Australia. Certainly on the older, made-in-GB pencils I have, the lacquer and overall finish seem to be superior to the pencils of today. I suppose this is due to there being a bit less gold lettering, thinner coats and environmentally-friendly paints used in the finishing. The lead seems to be the same high quality, and the wood on this pencil is as good as the older models.

So, do not overlook the Staedtler tradition HB pencil. It is a fine pencil for the money and should be in everyone's pencil case.

Back to School

2010-09-01T19:42:00.002+01:00

1 September is traditionally the start of the new academic year here in England, and indeed today was the first day of school for my children - or it would have been, had the schools concerned not been closed to enable the teachers to receive some professional development. 2 September is the de facto start of term. The shops are full of "Back to School" promotions; Stabilo seem to be doing well with getting their new products in the stores.

I've had a minor splurge on pencils, mostly for my children but also for myself, which I intend to turn into reviews soon. I'm conscious that after a week online, I have yet to produce any reviews, or pictures, only my ramblings on stationery matters. I promise that will change shortly. I return to work tomorrow and intend to post some review-type articles as I do most of my writing at work.

More on the Blackwing 602

2010-08-29T22:11:00.001+01:00

Thanks to Andy Welfle.

A Realist's View of the Legendary Blackwing 602

Where have all the round pencils gone?

2010-08-29T00:14:00.006+01:00

I mean good quality pencils, not the cheap ones you buy as souvenirs. I recently found out about stenographers' pencils such as the Staedtler 101 and the Faber-Castell 9008, which of course do not appear to be available here in the UK. I've seen them advertised on Amazon.de and ebay.de but my German isn't good enough to make enquiries about postage costs to the UK, a pity really because the Staedtler Stenofix looks like a very smart pencil indeed, and I don't mind the fact it's available only in HB.

It seems obvious to me that a circular, rather than hexagonal shape, is more comfortable for long spells of writing, whether it's another chapter of a novel or just some notes taken in a meeting. Yet, none of the top brands appears to offer them any more, or if they do, they sell them only to select places. One has to go cheap to find round pencils, a situation set to continue as the Stenofix and 9008 appear destined for the dustbin of history if anecdotal evidence is to be believed, even when Staedtler still advertises the model on its global website.

Obviously, in an office environment where most people write their own correspondence on PCs, stenographers are an endangered species and the steno pencil also looks set for extinction. Another possible reason for the near-disappearance of steno pencils is the wastage of wood used in production. It seems that for a given slat, nine hexagonal pencils can be cut against eight round pencils. Clearly manufacturers have to pass on this cost to the customer, making a quality round pencil more expensive than its hexagonal competitor. I have some trouble believing this as it would then follow that all cheap, no-name pencils, or souvenir pencils, would be hexagonal too when clearly they are not.

For the "name" manufactuers, operating in a market where the humble pencil is considered a disposable commodity, it would be difficult to charge a premium to recover the extra material costs. For most users, there is no apparent advantage to using a round pencil over other shapes and the manufacturers have no stake in changing that attitude. It is possible now that most pencils are hexagonal because people expect them to be.

Jeffrey Archer's Pen

2010-08-26T17:23:00.006+01:00

A while back I posted a question on the Fountain Pen Network regarding J G B*ll@rd's pen (I wish to mask the spelling of this author's name because some of his fans scan the internet for anything related to him and that particular post attracted some scorn from certain people). I had heard on the radio that B@ll*rd used a Parker fountain pen. Nobody seems to know what model of pen, or much less, care. Of course, it doesn't matter what type of pen he used, nor does it matter what type of paintbrush Picasso used or the make of John Coltrane's saxophone. I was curious; and I'll probably never know.

For the sake of informing readers of this blog, B*ll*rd wrote all his first drafts longhand, probably with a Parker fountain pen of uncertain provenance, in blue ink. Second and subsquent drafts were written on an typewriter, and could be heavily edited with handwritten notes in blue or red ink, and pencil. Interestingly, the typewritten drafts were single-spaced, judging by this example, the first page of his novel Crash. This page is, to me, a work of art, a precious artefact which I am delighted now resides in the British Library.

All of this points to the meticulous care with which he assembled his novels, whose stature will rise long after his death, aged 78, in April 2009. It is interesting to note that, deep into the computer age, this master of speculative fiction never deviated from this pattern of working. He was proof that it was still possible to take the most basic of tools - a pen and paper - and create entire worlds.

Which leads me on to Jeffrey Archer. I've read only one of his books, many years ago, and I'll never get that time back now. However I recall a newspaper advert for Parker pens from the early 1980s where he is quoted as saying he buys a new Parker fountain pen to write each novel. Now I would love this to be the case; Nobel laureate John Steinbeck famously used pencils but it would be apposite that Jeffrey Archer uses a Parker fountain pen, and not just any old pen but a super-deluxe model with 24-karat everything.

Imagine my disappointment when, on Googling this, I discovered that Archer now claims to write with Paper Mate felt-tip pens, not a pen resembling a fragment snapped off a floating gin-palace. This is a bitter blow because it breaks my pet theory that there is an inverse relationship between a writer's pen and the quality of their work. In fact I find my theory completely refuted, unless I resort to the line that Archer is the exception which proves the rule.

Meh.

(Edit:

Blackwing 602

2010-08-26T17:01:00.005+01:00

Until last week I'd never even heard of the Eberhard Faber Blackwing 602 and to be frank, I don't know what the fuss is about as I've never used one - obviously. Anyway a lot of people are getting excited over the California Republic re-issue of this "legendary" (sic) pencil.

It certainly looks smart, though the flattened ferrule and eraser take a bit of getting used-to. All of the California Republic pencils I've seen online look the business though and if I could get my hands on some I'd be interested to try them out.

Linkage here:

Blackwing Pages

Staedtler Pencil Manufacturing

2010-08-25T15:13:00.003+01:00

This is Staedtler's promotional video, which gives more detail about the composition of the lead than the How It's Made film.

How It's Made (Season 11 / Episode 3 / Part 1)

2010-08-25T15:05:00.002+01:00

This one concentrates more on the preparation of the slats and the finishing process than Staedtler's.

Page One

2010-08-25T12:09:00.001+01:00

Here goes with another Blogspot blog which nobody will read.

I've had a lifelong fascination with stationery but particularly with pens and pencils. I have long used a fountain pen for taking notes at work and at home, but recently I re-discovered the joys of using a pencil. I have been trying a few out of late: various Staedtler pencils, including the Noris, tradition and Lumograph ranges; and a couple of Tombow Mono 100s. I am interested in various writers' working habits. Japanese pens and pencils also interest me greatly.

It was about three years ago that I became actively interested in pens. After years of using a keyboard and mouse my handwriting had suffered and as I abhor ballpoint pens, I bought a fountain pen as I had used one for writing in my professional examinations because I tend to press too hard into the paper when I use a biro. Like many who have been educated at university, I have a callous on the middle finger on my writing hand from writing so many essays and exams with a Bic Cristal.

Let me be clear: I am not a collector of anything, but like many people I have a collection of pens and pencils acquired over the years.

My main pen is a Pilot M90. This is the best pen I have ever used. I also own various other Pilots, and a couple of Lamy Safaris. Here in the UK, Parker is synonymous with fountain pens, but I've never really liked them much even though I used one at school (or perhaps, because I used one at school). I do use blue Parker Quink, having spent a lot of money on other brands. More on that some other time.

As for pencils, I have one true mechanical pencil, a Pentel P205 which I bought in 1994 for a course. I have a couple of clutch pencils: a Staedtler Mars 788 which had a blunt lead when I found it, and a Woerther Shorty which I use for sketching but which is also useful for other tasks like shopping lists. Recently I have gone back to buying and using woodcased pencils, and I adore Staedtler pencils. The most commonly-available Staedtler range in the UK is probably the tradition which can be purchased in most stationers'. Noris pencils are often found in supermarkets. Lumographs appear to be rare as hens' teeth though, and I had to buy mine online and not in a brick-and-mortar shop.

That is it for now, I think. Apologies for the appalling pun in the title; I daresay I'll regret it eventually.