Over the summer I took a trip to the Lake District. As you would imagine, I spent an afternoon in Keswick, including visiting the Pencil Museum. I’ll have another few posts on that at some point, but in advance of that, I spotted a 1930s catalogue in a display.
It was quite hard to read, but I took individual photos of each section and then did a bit of cleaning up. The results are below.
As with most of my catalogue posts, these are provided largely without comment. The idea is to have the resources in one place to help people identify what pencil they have and work out the corresponding product number.
I would be very interested to see a version of the Rob Roy with the slide ring protector.
British Drawing pencils are quite the flavour of the month at the moment, with the prices going through the roof (unnecessarily in my opinion). As you can see, all the colour variations are essentially the same under the hood.
I don’t think I’ve ever come across the Patriotic or the Derwentwater (graphite) pencil. Would be keen to add these to the collection if anyone has them to trade.
The museum didn’t even have an example of the Beaver.
The RT models of the British Drawing are much harder to come back in my experience.
The earlier Floral pencils are noted here. You can spot them in the later catalogue too, but the overall design changed a bit. Cumberland also later introduced the ‘John Peel’ as a more boy orientated version of the Floral, which was initially a girl-focused school pencil.
Can’t recall if I’ve ever seen the Dessin with a rubber tip.
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