Today we take a look at E Wolff & Son's 'Academy Chalk' pencils. I've  come across three variations of this pencil; the two older versions featured in this post and the more modern version, as seen on Bob Truby's site here. A quick reminder about Wolff's pencils in general: pencils with right-to-left lettering are almost... Continue Reading →

Faber have produced a lot of special editions and limited editions over the years, most of which are not advertised very well. It can be tricky trying to track them all down, but a fun task nonetheless. According to the kind people at Faber, the Royal Metal Edition was released in 1988 and sold in... Continue Reading →

Ah, the elusive A.W. Faber-Castell M grade pencil... This pencil was unbelievably difficult to track down, almost to the point where I (and some other pencil collectors I know) started to question whether it actually got produced at all. Saying as it turns up so rarely, I thought it would be good to put some... Continue Reading →

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,... Continue Reading →

This post is mainly about the Cohen version of the Account Book pencil, but I've decided to show some other examples as well as it seems like a good place to display them. First thing of note, the Account Book pencil from Cohen is an extension of the Compressed Cumberland Lead model; it is just... Continue Reading →

The 'Royal Sovereign' pencil is very popular amongst collectors and for good reason.  There are lots of variations to make the hunt interesting, with particularly early models commanding high prices these days (rather unfortunately). You can read a pretty lengthy post about that particular pencil here. The thing is, the Royal Sovereign pencil (sort of)... Continue Reading →

Another short post today.  This time we have the Eagle Pencil Company's UK price list from 1958 As i mentioned on the Cumberland Pencil Co price list post, you could just download the pictures in this post, but I’d prefer if you came back here to review the catalogues instead! Enjoy! Quite a small selection... Continue Reading →

Just a quick post today, but an interesting one none the less.  As promised, I'm going to start uploading copies of various pencil catalogues onto the blog.  Old catalogues, particularly for British makers, are difficult to come by and so it could be a helpful resource for collectors. As with all the images on the... Continue Reading →

If you read this blog on a regular basis you might be thinking that this post title looks remarkably similar to another post I wrote - B. S. Cohen's Compressed Cumberland Lead pencils. And you'd be right.  I recommend that if you haven't read that post, you read it first before carrying on with this post. This... Continue Reading →

When it comes to collecting old Wolff pencils, the examples I always look out for are those that where manufactured when Wolff was operating as a partnership, i.e. predating the formation of the Limited Company. These are usually identified through the use of the words 'manufacturers' or 'makers' printed somewhere on the pencil barrel or... Continue Reading →