Since this is the year in which the Faber-Castell Castell 9000 turns 100 years old, it’s only fitting that we end the first calendar year of the Revolution with a piece about this great green pencil. This piece is from pencil Comrade Michael Leddy.

Serious pencils indeed.

My love of “supplies” — pencils, pens, notebooks — goes back to Saturday morning trips with my father and brother to Alan’s Stationers in Brooklyn. My dad was (and is) a meticulous artist, and his affection for tools and materials was something I picked up on very early. I remember my own early “supplies” very well — a series of miniature Carter’s dip pens, which came packaged with miniature bottles of ink; a Scripto mechanical pencil; dozens of Venus coloring pencils; and a gray “T-Ball Jotter” (I never thought of it as a Parker) with thick, fragrant blue ink.

As I’ve gotten older, the fascination of “supplies” has fused with my deep affection for the artifacts of what I like to call “the dowdy world” — modern American life before it was refigured (or disfigured) by certain forms of technology. My affection for supplies has become, of necessity, an affection for what is largely past. As I’m writing these words, I’m looking at a Mongol ad from the 1950s, framed on the wall to my right:

Your Best Buy’s
MONGOL
2,162 words
for
one cent

In the dowdy world, people took their pencils seriously.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s I found some wonderful traces of the dowdy world in Warner’s, an old-line office-supply store in downstate Illinois. Warner’s has long since moved to an emphasis on office-furniture and “gifts,” a necessary choice for economic survival. But back then, the store featured an entire aisle of typewriter ribbons, most of them for machines already extinct. The ribbons had long since dried out, as I discovered after buying a supply for my Olympia manual. But other stuff was still as good as new, more or less — Listo pencil leads, gummed airmail labels, card pockets for library books. O Warner’s!

My ultimate Warner’s find (in 1991) was a cache of A.W. Faber Castell 9000 pencils. I came away with two-dozen pencils in tins, and a few loose pencils in a third tin. I’ve sharpened and used up a few of the loose ones over the years (down to the bittersweet end, with a pencil extender), but the dozens remain untouched. These are serious pencils indeed.

Consider the box, which suggests the sort of presentation more frequently associated with fine cigars. (The box came along for free with the pencils.) I like to imagine an arrangement of these boxes, perhaps in a store window, eye candy for the pencil connoisseur.

The pencils are packed twelve to a tin, each tin complete with a seal. (I’ve seen photographs of Vladimir Nabokov at work with this kind of tin at his side.) The lead is dark, rich, smooth. The wood, so far as I can tell, is red cedar. Yes, red cedar. Simply sharpening one of these pencils is a delight. The shavings are smooth and papery. The fragrance brings back dim recollections of closets and clothes chests. No other pencils I’ve used have smelled like these.

And now for the most remarkable feature of these pencils. Their history is inscribed, a bit blurrily, on their sides:

LEADS IMPORTED FROM
AMERICAN ZONE GERMANY

Which is to say that these Castell 9000s were made between 1945 and 1949, when post-war Germany was divided into four Allied sectors. And these Castell 9000s were still sitting on a shelf in 1991 (and selling for 1991 prices too, about seventy cents a pencil, I think). I said something in the store — something vaguely articulate, like “Wow! These are really old!” “They never sold,” was the plainspoken American-gothic reply. And now here I am in 2005, vaguely articulate once again.

Michael Leddy teaches college English and has published widely as a poet and critic. He blogs at Orange Crate Art. Many thanks to our hard-working Comrade!

There are two other great articles about the Castell 9000 on the web for your reading pleasure. Faber-Castell has a great article in English on the German site (here), and there is a very very fine piece at Paper and Pencil (here) on our green Comrade.

[Images and text, M.L. Used with kind permission.]