Pencils, eh
A virtual museum of the golden age of the Canadian pencil industry.
Today is square root day! According to Wikipedia, this is "an unofficial holiday celebrated on days when both the day of the month and the month are the square root of the last two digits of the year." In other words, May 5th, 2025 is 5 - 5 - 25. What better way to celebrate some old fashioned math than with an old fashioned math tool. Below is a Hughes-Owens "Pocket Versalog" and instruction manual. The scales on the pocket version are half as long as the scales on the full size Versalog (4.92" rather than 9.84"). This book, slide rule and slip case all came together is a boxed set from Canadian retailer Hughes-Owens in the 1960s. My book has an inscription in the front cover dated 1967. Time to grab some nice drafting pencils and do come calculations. Perhaps some Eagle Turquoise drawing pencils...
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With focus on "V-5 lead" and oval logo I can fairly confidently date the pencils show below as having been manufactured in the early 1960s. Advertisements from 1962-1963 all show pencils just like these.
March 30th is National Pencil Day. Celebrated in honor of Hymen Lipman who patented a pencil with an attached eraser on March 30, 1858. Lipman did not attach the eraser with a ferrule as is done today. Rather the india rubber was glued into the back fourth of the pencil and could be sharpened to reveal eraser insted of lead.
This week, the Hudson's Bay Company announced that they would be closing all but 6 of their stores. This company has a long and storied history in Canada. We've seen quite a few large department stores close in the past few decades including Eaton's, Sears and Simpson's. Both the Bay and Sears had a connection to Simpson's. Simpson's and Sears started a join company Simpson's-Sears that operated concurrently to Simpson's. The Bay took over the Simpson's stores and many were rebranded to The Bay stores (including ones in Atlantic Canada). Below are a few pencils from the golden age of the Simpson's department store. The style of the ferrule makes me believe that these were made by Eagle Pencil Company. The Eagle Royal pencil was an early pencil made in Canada. The Royal was a less expensive pencil than the more common Mirado. The 80 was a round pencil and the 81 was hexagonal. Notice the pencil pictured in the 1940 advertisement shows a metal ferrule while the pencil in my collection has a paper ferrule from later in the World War 2 era. In Canada, the Wartime Prices and Trade Board enacted restriction on the number and style of pencils during the war. In 1942, pencils were not allowed to have crude rubber erasers or metal ferrules or fancy lacquered finishes.
This box was probably manufactured by the Eagle Pencil Co. between the late 1940s and early 1950s. Boxes like this can be quite hard to date. When new, this box contained 6 pencils, including one eraser-tipped, a pen holder, an eraser, and a ruler. Larger pencil boxes sometimes had a drawer with a compass or protractor or even water color paints. This case is in incredibly good condition for its age. The plane on top looks like a Douglas DC-3... according to Wikipedia, at the peak of its dominance in the airliner market in 1939, around ninety percent of airline flights on the planet were by a DC-3 or some variant.
*** Update - March 2025 *** I found a picture of this set in the Eaton's Autumn-Winter catalogue from 1950 (French edition). The original contents were described in the catalogue as "SCHOOLCHILD'S COMPANION. Contains 6 pencils, including one eraser-tipped, a pen holder, an eraser, a ruler. 5-4153. Price, complete... 35¢"
What a line up! Four boxed sets of Canadian colored pencils. All sets of eight different colors and from a similar time period (around the 1950s). I recently added the Cray-tone set made by Venus Penil to the group. These boxes have a lot of stype and a bit more elegance than later sets that were sold in clear vinyl packages. I have lots of Laurentian colored pencils but I realized that I don't have boxed set of 8... perhaps something additional to add to this line up.
Canada's flag turns 60 years old on February 15th, 2025. The maple leaf flag was made official by a proclamation from Queen Elizabeth II on January 28th, 1965 and on February 15th, it was inaugurated in a public ceremony on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. This week all of Canada’s living former prime ministers released an open letter urging Canadians far and wide to fly the flag this weekend as a show of Canadian solidarity.
What better way to celebrate than by flying a flag and pulling out some commemorative pencils! Below are a trio of vintage, Canadian made, flag pencils. I picked up this pad of Canadian Pacific Telegraph paper recently. I thought it would be fun to type out some messages on my Corona 3 typewriter. They also make a nice backdrop for these Canadian Pacific pencils. Because of the name on this pad of paper, "W.D. Neil, General Manager of Communications, Montreal" we can approximate the date. The 1949 CP annual reports also lists him in this position and I've seen several used telepgraphs very similar to this one from around the same time period (early 1950s).
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