Pencils, eh
A virtual museum of the golden age of the Canadian pencil industry.
Verithin vs. ThinexColored pencils are made for a variety of purposes. School pencils, art pencils and pencils for the office. In the 1950s, colored pencils would have been found on the desks of engineers, architects, advertisers and accountants. Colored pencils marketed for the office were often hexagonal instead of round. They had hard thin cores designed for long wear and durability. In Canada, popular pencils in this category were the Eagle Verithin and Dixon Thinex. These two pencils were very similar and direct competitors. A sad and sorry life...The vintage ink blotters shown below feature advertisements for Verithin and Thinex pencils. They paint a sad picture of the life of the average 1950s businessman. Working in Dickensian conditions... sitting at a desk all day tediously drawing thin red checkmarks in a drafty warehouse with broken windows and a leaky roof. Writing with a stub of a pencil and hoping that the rain doesn't ruin your days work.
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Writing with ink can get messy. Writers who use fountain pens or dip pens will sometimes use ink blotters to prevent smearing. These ink blotters are an absorbent paper that can be used to blot the excess ink off your paper. Manufacturers quickly realized that these blotting papers were an ideal host for advertisements. You can find ink blotters with advertisements for just about everything. My favorites however are ink blotters which advertise pencils. They seem to straddle the worlds of ink and graphite. A bridge to connect different writing instruments. Many of the businesses that stamped their names on these ink blotters were small independent retailers. It is often hard to find information about these small businesses.
Eagle and later Berol Canadiana colored pencils were made in Canada from the early 1950s (this site states 1952) until the factory in Drummondville, Quebec ceased production in 1992. During this time, there were a number of different packaging styles. Below is a rough timeline of the different styles of packaging that I'm aware of. It is based mainly on old newspaper advertisements.
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