Pencils, eh
A virtual museum of the golden age of the Canadian pencil industry.
The pencil shown here has a paper ferule indicating it was probably made in the 1940s during World War II when metal was reserved for the war effort. It is also stamped "Canadian Graphite" indicating it was probably made by Dixon Pencil Inc. This was the only company I know of that used graphite from an mine in Ontario and stamped there pencils with this phrase. The next time I'm around Yarmouth, I'll have to stop in to the Red & White Dayton Food Store to connect with a bit of history.
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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.
My son and I are fans of the CBC show Back in Time for Winter. The show follows a modern day family as they recreate life in Canada through several different decades (1940s to 1990s). In that spirit, I thought it would be fun to look back at the school supplies a typical Canadian student might have seen when back to school shopping in the 1970s. Colored pencils would have been a staple of back to school shopping lists. You would likely see colored pencils sets from Venus, Eagle and Dixon. The advertisement below from 1974 shows sets from each of these three companies all of which had manufacturing facilities in Canada. In the early 1970s, older students would have been shopping for a slide ruler. Later in the decade, electronic calculators such as the TI-30 would become affordable. Do you have memories of shopping for school supplies in the 1970s? What was a cherished or wished for item that you had?
The Dixon Chancellor is a relatively rare pencil to find. I recently found one in fair condition. The Chancellor was made by the Joseph Dixon Crucible Company of New Jersey before established a factory in Canada. I saw an advertisement from 1920 listing the Chancellor as well as other Dixon pencils for sale in Canada. The Dixon Company purchased the William Cane & Sons Pencil factory in Newmarket, Ontario in 1931 and established the Dixon Pencil Company of Canada. It is quite possible that the made in Canada Chancellor is just a re-branded Cane's pencil and likely made on the same equipment in the same factory. The Chancellor was made through at least the 1940s using Canadian graphite from the Black Donald Graphite Mine in Ontario. I'm not sure if Dixon ceased production of this pencil in 1954 when this source of graphite closed or if they found an alternate source of Canadian graphite and continued production.
Dixon had a nation wide advertising campaign in 1935 highlighting their new Chancellor pencil. You can see a few ads from newspapers across Canada below. I found this collection of vintage red pencils at a second hand shop today. I imagine that this is a from a teacher's collection of checking pencils used for marking papers. Three different red pencils, all with shiny gold imprints from three different Canadian pencil factories. The Berol Canadiana and Dixon Red 2210-R pencils are round and the Venus Handy-Check pencil is hexagonal.
S-Marque Inc. (which I believe later became Basics Office Products) sold Canadian made pencils. These pencils were manufactured by Dixon Ticonderoga Inc. for S-Marque probably in the mid-1980s. They were one of several companies that Dixon manufactured "Stripe Design" pencils for. These stripe design pencils had a band of yellow about the ferrule at the end of a pencil. Actually, the ferrule pictured on the box looks just like a Ticonderoga ferrule. Below is a pencil lightly labeled "Made in Canada" from Zellers, a defunct Canadian discount retailer. The ferrule with the yellow strip is identical to the S-Marque pencil above. This is likely another "stripe design" pencil that was made by Dixon.
The Canadian Division of Dixon came to Newmarket, Ontario in 1931. Dixon bought out an existing pencil factory at 531 Davis Drive. They produced pencils here until 1990 when the factory was torn down. Ticonderoga 1386The Ticonderoga is probably the most popular pencil made by Dixon and is a classic yellow pencil with its distinctive green ferrule with two yellow bands. In the US, the pencil advertisements often had patriotic american symbols and characters. In Canada there was often alternate advertising. Links |
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