Picture a "Mad Men" style advertising agency conference room in the late 1960s. They are designing the packaging for a three pack of Venus Velvet pencils to hang from a rack on store shelves.  They need to decide on what type of image to put on the card back... I can only imagine the conversation that led to this design.  

This is the first time I've seen Venus Velvet packaged this way. I also haven't seen Venus Velvet with two blue bands instead of 1 (although some of the Venus "Super Color" colored penils I've seen have two bands). Thirty-three cents for 3 pencils sounds like a deal to me. I imaging unopened packages like this are fairly rare. This one has a price tag from a Gambles department store. I had never heard of this store before I looked it up. Look like they were around until the mid-1980s.

What better way to celebrate Canada Day than with some Canadian flag pencils! The Canadian national flag was adopted in 1965. There were several commemorative pencils made for this occasion including the one below from Venus Canada.

The vintage pencil below features the Canadian flag on one side and text on the other. The manufacturer is not identified but I have several Dixon pencils with a similar ferule.

This isn't a stamp blog but I find there are a lot of common themes between pencil and stamp collecting. The year 1965 saw the issue of a commemorative stamp to mark the adoption of the new national flag. The cachet contains the date of inauguration of February 15th, 1965.

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. ​

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? 

These pencils date from the early 1970s after the Venus Pencil Company acquired Esterbrook. 

These pencils are probably from the 1980s. Faber-Castell acquired Venus Esterbrook in 1966. They no longer have Canada stamped on the side and the printing is in gold instead of blue.

Laurentian pencil crayons (later spelled Laurentien) were an iconic part of many Canadian students' school supply checklists and lots of Canadians fondly remember using them in school. These colour pencils were made in Canada by the Venus Pencil Company. They were also sold in the US under the brand name 'Paradise.' Each colour was labeled with a number for use with Colour-By-Number kits. Production of these colour pencils in Canada ceased in the mid-1990s. Laurentiens continued production in the US until about 2011 when the product line was discontinued.

My oldest set of Laurentien pencils probably dates from the early 1960s. The pencils come in a box labeled Laurentian on one side and Laurentien on the other. All the pencils are stamped Laurentian. Later pencils were stamped with the French spelling "Laurentien" which was intended to help sales in Quebec. I'm not sure when Laurentien pencils were first made (I've seen the date 1951 but no evidence of this). Venus Pencil Company Ltd started in 1931 as the Canadian affiliate of the American Pencil Lead Company. American Pencil changed their name to the Venus Pen and Pencil Corporation in 1956 (after their most popular pencil line). In the early 1970s, Venus was acquired by Faber-Castell and the corporate branding on these pencils changed.​

One way to date larger sets of pencils is to check the name of colours #14 and #21. In the mid-1960s or early 1970s, Venus changed the name of #14 from "Natural Flesh" to "Flesh" and then to "Soft Peach", and #21 was changed from "Indian Red" to "Roan Red". 

In 1967, the name of the company was changed to Venus Esterbrook Canada Ltd. The case was changed to vinyl with a metal snap but the pencil crayon markings remained unchanged.

I have several sets of various sizes of Laurentien pencils with the Faber-Castell brand name on them. These were sold in a vinyl pouch and in several different sizes. Early sets has "Venus Canada" marked on each pencil and later sets are simply marked "Canada". In the mid-1980s, some packages advertised contests for personal computers (I've seen both Vic 20 and Commodore 64 contest packages). The sets I have below all have UPC-A barcodes which were in use starting around 1974.

Some early Laurentiens with the Eberhard Faber brand were made in Canada. Later ones were made in the US. The US made pencils were eventually branded with the Sandford name and then the vinyl pouch was changed back to a box. The set of 20 pencils I have shown below, has "Made in Canada" on the front but the pencils are all stamped "U.S.A."

Sanford produced Laurentien pencils in the USA through the early-2010s. After several mergers in the pencil industry, Laurentien pencils eventually became the property of the Newell-Rubbermaid company. This multinational company had numerous other pencil brands in its portfolio​ including Prismacolor and PaperMater. Laurentien Pencils ceased production in late 2011.