The Venus Pencil Company of Canada made a number of different copying pencils. The No. 165 came in five different degrees from Soft to Extra Hard. It also came with a point protector, mouthpiece or in a "pocket style". Vintage copying pencils are known to contain aniline dyes, which are quite toxic, so even with a mouthpiece I would be hesitent to hold this pencil in my mouth! These pencils have the same crackle finish that Venus Drawing pencils have. The difference is that these are in a blue colour instead of green.

It is pretty rare to find pencils still on the card from their hanging retail display. Below are two examples of a trio Venus Velvet 6557 pencils sold on a hanging card.  The earlier version is on the left which dates from the late 1960s or early 1970s. The example on the right can be dated using the Boots price sticker. Boots was a UK retailer that expanded into Canada in 1978 when they purchased the Tamblyn Drugs chain. Most Canadian Boots shops were converted to Pharma Plus in 1989. Because there is no bar code on the back of the package, we can probably date it to the earlier part of this decade long period. Notice the price jumped on these pencils from $0.33 on the left to $0.99 on the right.  

At first I thought that the font on the packagin on the right was Cooper Black font, a famous and commonly used font for advertising. I think this font is a bit less rounded but similar. 

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.

May 8th is the anniversary of Victory in Europe Day, or V-E Day. This day commemorates the day that Germany unconditionally surrendered its military forces to the Allies on May 8, 1945.

There is a show on community television where I live called "The Past and the Curious." The show states, "An article can endure through time, but only its story makes it an artifact." I think the pencil shown below has an interesting story to tell. It is a pencil made by the Venus Pencil Company of Canada that has the patriotic slogan "There'll Always Be an England" on its side. In addition to the slogan it has the Union jack, a British bulldog and lion... all popular symbols of England.

​"There'll Always Be an England" is an English patriotic song, written and distributed in the summer of 1939. The song became very popular as Canada entered the Second World War in 1939. The song was played on the radio and the sheet music sold 130,000 copies in Canada (published by Gordon V. Thompson who secured the North American copyright). Initially, the song was banned on the radio in the US which was still neutral at the time. 

Because of the popularity of the song, many items where made with the slogan, "There'll Always be an England." Below is a vintage Canadian post card with the slogan and a Union Jack waving in front of a military display.

Below is an envelope sent from Canada to the US in November 1941. The postmark shows that the letter was mailed on Nov. 20th, 1941 from Windsor, Ontario.  It appears that the "Enlist Now" flag cancel was used in 32 different cities during the period of 1941 to 1943. I can imagine this letter reaching its American destination about the time of the Dec. 7th 1941 attach on Pearl Harbour. 

Happy VE Day!

Stationery companies often gave out ink blotters which contain advertisements for products they sold. Some these advertisements are for pencils. I have shared some photos of ink blotters in the past. Below are three ink blotters from the Hay Stationery Company of London, Ontario.  ​

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.

The Primer Print 1 is a red jumbo pencil with a 10 mm diameter (a bit larger than the blue Primer Print 2 below). This version of the pencil has a big spot for students to write their name on. Bob Truby's site has photos two different versions of this pencil. 

I found this collection of Primer Print 2 pencils at a second hand store in July 2018. They're in really nice condition. They're a large diameter (approx. 8 mm) round pencil for younger students.

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.