A few heartfelt words in honour of the humble pencil…
Once you start to notice their markings, pencils draw you into a beguiling world of exotic lettering. With color unavailable to their designers – absurdly, the color of a pencil either definitely indicates the color of its lead, or is completely arbitrary – pencils have historically expressed their identities through playful typography. The range of information they need to convey (manufacturer, product name, grading and classification, place of origin) calls for a self-contained system of semantic distinctions, and the unforgiving process by which tiny letters must be hot stamped into soft pine demands durable letterforms of considerable ingenuity.
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