Hacker News Reader

Comment by airstrike | Hacker News Reader

In my mind, Faber-Castell will forever be the ultimate pencil. I think yellow pencils are a staple of American culture but in my mind pencils are green...

http://www.fabercastell.com/products/pencils/GraphitepencilC...

View on HN

Staedller, the most stable graphite lead pencil brand across Asia (not colored pencils) were black and yellow striped hexagonal, and of wonderful quality (iirc, better than Faber Castell for art pencils).

In Australia and New Zealand, Staedtler are hexagonal but red and black.

[1]: https://i.imgur.com/AMbEQzT.jpg

I suppose it's quite easy to monopolise the visual imagination of one child. I picture pencils as black, because someone once gave me a nice mixed tin of Caran d'Ache pencils which were all matte black, and I used them endlessly to do drawings of 16x16 sprites and 8x8 fonts on graph paper.

MSX? Spectravideo? Which other system used 16x16 sprites? :-)

> mixed tin of Caran d'Ache pencils

Totally off-topic but I just realized as I read that that it sounded like the Russian word for pencil: карандаш (karandash)

So I thought, aha, it's like with Xerox -- the Russians took the name of the company that makes the item and named all the items of that type after the company's name.

But it actually is even more interesting. The name of the company was taken from a French satirist who created his pseudonym after the Russian name for pencil.

And then, later, a Swiss company that made pencils used the name of the French satirist's pseudonym as their name.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caran_d%27Ache_(company)

Agreed, this must be a (North)American thing rather than a Western thing. I grew up in Spanish-speaking Western country and yellow was not the most common pencil color of my childhood.

I must say, I did always think those pencils were higher quality than the ones I got.

But I didn't get just yellow ones. I had many different colors and patterns.

I do instinctively recognize yellow as "the color of pencils" but it's from so many cartoon graphics of them, not because they were all that color.

How is this particular item a "spare" pencil? > Spare pencil for the Castell 9000 perfect pencil

Surely any time you buy a new pencil it is a spare or replacement for the pencil you already have?

I could be wrong, but I think it means 'spare' as in 'singular' or 'loose', not as in 'replacement' or 'extra'.

No it's spare as in replacement. It's a replacement pencil for a pencil holder. That's why it's so short.

It's the consumable part of the pencil. Cheaper than buying the pencil holder again.

Here you go: http://www.fabercastell.com/design/products/perfect-pencil

FWIW, the article mentions that Faber also jumped on the yellow trend.

I use Faber Castell pencils in 3H and 4H in my workshop, they're quite good. Sharpen to a very fine point easily that lasts a while when marking metal or wood surfaces.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com