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Comment by fnordprefect | Hacker News Reader

It's not even Western, from my experience it's just the US. In Australia, I don't think I'd ever seen a yellow pencil, other than one that came in a set of coloured pencils for art. I hadn't realised it was the norm in the US until relatively recently.

We have these, just for example:

https://www.faber-castell.com/products/GraphitepencilGoldfab...

https://www.staedtler.com.au/en/products/pencils-accessories...

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Definitely not just US. I'm from Lithuania and these were the pencils we all used [0]. That was around 1992 and later, so could have been a relic from Soviets.

Only in later years green ones appeared and yellow with black stripes.

[0] - https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/lead-pencil-isolated-white-b...

I spent a year in the baltics, got homeschooled while there. The pencils were a tealish green and tasted much worse than your garden variety Dixon, but wrote much better.

It was probably an H grade rather than HB. Pencils in the US stores often come out smudgy to me ever since then...

I distinctly recall yellow pencils in the USSR. Not that it was the only color, but it was definitely a popular one.

Looking it up, apparently this has something to do with pencils being manufactured in early (1920s) USSR by an American entrepreneur:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armand_Hammer#Career

https://i.imgur.com/vpObXqU.jpg

Eventually the Soviet government bought the entire operation from him, and thenceforth it became this:

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9C%D0%BE%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%BE...

And they probably just continued to use yellow, because why not?

Australian here too - I do remember occasionally using yellow US-style pencils but I think they were usually crappy knock-offs from cheap shops because the wood was always low quality, the graphite broke all the time and the rubbers (erasers) on the top were always useless and left black marks everywhere.

The standard pencil we had at school was just plain red with a straight cut top so you could see the graphite - I think a staedtler HB (bit like [1] but didn’t have the ‘minerva’ brand name on it). A lot of automatically marked tests needed 2B pencils to mark the answer sheet and we almost always used the red and black striped ones like your link.

1. https://www.supplyme.co.nz/shop/Stationery/Pens+Pencils+Mark...

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