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Comment by zwaps | Hacker News Reader

Crazy that Staedler, Castell, Lamy, Pelican, Rotring, Montblanc and Herlitz are all small German companies that make... pens and pencils.

Germany and Japan are for some reason obsessed with writing tools

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A lot of places actually use Japanese pens and pencils. But those are not commonly sold in Europe or the US. It seems like Japan is pretty bad at exporting things outside of Asia.

That said Montblanc is not a small company anymore it belongs to Richemont SA the third largest luxury goods company in the world. When I wanted to buy a fountain pen I ended up buying a small German brand who's name I forgot. The Montblanc ones were expensive, so-so in the hand and generally not very pleasant to write with IMHO. I do generally like Rotring though.

> Japanese pens and pencils [...] are not commonly sold in Europe

Thats not my experience at all.

Not mine either, in the US.

-While you mostly (around here, in the Norwegian boonies at least) will have to go to a specialist shop to get Japanese pencils (I've a box of Mitsubishi Hi-Unis on my desk as I type this), any two-bit shop carries a bunch of Japanese rollerballs (Mostly Pilot and Pentel) and fine-liners (Sakura).

Pentel is probably one of the most common mechanical pencil companies in the US and is Japanese. They are so common in fact I didn't even know this till I was in a Japanese language class in college and my professor asked me where my pencil was made to point out this fact and it came as a surprise.

Similar here. When I first saw "Penteru" in Japan, I had to stop and figure out who had imported what, but even the way the logo text was rendered in Japanese made it pretty obvious. That was a surprise for sure.

Didn't know that, thanks for correcting.

Apparently ballpoint pen manufacturing requires some precision technology - China acquired it only in 2017 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/01/18...

Wikipedia says that Rotring is owned by Newell Brands, a 14B$/year company, which also owns Parker and Sharpie.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newell_Brands

Somewhat ironic that they don't make curtain rods anymore...

A single English exception was Derwent colour pencils.

These days apparently not quite the same quality.

[edit - another - https://www.hamiltonpens.com/collections/platignum]

It’s amazing that they have managed to stay independent where companies like Rotring [0] and Parker have not. Most of these stationery brands have been rolled up into bundles of like brands, but not the famous German ones like these.

[0] https://unsharpen.com/pencil/rotring-600-drafting-pencil/

I still have mine. And use it almost daily.

https://unsharpen.com/pen/lamy-unic-ballpoint/

Pens, pencils, write-heads, bits, what's the difference?

Analog vs digital.

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