Welcome to Leadholder

The Varius is my favorite twist lock pencil of all time. I’ve loved it since I first discovered US Patent No. 1,908,491 which was an early version of the pencil, but possibly never actually produced. While said patent was still being examined in the bowels of the U.S. Patent office, the Swiss inventor, Max Steiger was busy improving his design. The result is the miniature marvel known as the Varius. The Varius’ clutch is adjustable to hold a large variety of lead sizes from 1 mm to 3+ mm.

A few more items have been added to the Leadholder Auction. Many more yet to come.

Added the Pilot H-569 to the Thin Lead Drafting Leadholder Gallery.

Leadholder Auction Update:

Another gem has been added to the Leadholder Auction. I will try to add several more items today and tomorrow.

Oh this is fascinating. An auction savvy reader, David Pye, wrote to inform me that my crazy auction system of giving the winner the item for the price of the second highest bid is not unique. It’s called a Vickrey auction.

I am in the process of getting caught up on my pencil correspondence so if you wrote me or ordered from the shop and haven’t gotten a reply yet, please be patient, I will answer them all. Here’s a tip: because I am so backed up I have abandoned trying to reply to everything in strict chronological order. I am answering new messages as well as working my way through older ones, so If you re-email you might get a quicker response.

Added two pencils from Mitsubishi to the Thin Lead Drafting Leadholder Gallery:

Mitsubishi Uni M5-552.

Mitsubishi Uni U5-703.

Added two pencils from Ohto to the Thin Lead Drafting Leadholder Gallery:

Ohto SP 500.

Ohto Promecha 1000.

Super Special Announcement:

The first official Leadholder auction is now in progress!

And it is a special item that kicks off the auctions. A model and maker that until now was not shown or even mentioned on Leadholder.

You need to be registered to view the auction pages. I’m not trying to be a jerk and harvest personal info, the registration is required because it helps to prevent fake bids.

Before registering you might want to look at How do the auctions work?

Welcome old friends and new visitors. Traffic on Leadholder has reached an all-time high and has increased by 1/3 just in the first two months of the new year alone. And this trend seems to be independent of the spike in traffic generated by the Architect article (see below). Web traffic and articles in national magazines are not the only upward pointing indicator of the improved visibility of this tiny, um, region... or, um... wavelength of the collecting spectrum! (or something): Prices for leadholders on eBay are out of control, and now I seriously can’t afford my hobby any longer. It used to be so cheap. Five or ten bucks for a pencil. Now $100 is common and nice ones fetch $500! I can’t wait to see what the next good Alteneder fetches.

Special Announcement:

Are you a collector? Then you’ll want to register for the upcoming Almost Nearly 10 Year Anniversary Leadholder Leadholder Auction. I am currently taking a hard look at my collection and will be auctioning off dozens, maybe hundreds of items. Many of the items will be duplicates from my collection or pieces that are just not my thing. There will also be some rare and exceptional pieces—some that have never been posted in the galleries.

Now, back to the usual sort of updates:

Added a Schweizerfabrikat Varius to the Non-Drafting Leadholder Gallery.

Added an A.W. Faber-Castell 9026 Varius to the Non-Drafting Leadholder Gallery.

Added a Faber-Castell TK 9400 Sterling Silver 50 Year Commemorative Edition to the Drafting Leadholder Gallery.

Added an A.W. Faber (USA) Castell Locktite 2538 “King Size” to the Non-Drafting Leadholder Gallery.

Added an A.W. Faber-Castell Locktite 9805 SG to the Drafting Leadholder Gallery courtesy Allan Macdonald.

Added an Ero 4040 to the Drafting Leadholder Gallery.

Added the A.W. Faber Sure-Grip 6500 to the Drafting Leadholder Gallery courtesy Paul Hunt and Allan Macdonald.

In the notes for the previous update (March 13, below) I humiliated every single visitor to Leadholder who missed the typo on this welcome/what’s new page (which was ALL of you, by the way (Oh, sure, and ME too)) but I never actually mentioned what the offending word was. So a few days ago some guy writes me and says something like, “Dude, if you’re going to whine about me failing to correct your stupid mistakes, dude, the least you could do is tell me what I missed, dude!” OK, dude! You’ll regret my telling you though; you’re sure to feel even more inadequate, but you asked for it: It was “January” which was spelled “January” in the January 11 entry. Happy now?

Well, this is fun. I was interviewed by Hannah Mccann for Architect magazine a while back and she wrote a nice little article about leadholders for the January 2008 print edition which is now available online.

Why did no one tell me I had a typo right on the front page for two months?! What? Oh. I see. All my pages have typos. And you all just assumed it was a “style” thing. Well it’s not! Next time tell me. Lazy bastards. (See how I was able to pass off my own failings as someone else’s (your) problem? Pretty cool, huh? Yes. I guess you could say it’s a gift.)

Added a Mitsubishi UNI Color to the Non-Drafting Leadholder Gallery.

Added a Wörther Shorty Aluminum to the Non-Drafting Leadholder Gallery.

I forgot to mention that the new Shop probably certainly has minor bugs. I’ve found two myself so far. I had to code it myself so please let me know if you experience any “anomalous” behavior, or would like to suggest improvements.

The Leadholder Shop has undergone a significant overhaul and many new items added. The shop now features a shopping cart and simplifies the ordering process. Of note also is that the Order Fulfillment Division is under new management (my wife) and service has been greatly improved.

A major new feature has been implemented on several of the Gallery pages. King-Size images! I have been mulling over increasing the scale of the Gallery images across the board but was reluctant because it would increase the page size and for some of the items larger images do not exist. What I hope will be the perfect solution has entered the public testing phase and your feedback on the new method of presenting larger images will be appreciated. This method loads the larger images only when requested and can be applied to those gallery items that have larger images and left off those that do not.

Try it here on this Tru Point Automatic (hexagonal grip):

I like this as a demonstration because in the standard size image you cannot really make out the grip pattern, but zoomed in, the description of the pencil as having a “hexagonal grip” makes much more sense.

Note: If you do not have Javascript enabled in your browser, the large image will simply open on its own page rather than zooming in and out in spectacular fashion.

Oh look!
It’s the Eberhard Faber-thon!

Virtually every Eberhard Faber page has been updated in one way or another. Also many new items previously unknown to leadholderdom have been captured and put on display for you to throw peanuts at.

  
Added a fantastic two page Eberhard Faber ad from the April 1954 Architectural Record to the Vintage Ad Gallery.

Added a variety of Eberhard Faber Microtomic 608 leadholders to the Drafting Leadholder Gallery including:


an early smooth nose variant, courtesy Allan Macdonald,


a knurled nose, with gold imprint variant, courtesy Allan Macdonald,


and a silver imprinted variant.

Updated the Eberhard Faber Microtomic 610 exhibit with additional images in the Drafting Leadholder Gallery courtesy Paul Hunt.

Updated the Eberhard Faber Van Dyke 606 exhibit with additional images in the Drafting Leadholder Gallery courtesy Allan Macdonald.

Added an Eberhard Faber Van Dyke 650 to the Drafting Leadholder Gallery courtesy Allan Macdonald.

Added a Norex 305 to the Thin Lead Drafting Leadholder Gallery.

Added an itty-bitty-teeny-weeny Norex 325 to the Non-Drafting Leadholder Gallery.

Added an itty-bitty-teeny-weeny Hafter P.15 to the Non-Drafting Leadholder Gallery.

Added a Koh-I-Noor VT 827 to the Drafting Leadholder Gallery.

Added an A.W. Faber Castell 9003 Chisel Point to the Wood Cased Drafting Pencil Gallery.

Added Staedtler USA’s comedic tour de force, the 2nd generation 980 SBKV “Technical Pencil Value Pack” to the Drafting Leadholder Gallery.

Added an unusual Koh-I-Noor 5617 05 to the Thin Lead Drafting Leadholder Gallery.

Added an L&C Hardtmuth “Technicolor” Versatil 5617 to the Non-Drafting Leadholder Gallery for no other reason than it was useful to reference this model number in the discussion about the thin lead 5617 mentioned above.