This is the workhorse of thin lead drafting pencils. I read over at Pencil Revolution that this is Henry Petroski’s (the author of The Pencil) favorite daily use pencil. The design has remained unchanged since the 1970s. In Japan, Pentel also sells a 0.4 mm model with a green barrel. In fact, they have many drafting pencils in the 0.4 mm size, but none are sold by Pentel of America. Dicks. In fact (yes, again) Pentel of America sells a 0.5 mm Sharp with the green barrel of the 0.4! I tell you it’s a travesty.

Remember when I dogged on thin lead mechanical pencils somewhere on this site and criticized the “little plastic jiggy-jogs all over thier wimpish forms”? This is the pencil I had in mind when I wrote that. Early pentel thin lead pencils were nice. This early Graph Pencil for example has a fairly nice clean design with an elegantly tapering barrel, and a very nice pushbutton assembly. Even some newer models such as the Pentel Graph 1000 have a nice elemental form. The P200 series pencils on the other hand are a train wreck. Where the clip attaches is a misshappen groove molded into the cheap plastic barrel. This probably goes unnoticed by many engineers who for some reason always need to keep their pencils in a shirt pocket as the wander around “the plant,” but to those of us who keep their pencils at a drawing board, it’s a deal breaker. At some point probably in the 1980s, Pentel reworked their identity and began using the Pentel logo we still see today. In order to incorporate the logo into the P200 and later versions of the Graph Pencil, they apparently added a rectangular chunk of metal to the inside of the mold with the new logo on it and left it at that. The result is this very weird indentation with the Pentel name 2/3 of the way down the barrel, just before the grip. For me this gives the pencil an unacceptably asymmetrical and ambiguous feel. Further down, we find the grip area which has been engineered with precisely the geometry to repel human hands. The P200 grip is to fingers what Teflon is to eggs. As if to make up for this, at the base of the grip, just before the nosepeice, is a little bulge. Functionally, I suppose this could be rationalized as a kind of warning strip telling the fingers that have no choice but to slide down the un-grippable grip when they’re getting dangerously close to the point. Aesthetically, this bulge together with the logo canyon negates any chance of seeing the barrel as a pleasant and simple extruded form.

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