rotring Tikky

The Tikky was introduced in 1979. If you’ve looked at the rotring catalog links, you may have noticed they really milked the Tikky pencil design for innumerable models which differ from each other only slightly or not at all. I’ll try to put some order to the situation.

There have been three generations of Tikkys:

A first generation Tikky produced from 1979 to 1996.

A second generation Tikky produced from 1997 to 2007.

A third generation Tikky produced from 2008 to present.

Within the generations there have been an ever decreasing number of variations on the Tikky theme. There is the Tikky standard, Tikky special, Tikky automatic, Tikky double push, Tikky metallic, Tikky metallic double push and surely others. Then there are the non-Tikky Tikkys: the T, the TS slide, and others.

The T and TS slide lines seem to have been the types marketed to professional draftsmen, but all have the elongated sleeve necessary for drafting, so the distinction is only marketing, which as far as I’m concerned isn’t necessarily the best determination of a pencil’s suitability or unsuitability for drafting so I include the non-T types below as well.

For some reason, the Sanford division of Rubbermaid Newell bought rotring in 2000 and turned the direction of the company away from professional products and directly toward the ground, producing such things as the rotring Core, which was obviously designed by an athletic shoe designer who was fired from Reebok for trying way to hard. The Core line seems to have been engineered for the specific purpose of adding color to the clearance bins of stationers and has never been seen anywhere not on sale.

Since then, Sanford seems to have gotten rotring back on track. The current Tikky is a nice design I think. It’s a bit too “designey” for me, but it is a clear homage to the original and is an improvement over the bland Tikky II in every way I can think of. The new Tikky really feels nice in the hand and the oddly sculptural barel has a nice feel of quality.