Saturday, August 20, 2016

Permanently Entertaining

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I’ll admit that I’ve evolved from collecting American-made pencils only to collecting pencils that I like, regardless of where they were made.  This one, which surfaced in a recent online auction, screams not American:


The worn german silver plating screams continental, but I really liked the pattern on the barrel:


And I’m always a sucker for a great name like “Permanento.”  Note also the interesting pattern around the crown:


This one got even better when it arrived, because the seller, who apparently didn’t know anything about pencils, left a couple things out:


That blue square is a color indicator - this is a multicolor pencil.  And then there’s that great logo:


I was pretty sure the middle letters were “ie,” but I wasn’t sure whether the first letter is an o or a v and the last letter might be an r or a k.  After I posted a question about this on the Pentrace page over on Facebook, my friend Giovanni Abrate figured out that it is “vier,” the German word for four – of course.  

Aurora makes a “Permanento” pencil, but it isn’t a multicolor.  Google isn’t turning anything up for me, so I’m at a dead end.  I’d appreciate hearing any other information about it.

2 comments:

Martha said...

Just out of curiosity, what are the four colors? Primaries blue, yellow, red, plus one?

Jon Veley said...

Sorry to be late in responding -- black is the fourth, and typical colors on 4-color pencils are red, blue, green and black. Yellow is a bit of a specialty color less commonly used.