Berol Handwriting

What seems to be a fairly basic pencil on the face of it. Appears to be designed and sold for school classroom use.

The company

We have covered before. Sadly no longer an English manufacturer, and now owned by Sandford.

The pencil itself

The pencils is a pretty distinctive red/white strip with a rounded red tip.

Unusually, the pencil came sharpened with a very acute angle, meaning it had a very short tip:

After sharpening, that’s a much nicer point, but, note how it is offset. Looks like the lead is not quite central here.

I find the embossing on the pencil quite hard to read - but, yes, it really does say ‘handwriting’ - here is a closeup:

How does it write

I quite like this for writing. The line is nice and derk, and not scratchy. It’s reasonably firm, but does need sharpening reasonably often. I was quite happy using this through the week.

Sourcing

I have a feeling I picked this up at some highstreet stationers. Having a look online, they look quite easy to source - in fact you can buy a rather healthy quantity of 200 in a box for a tad over £15 - that’s what, 7.5pence per pencil - they don’t get much cheaper than that really.