Chapman Stylrite

The company

The pencil itself says ‘H.J.Chapman’, Made in Great Britain. Well, technically it says ‘made exclusively for’, so I don’t think Chapman are the original manufacturer.

Having a surf around, there is a link here with a bit of history about Mt. Chapman, and at the end it says the company was finally purchased by W.H.Smith in 1989.

The pencil itself

A fairly classic yellow pencil. I suspect this is reasonably old. It is a little beaten up. It has embossing on two sides:

You can actually see the same pencil shown on one of the Chapman history pages here

Nothing fancy here, just a vanilla pencil. Given its likely age, I suspect it will be made of cedar.

How does it write

This is a pretty hard pencil. It is listed HB, but ir really feela more like an H. It does feel very ‘sharp’, and didn’t need much sharpening. The line was actually pretty clear - dark enough. I didn’t mind using this through the week, which is a surprise for a pencil this physically hard.

Sourcing

No idea where I got this. I suspect I inherited it from somewhere. afaik, the company no longer exists (and may not have done for 25 years), at least not as a company supplying pencils. So, good luck hunting one of these down - the only way is going to be the socond hand market. And, of course, we don’t know who the original manufacturer was either.