View on GitHub

52pencils

A pencil a week, for a year

Kita-Boshi 9500

The company

The Kita-Boshi Pencil Company (*Warning, that website looks to be in Japanese only!) is a small family owned Pencil company in Japan. A funny thing happened to me here - a friend of mine sent me a link to a nice YouTube video showing a Pencil production line that I find rather mesmorising - and it turns out to be of the Kita Boshi factory. I had a search of this blog and realised I’d not done any reviews of them, but then to my surprise found I had a whole box waiting in my stash!

Thus, after a rather long break from the blog, it was time to break out a new pencil!

The pencil itself

Apparently I had a whole box of them…

Kita-Boshi 9500 box

These are well finished pencils. A nice very dark ‘British Racing Green’ type colour. No real ripples or blemishes, and the embossing on both sides of the pencil is fairly crisp.

Kita-Boshi 9500 body

The pencil bodies are cedar, and so far I’ve had no issues with sharpening them. Well, apart from the point is slightly off centre, when I sharpened my first one, but I think that is more a consequence of my sharpener than the pencil. It’s and odd thing - I have a feeling that once you have started to sharpen a pencil off centre then it is quite hard to correct in later sharpenings. At least that is the experience I have with my X-acto L. I wonder if it is something to do with the sharpening hole being fractionally bigger than the pencil. It would not take much to make the off-centre point obvious (by looking at the encircling cedar ‘shoreline’).

Looking at the end of the pencil though, the lead is nicely centred.

Kita-Boshi 9500 ends

How does it write

This is one smooth pencil. It writes very well. Well enough to have now been my on-desk everyday user for the last 4 months. The feel is smooth, but not waxy. The line is very dark and crisp. The point lasts a reasonable time. I can happily recommend these.

Sourcing

These may not be the easiest pencils to source in the U.K. It looks like I got mine from Choosing Keeping err, nearly five years ago! They appear to have 2B at the moment, but I got a box of HB, for a very reasonable price of £12.50 - that’s only just over £1 each! A bargain.