Kirin ruler pencil

And now for something a little different. I don’t have many novelty pencils in my collection, but this interesting ‘ruler pencil’ is one of them.

I don’t remember exactly where I got this. My best guess is either I got it in a Waterstones or in Paperchase. A search on the internet didn’t help me figure out which though.

The company

All I can really find is that Kirin is a Japanese pencil manufactureres who specialises in unique and novelty type pencils. I tried to track down their website, but failed to find it. I found a hint they have one, and you can find some of their pencils, including this ruler pencil, on pencils.jp.

The pencil itself

As the title suggests, this is a pencil that is marked up as a ruler.

As you can see, the pencil is also not hexagonal or round, but is of rectangular cross section. The pencil also has an inches scale on one side, and a centimeter scale on the other.

The finish on the pencil is pretty good - I actually quite like the high gloss varnish finish, and the end cap is nicely rounded and painted.

One peculiarity about the shape of the pencil is that it does not fit in my everyday pencil sharperner - it is just a tiny bit too wide. Thus, once I’d worn it down a little, to resharpen it I had to resort to some other manual single blade based sharperners - the result was a somewhat blunt tip.

Sure, I think I could have dug out a long point sharpener that maybe the pencil would have fitted in, but I didn’t - and the stubby point was good enough. I really should get around to doing a sharpener comparison entry one day…

And finally, how do I know this is a Kirin brand pencil - well, there is some very finely printed text on one of the narrow sides of the pencil (that I did not spot immediately).

How does it write

Given I viewed this as a novelty pencil, I was not expecting much. How wrong could I have been. This pencil writes really really well. I really enjoyed using it though the week. If I could find a dozen of these at a decent price, or I could find any other Kirin brand pencils, then I would go ahead and grab a box.

Sourcing

As above, I don’t remember where I got this, and a search shows up nothing in the U.K., and only one place in Japan that is selling them. If I could find them, I’d buy the. This is one pencil I will add to my notional ‘look out for’ list in my head, and will pick up more if I see them. Next time I am passing by Waterstones and Paperchase I will stick my head in and see if that is where they were…