German naked cedar pencil

iirc, I acquired these when I was on a drive to find un-varnished (naked) cedar wood pencils. They have good a good feel to them.

The company

Have I covered Lyra here before, I don’t remember. So, let’s go look up some stuff. There is a wikipedia article here, which notes that Lyra (or apparently to give it its full name, the ‘Johann-Froescheis Lyra Bleistift Fabrik GmbH & Co. KG’, was formed in Nuremberg in 1806.

Since 2008 Lyra has been part of the Italian group FILA.

The pencil itself

This is a reasonably good looking pencil, especially if you like the bare wood look.

It feels good in the hand. The embossing is reasonably nice, and is not too obtrusive to the look of the pencil.

How does it write

It writes OK. Given the German pencils tend to err on the side of ‘hard’ for the given grade, I was quite happy using this HB pencil through the week. The hardness was a nice sort of medium balance. needing sharpening reasonably often, but good for a decent stint of writing between sharpenings.

Sourcing

I thought these were going to be easy to source, but not quite as easy as I expected. They are available through a popular ‘auction site’, and are about £5 for a dozen. That’s not a terrible price.