Caran Swiss Wood 348

Here we have a high end fairly unique pencil, that rather than being made from Cedar as you might expect, is produced from Beech, sourced from the Glovelier region in Jura.

The company

We’ve covered Caran d’Ache before - a high end Swiss art manufacturer.

The pencil itself

The pencil is ‘bare wood’ with a glowing red end, apart from, I suspect it is not actually bare wood, but probably coated in a matt-ish clear varnish. Key to note, is the pencil is made from Beech, but, it is not the color I would expect from run of the mill Beech, which would be a fairly light cream maybe with a touch of pink. No, these are dark brown:

The pencil came reasonably sharpened

and has a very distinctive bright red tip, with the swiss flag on the end!

and just for completeness, there is the barcode on one of the other sides.

Something else interesting about this pencil, is its smell! It is really really spicy. I would say it smells of curry - curry leaf, curry plant. My wife says it smells burnt, and I can see that - maybe a touch of burnt caramel. And I don’t mean just a little, it is quite a strong smell. Apart from Cedar pencils smelling quite nice, I think this is the only pencil so far I have reviewed that has had a distincive smell.

And, one last thing. Much like the Caran Grafwood, these pencils are a touch larger than a normal pencil. Just enough that they don’t fit in my normal preferred longpoint sharpener. Nor my other long point sharpener. So, I had to resort to using one of the few sharpeners the pencil would fit in, which gave me a fairly ‘normal’ point. If only I could get a nice long point on these…

How does it write

Well, this might just be one of the best pencils I’ve used. It has an excellent smooth writing feel, the lead is hard and wears very very well, and the line is really nice and dark. I’ve have to try and cast my mind back, but my suspicion is that these will be using the same lead composition as the Grafwoods. An excellent pencil.

Sourcing

These are not necessarily the easiest pencils to obtain. Caran being a well known company, I suspect you will be able to find them, it might just take some effort.

iirc, I got mine from Choosing Keeping.

Price wise, these are not cheap pencils - we are looking at £3.50-4 per pencil.