There is a legendary pencil called the Blackwing 602, first manufactured in the 1940s by the Eberhard Faber company. Eberhard Faber was founded by John Eberhard Faber, himself part of the “ancient” Faber family of pencil manufacturers in Bavaria. In the mid-1800s, he started shipping American ceder back to Germany for pencil manufacturing, then established the first American pencil factory in NYC. The company’s pencil operations were acquired from Staedler by Faber-Castell in the late 80s, and then by Sanford (a division of Newell-Rubbermaid) in the late 1990s. The Blackwing was manufactured until 1998, when parts for the eraser ferule—the metal band that holds rubber to wood—ran out [1]. Individual pencils became very desirable, fetching high prices on Ebay. >>> Continue reading
