There was a lot came up the other day with a Swan in it which I wanted. The rest of the lot was pencils, something I don’t have a great deal of interest in or knowledge about. However, they turned out to be Yard–O-Leds which even I know are good pencils. You would pay a sizeable lump of money for a new one but I don’t think that these old ones were exceptionally expensive. I’m sure they don’t have much value now.

I would have set them aside to deal with them later but the degree of filth with which they were coated was just so demanding of my attention. It must have taken decades for them to accumulate that amount of dirt. Perhaps they were in the bottom of someone’s tool chest. In any case, I am challenged by something like that – I just have to polish them! So I got out the cloths and the polish and went to work. You see the result – far from perfect because unfortunately the silver coloured pencil, which is actually rhodium plated, is quite scratched up and the rolled gold one isn’t much better. Nonetheless, they look a lot better than they did when I got them! I should have taken “before” photographs.

There is no bottom to the depths of my ignorance about pencils, but I will hazard a guess that the rhodium plated one may be as early as the 1920s whereas the rolled gold one is quite a lot later, perhaps the 1950s. Perhaps you can put me right on that.

I’m not fond of writing with metal instruments, whether they be pens or pencils. They tend to be heavy and slippery. Of the two, I could make more of the rhodium plated one; the rolled gold one seems exceptionally heavy and unwieldy to me.

So there they are. I’ll probably list them on the sales site at some point.