Two of my nerdy passions formed a perfect storm this weekend when I realized that Goodwill sells bags of donated pencils for $1.99. This was, like, life-changing for me. Of course I bought a bag. I probably would have bought more if I didn’t still have a lunch sack worth of Thai pencils to review (and actually use up).

The best part? A lot of the pencils in the bag I bought are old…dare I say, vintage?…and no longer being manufactured, at least in the same location/form/etc. that they are today. I’m pretty excited to pick up some high-quality pencils for a good price, and to take a trip down memory lane back to a time when my favorite type of writing instrument sucked significantly less in general.

I plan to put these to good use for blogging fodder! What should I write? A standard review wouldn’t be very useful but I’m thinking of doing a series of “old vs. new” comparisons where I can; for example, doing a shoot-out between these old-school, made-in-U.S.A Ticonderogas and the newer models from China and Mexico.

I did do a preliminary paper test just to see how they wrote. I also compared them to two of my favorite contemporary pencils. Here’s how that looks:

First impressions? Most of these pencils write pretty damn good, even though back in their day they were probably all “just pencils”. The Ticonderoga was great (as expected) but the Berol Integrity was surprisingly good as well, and I don’t think I disliked any of them.

Must have been nice to be able to just pick up any old pencil off the shelf and know it was going to be a solid writer and not frustrate the hell out of you!