Here we have the “1932 New Zealand Rough Diary”. Don’t ask me what a “Rough Diary” is, it seems to be a reasonably normal sort of large desk diary to me. No idea what the “Rough” bit means. 
Somewhat larger than A4 size, it has stiff cardboard front and back covers, is printed 1 week per page, with a blank pink page in between every printed weekly page. I bought this diary in an online auction because it contained advertisements for pens and pencils. I’m very pleased with the ads, they are great, but I got so much more than I bargained for. Despite the seller being in a small provincial city about a 6 hour drive away, the diary entries clearly indicate the original owner lived right here in my neighbourhood. Furthermore the diary has 27 pages chock full of old time information. As well as the usual yearly calendar with sunrise, sunset and phases of the moon, we have various “ready-reckoner” tables like the ‘Lamb & Sheep Table’ used ‘To ascertain the value of lambs per head at a given price per pound’. This was back in the days of pounds, shillings & pence, before decimal currency, so working things out was a bit complicated. However, I now know that if my lamb weighed 34 pounds and was worth 7 and 5/8 pennies per pound, then overall my lamb would fetch 21 shillings 7 and ¼ pence down at the local saleyards.The ‘Wage or Income Table’ tells me that if I earned 8 and ¼ pennies per day, then that was 4 shillings 10 and ¼ pence per week, or 1 pound 1 shilling per month, or 12 pound 12 shillings per year.
This diary is from 1932, when the Great Depression was still in force, and money was tight. You can see that many of the pages were used over again by changing the year – with a pencil of course! The many pages of the Legal Information section advise the reader that “The Unemployment Act, 1930, is designed to meet the unemployment problem, which, as in other countries, has grown rapidly and beyond the power of our charitable relief organisations to deal with.” Later we read “The Mental Defectives Amendment Act, 1928, has effected certain reforms in the law”. Amongst these various reforms are regulations that “The supply of intoxicating liquor to mentally defective persons, except on the advice of a medical practitioner, is made an offence”.
Much detail is also given on the registering of births, deaths and marriages; and the methods of “Legitimation” of any child born before the marriage of his or her parents. The phrase “carnal knowledge” gets used rather frequently.The large Government section of the diary lists all the various government departments and offices, etc. I scanned the list of the Members of Parliament for names I knew. There were a few, including “Fraser, P.” As a young radical militant socialist, Fraser was imprisoned in World War 1 for opposing compulsory military conscription. In World War 2, Fraser had risen to be Prime Minister of New Zealand and as an opponent of fascism would introduce compulsory military conscription. Just a little bit of a U-turn!
Anyway, this diary is a great little glimpse back in time for a person like me with an interest in history, but enough of that, this is a pencil blog!
In the diary there are several advertisements related to writing - full page ads for ‘Onoto’ pens, for ‘Swan’ ink, for ‘Eversharp’ pencils, for ‘Multyplex’ typewriter ribbons, for ‘Multyform’ typewriter carbon paper, and lastly for the ‘Leada Loose Leaf Ledger’. I’m only going to feature two of these – the Onoto and the Eversharp ads.
First up then is the Onoto advertisement. Now I’m no expert, but a quick browse of some fountain pen sites implies that Onoto de la Rue were one of the serious heavyweight prestige brands of their day, arguably the most prestigious of the British manufacturers. I’ve actually got one or two of their pencils so I will have to dig them out sometime soon and post a photo or two.
The advertisement proclaims Onoto the British Pen as “…the finest pen the world has ever seen…”. This pen is advertised at a price of 32 shillings and 6 pence, which I believe is a little less than 1 weeks “average wage” for the time period. I’ll leave you to work out the comparison with todays average wage and the pricing of Mont Blanc and other premium pens.
This image is full resolution so you can click on it to expand and read the full text.
Sorry - some Blogger "known issue" is preventing me from uploading a full resolution photo.
I own two Pilot Clickers, both 0.5mm lead, one is red and labelled a Pilot HCK-50R-R5, the other is black and labelled H-545-B. Apart from the colour and the label I can’t see any difference between them despite their seemingly different model designations. Probably just old and new, or different codes in different countries.
Another obvious feature of the Clicker is the long black rubber grip section, basically covering the whole bottom half of the pencil. Its not a particularly “grippy” compound, it’s not contoured (except for a minor flare out at the tip), and it’s a fairly hard compound so there isn’t much give under normal finger pressure. So, overall it’s one of those rubber grips that leave me a little confused. Why did they bother? Is it just a current fad – “rubber grip = better”? One thing about the uncontoured grip though is that it does allow you to grip the pencil down low or higher up.
The 
Mars Micro Carbon leads come in clear plastic rectangular container of 12 leads. They have a simple push fit stopper, which once removed allows the leads to pour out. The idea behind this is that many of the Staedtler mechanical pencils have lead refill magazines that will take 12 lead refill sticks at a time and the neck of the tube fits into the top of the pencils refill magazine, making for a quick easy top up. 
The size label is colour coded to match the lead magazine on Staedtlers pencils, e.g. note how the “0.5mm H” part of the label is a reddy-brown colour, and Staedtlers 0.5mm technical pencils all have that same colour lead magazine. For 0.3mm pencils and leads the colour is yellow, blue for 0.7mm, etc. This is all according to an ISO standard for the colour coding of drawing instruments by line widths. 
The refill tubes and their labelling are clean and functional, but nothing “fancy” in comparison to some of their (Asian) competitors. The reverse side has a barcode and some recycling symbology. I note that they all state “Made in Germany”.
As usual, it’s rather hard to tell one grade from the next one on the scale, but you can see a difference over the full spectrum. One thing I did note was that H definitely felt harder than 2H when I was writing with it. HB was the first grade that felt “smooth”. The harder grades all felt “hard”, you could feel the paper grinding lead off the stick. HB was the first grade that felt smooth. So, there was a clear difference in the “feel” of the lead when changing from F to HB. There was also a noticeable change in feel from B to 2B.
Ain 2H is definitely harder than Staedtler 2H, though there is not really any difference in blackness. In HB the two brands are fairly similar in hardness, but Staedtler is slightly darker. The story is the same in 2B.
Here’s an older version of the container of 12 – it’s the same plastic moulding, just made in opaque blue rather than the current clear plastic, and the labelling is different. In particular the leads are called Mars Micrograph rather than Mars Micro carbon. The actual Staedtler part number is still the same, 250 05-Hardness.
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