The traditional, time-tested Koh-i-Noor 1500 pencil comes in a wide range of hardnesses – from the butter-soft 8B to the hard-as-a-rock 10H. It has been on the market with its stately golden yellow envelope for decades, reportedly from the time of its receiving an award of excellence at a World’s Fair in the 19th Century.

A few remarks about the company named Koh-i-Noor are in order: Joseph Hardtmuth, who has already been mentioned elsewhere (“General Information about Pencils”), founded the company at the end of the 18th Century in Vienna. In the middle of the 19th Century it was relocated to Budweis in Czechoslovakia. In 1914 the company was certified as one of the largest pencil manufacturers in the world; already be that time it was making deliveries beyond the borders of the Hapsburg Empire. After the Second World War it was nationalized and became the sole supplier of artist supplies for the entire Eastern Bloc from the Black Sea to the Arctic Ocean. In 1992, it was again privatized. Many of the former products are still manufactured along with the name of the company and the label. (The label is based on a world famous diamond, the Koh-i-Noor, which was appropriated in the 19th Century by the British in their former colony India. In Persian the name Koh-i-Noor means the Mountain of Light.)