Soviet and Russian Leadholders

These are all Soviet era leadholders. Most were given to me by my friend Dmytryy Orzhekhovskyy who is a collector of ordinary wooden pencils and has a website called, appropriately enough, Ordinary Pencil.

When I first met my Ukrainian friend, Dmytryy, and we setup a deal to exchange pencils, this is the sort of leadholder I imagined he would send me. Everything about this pencil is a little strange: from the way it joins in two halves like a cheap ballpoint pen, to the creepy colors of the barrel and malformed pushbutton. Even the chalky leads are weird.

You may have heard the following apocryphal tale of Soviet engineering economy: At the height of the space race the US spent millions of dollars developing a special “space” pen that could write in zero gravity, while Soviet cosmonauts simply used pencils. Yes? Well this is the pencil the cosmonauts used in their Soyuz capsules. OK, not really, but it would be cool if it was and it’s definitely “Soviet” looking enough.

These freakish things were purchased new in Odessa in 2001, but look like they had been hanging around the store for some time. The knurled ring unpleasantly rubs the hand exactly in the web of the thumb and forefinger.

The other day when I woke up, I found these two leadholders in my Easter basket. The year before, the Easter Bunny brought me the two pencils at the bottom of this page.