The Staedtler Norica
I spent an entire day wading through Dixon Ticonderogas before finding something, anything different.
| Maker | Staedtler |
| Model | Norica |
| Hardness | 2 HB |
| Features | It's blue! |
| Price I paid | $4.49 for 12 |
When I decided to see what the World of Pencils™ had to offer after not paying attention to them in decades, I was shocked to find that trying to find something other than the Dixon Ticonderoga and its offshoots was going to be hard.
I spent amost an entire day scouring every office supply store and the office supply sections of every store I could find within a ten-mile radius of my house. Every place was the same. They had Dixon Ticonderogas (sometimes lots of kinds of Dixon Ticonderogas, and a house-brand pencil1, but none of them really screamed 'premium writing experience' to me2.
Toward the end of the day I was getting desperate. I was getting tired of seeing Ticonderogas everywheree and was desperate to find anything else. At one of my last stops, I found one lonely box of Staedtler Norica pencils.
I'd never heard of Staedtler before, and I still have a lot of trouble trying to spell Staedtler without second-guessing it every single time, but these pencils looked premium. At the very least they looked different. Plus, the place only had one box of them left, so they must be The Good Stuff™ I had been searching for. So I picked them up.
And the very next store had an institutional size box of 144 of the things available (and plenty of them), so maybe they weren't quite as rare as I thought. Maybe my local Staples was just understaffed and hadn't stocked the shelves yet that day.
Regardless, I bought some, took them home, and started trying to figure out what decisions in my life led me to this moment.
For the writing test, I pulled out a Jumble puzzle book and attempted to solve a few puzzles. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the pencils were pleasant to write on, but I think that might have been partly because of the paper. These Jumble books are printed on, what appears to my untrained eye to be, decent paper. I'm not really used to this. I'm used to getting the absolute cheapest puzzle books printed on paper that's just one grade above getting sawdust wet, flattening it into a sheet, and then drying it in the sun for a few weeks3.
If I had to characterize what it was like to write with the norica in the workbook, I'd say it was nice. Nothing extraordinary, but nice. I also pulled out a Black N' Red notebook and wrote a few lines to practice my cursive, and, again, it was nice. I know that doesn't really describe the experience, but that's because I don't have the vocabulary yet to describe a pencil in the way that enthusiasts might, and, I felt like this pencil wasn't really remarkable.
It really felt a lot like a Ticonderoga, but if I was really pressed to find a difference, it would be that I didn't have to press as hard to leave a mark like I feel I do with the Ticonderoga, so I broke the lead less, and my wrist didn't hurt after an evening of solving puzzles or doing some journalling.
What I really started wondering was what if pencils had averaged out? What if the bottom had been raised so much and the top lowered so much that everything started to approach a dull average? That's going to make reviewing the rest of the pencils I bought a challenge, since how many times can you restate the same thing?