Maker	Tombow
Model	8900
Hardness	2B
Features	It's green!
Price I paid	64¢

One of the things that I'm not very proud of is my ignornace of world cultures. I don't mean that I get surprised when I see a picture of someone in Cairo, Egypt using a computer or someone in Kuala Lumpur, Malasia using a smart phone. I know that these things are happening even if I don't think about them every day because I sometimes fill out forms on websites and the website operators will sometimes put the list of countries in alphabetical order instead of putting the United States on top, and I know that they would only be incentivized to do that if people in those countries had the means of accessing the form.

But the kind of ignorance I'm talking about here is more about everyday life. What kinds of foods are available, what kinds of books, what are the things that make up the mundane background parts of everyday life that nobody thinks of? I think I have the answer to at least one of these questions.

It's hard for me to come up with anything concrete, mostly because I didn't look very hard, but, from what I can tell, the Tombow 8900 is kind of analagous to the Dixon Ticonderoga. Only in the way that it's considered to be a standard pencil, but that's kind of misleading.

The Tombow 8900 has hallmarks that it's a premium pencil. It comes in a fancy box that says, 'Tombow High Quality' right on it, and I'm pretty sure they wouldn't print it on there if it wasn't true. For some reason, I actually believe this, even though I don't believe the claim printed on every Ticonderoga package claimint that it's "The World's Best Pencil™".

One of the things I noticed immediately was that these pencils don't have a built-in eraser. It's not a deal-breaker or anything, but it takes some getting used to. Not only because every time I wanted to erase something I had to fight a zillion years' worth of muscle memory wanting me to flip the pencil around, but also that by eschewing the eraser, the pencil just kind of felt different. The weight was off. Or, at least, not what I was used to. I can fix that in two seconds with a cap eraser, or I can use a standalone eraser. Or I could just sharpen the other end and then I'd have two points to wear down, so I could go longer between sharpenings¹.

Erasing didn't actually go very well for me, anyway. At least, not at first.

Without the eraser built in to the back, the pencil feels very light. The box even advertises something called the 'Tombow Feather Touch'. I don't really know what this means, but I originally thought it had to do with the weight of the pencil in my hand. It really did feel like it weighed almost nothing. But after using it for a while and having trouble erasing the marks, I looked at what I was doing.

For a long time I've had an issue with pressing too hard with my pencils. I think it's because I used to use some kind of recycled paper that was big when I was grade school, but the paper itself was a medium grey color and you had to press kind of hard with your pencil to make a mark that was legible on that stuff. It's a habit that I've never really outgrown, but I'm trying. Once I realized that the 'feather touch' on the box could refer to how much pressure you need to exert on your pencil, I made an effort to write without engraving my pages, and it worked a lot better. The writing and the erasing.

Once I got the hang of this pencil, everything went fine. It doesn't feel like a premium pencil to me, but it felt good. There was a texture to the graphite as I laid it down that I fould feel through the pencil and I could hear if I got my head close to the page and the room was quiet. The subtle scratch scratch of the pencil making marks on the paper was meditative, in a way. Something about the sound matched with the tactile sensations of marking up the page made it easy to almost slip into a state of flow. And even though I wasn't doing anything with it other than solving some word puzzles and writing a few sentences in my Black n' Red notebook, the pencil itself almost seemed to disappear and just become an extension of my arm.

I think I can handle not having a built-in eraser for that.

This article was posted on 7 Oct 2026 and I haven't looked at it since.