A gripping tale of design (d)evolution

I’ve gotten a few from all 4 of those places and they’re all pretty reasonable but jiminy christmas it takes a long time for shipping.

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I ordered from the sale.72 guy and he also was pretty reasonable (he had no more ps235 to sell to me with my order though) his shipping was fast

Wow, now that’s an expression I’ve not heard in a very long time. “Jiminy Christmas!” :thinking::joy:

Yeah, the feedback rating on those sellers generally seems to be very good. Shipping can be pricey.. but if the item price is good, probably worth it. Good to know that while shipping is slow, you’ve had good transactions with them.

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Every single one
I bought a couple three star from this guy this morning.
He’s trying to sell everything as fast as possible.

Make offers, I bought 5 pencils, all of them over 50% off

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Hey, hey! Seller has the Herlitz that was in our latest NAME THAT PEN OR PENCIL episode!

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look at that! Still the answer eluded me.

“I would’ve got it too, if it weren’t for those meddling kids.”

Amazing coincidence! :thinking:

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Herlitz is such a wild card brand. Loads of uninspiring pieces. But also some surprisingly nice technical pieces (that I’ve only seen after they were sold). Someone out there probably has a really nifty collection of Herlitz curios!

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New datapoint: advertisement featuring the TK-fine 9705 in Progressive Architecture, June 1979. Looks like the concentric grooves version, not the lattice grid…

A year later in Feb and Apr of 1980, we see the full TK-fine line-up, including the TK-matic/L, TK-fine 9705, 9715, 9765:

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Great find!

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Did only the 9705 come with lattice?

As far as I know, yes.

Kind of amusing, the verbiage about saving money… suggesting that 2mm wastes lead and time. It’s… 1980? I mean, 0.3, 0.5, 0.7 and even 0.2 mm have been out for decades. Ad seems to be a bit late to the party. :smirking_face:

I was curious to know what TK stands for. Here’s what I found:

In the context of Faber-Castell products, “TK” stands for “Techniker” and “Künstler” , which are German words meaning “technician” and “artist” respectively.

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It may also be worth noting that in German the names of the letters T and K are pronounced “tay” and “kah”, hence the name of Faber-Castell’s Tekagraph (=TK graph)

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There was a LOT of such sales talk about efficiency and cost savings for technical drawing tools throughout the print run of Progressive Architecture. I’m thinking it was meant to appeal to reason, to give buyers in drafting studios more ammunition to justify a bulk purchase to the bean counters. How else to counter the rising menace of CAD ‘perfection’?

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‘Write on your letterhead for full details’

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