From the Knockology archives
This post revisits conversations from our smaller community before we moved to this forum. I’ve brought the discoveries and memorable moments together, with credit to the members who contributed. These discussions reflect what we knew at the time. Please add any newer information, corrections, or photos below!
There is a dangerous sentence in mechanical pencil collecting:
“I think that’s all of them.”
It is usually followed by a photograph from somebody…
Our early conversations were full of small discoveries, but some of the most familiar moments weren’t about a complicated mechanism or a missing catalog. They were about the unsettling possibility that the neat little family you’d been assembling had relatives you hadn’t met.
@dry captured the experience beautifully:
“Every time I get another one of these I find out there’s more I don’t have.”
A case full of pencils…and a map of the gaps
This photograph is a useful answer to anyone who thinks collecting is simply acquiring more things. By the time Dry shared it, the collection had become a research problem as well as a display. He was mapping what he had, what he knew he lacked, and what might still be out there.
The colored marks made the missing pieces visible. That’s a strange power of a developed collection: it teaches you to see the empty spaces with increasing precision.
A newcomer might see an impressive case. The owner sees the one variation that would make a row feel right.
Goals without a compulsory finish line
In the discussion that followed, @knocktype11 made a distinction worth keeping:
“Collecting is the end, not a collection.”
Dry explained that he liked having goals…smaller sets or groups to work toward. The reply wasn’t that goals were bad. Quite the opposite:
“Goals are great! Without goals you just wander around. Just don’t forget that the wandering is also fun.”
— Knocktype11
I like that exchange because it leaves room for different kinds of satisfaction. Completing a particular color run can be a real pleasure. So can finding something that changes your idea of what belongs in the run. The second experience may be inconvenient for your spreadsheet, but it is often where the interesting history starts.
Not everyone was collecting the same kind of “complete”
@drifand described a different approach elsewhere in the collections discussion. He was often interested in representative examples rather than owning every variation. The choice of which example to keep could come down to the design details he preferred.
That wasn’t a lesser version of the same project. It was a different project.
One person wanted the whole range. Another wanted a strong example of each design. Someone else was interested in generations, changes in construction, or a particular grip. Put those people in the same conversation and each could notice something the others had passed over.
The breadth of a community makes these differences useful. The collector who doesn’t need another color may still spot it in a listing and know exactly who does.
Even tiny pencils can create large problems
A later conversation about the little Q605 family had me thinking about colors I did or didn’t own. Then the possibility of a yellow one entered the discussion, and the familiar uncertainty returned.
That’s the amusing part of the “completion” problem. The object doesn’t have to be grand. A small plastic pencil can upset a carefully arranged mental inventory just as effectively as an expensive vintage mechanism.
It is also why claims like “all colors” deserve some care. Does that mean all the colors in a particular catalog, all the colors a collector has documented, or every version ever made? Those are very different achievements. Our conversations often began with the first or second and discovered how difficult the third would be to prove.
A support group with questionable restraint
What I remember most fondly is the mixture of genuine help and cheerful enabling. People compared collections, spotted gaps, shared leads, and celebrated additions. They also had a remarkable talent for making a previously content collector aware of something else to look for.
The aim was never that everybody should collect like everybody else. A focused drawer, an unruly set of cases, a handful of favorites, and a nearly complete family all gave us something to talk about.
Knock on!