Tombow 8900

The 8900 is a plain wooden pencil, hexagonal in section and painted a muted olive green, with the maker's name and the number 8900 stamped along one face in light lettering. It comes in six grades, from hard 2H to soft 2B, and is sold by the dozen in a yellow card box printed with a dragonfly, the Tombow emblem, and the old H.O.P. monogram.

The initials are those of Harunosuke Ogawa, who opened a pencil shop in Asakusa, Tokyo, in 1913. His firm adopted the dragonfly in 1927 and in the 1930s made fine drafting pencils numbered 8800 and 8000. In November 1945, three months after the war ended, it brought out the 8900 as a high-grade pencil for retouching photographs, priced at 30 sen.

The yellow box and green barrel were adopted in 1948, and Tombow says they have barely changed since; a collectors' exhibition in 2012 traced five versions of the box, differing only in the shape of the window cut into the lid, the colours and the lettering, with a barcode added in later years. Over the decades the pencil moved from the darkroom and the drawing office to the desk and the classroom, and in Japan it became the ordinary pencil of offices and schools, a familiar object rather than a specialist tool.

In 2011 the 8900 received a Good Design Long Life Design Award, given to designs that have stayed in use for many years. Tombow still lists it among its standard pencils, and in Japan a dozen costs 660 yen. It is also sold abroad, by British stationers among others, in the same yellow box. Inside is the instrument of 1945, launched for the patient work of correcting photographs: graphite in a wooden barrel, six faces and a number, in a box still marked with the initials of the man who started selling pencils in Asakusa in 1913.