After the Eberhard Faber Company closed its doors for good, I wondered what might have happened to the factory itself. The company relocated in 1956 from Brooklyn to a place called Mountain Top in Pennsylvania:
Photo: Luzerne County Historical Society
In 1986, two years before Eberhard Faber was sold to Faber-Castell, some of its departments moved to Nogales, Mexico. This helps to explain why the “U.S.A.” was missing from, for example, certain Blackwing pencils:
But this also allows for the most precise dating for certain Blackwings so far: to within two years. It’s reasonable to say then that if you have a Blackwing or other Eberhard Faber pencil that is missing “U.S.A.”, and/or has “assembled in Mexico” on the packaging, then it was likely made between 1986 and 1988.
At the time of the sale, Faber-Castell’s facilities were based in Lewisburg, Tennessee, but I don’t know if the Mountain Top facility might have been used at least a little while after the sale. The building had been owned by a company called Poseidon Pools up until 1998, but in 2010 it was demolished.
Who knows, perhaps back in the mid-1980s the Eberhard Faber Company could have been saved, or at least helped by, a benefit concert of some sort. They could have asked Bob Geldof to put it together; it looks like there was plenty of room to set up a backline in the parking lot. And they could have called it, oh I don’t know, Pencilaid or something.
The last para kind of reminds me of joni mitchell’s “big, yellow taxi”
“Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got
Till it’s gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot”
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That’s what I was quoting in the title…
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Yes, i’m red faced..
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Not at all; I’m glad that someone picked up on it. 🙂
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eerily, the first song I heard while out sketching today, was – you guessed it…”big yellow taxi”.
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