Celebrating 265 Years of Faber-Castell

Two hundred and sixty-five years. That's how long Faber-Castell has been making pencils — and this month we're marking the occasion in store with balloons, a proper celebration, and savings of up to 40% across the range.

It's a number worth sitting with. When Kaspar Faber opened his little workshop, the American Revolution hadn't happened yet. Mozart was five. And a cabinet-maker outside Nuremberg was quietly working out how to glue graphite into wood well enough that it wouldn't crumble in your hand. Nearly three centuries on, the company he started is still owned by his family and still setting the standard the rest of the industry measures itself against. So allow me to pour a coffee and tell you a little of how we got here — because it's one of the great stories in art materials.

A carpenter, a workshop, and 1761

Faber-Castell began in the village of Stein, just outside Nuremberg, in 1761. Its founder, Kaspar Faber, was a trained carpenter who made pencils on the side until the sideline outgrew the day job. Nuremberg was already the heart of European pencil-making, but Kaspar's insistence on planing and gluing each pencil by hand — properly, so the lead stayed put — is what set the young business apart. It's the oldest pencil manufacturer in the world still in operation, and it has stayed in the same family for eight generations. Very few businesses of any kind can say that.

The man who invented the pencil as we know it

If one figure deserves the credit for the Faber-Castell you recognise today, it's Lothar von Faber — Kaspar's great-grandson, who took the reins in 1839. Before Lothar, most pencils were sold anonymously, at whatever length and quality the trader fancied. Lothar changed all of that. He set fixed standards for a pencil's length, thickness and lead hardness that are still in use across the industry today, and he was the first to stamp his name into the barrel in gold — creating, in effect, the world's first branded writing instrument.

He also gave us the shape. That familiar hexagonal barrel? Lothar's idea. There's a lovely, entirely practical reason for it: round pencils kept rolling off the desk. His work made him a very wealthy man and earned him a title — Baron Lothar von Faber — from the King of Bavaria.

Where the "Castell" comes from

The double-barrelled name arrived in 1898, when Lothar's granddaughter and heiress, Ottilie — "Tilly" — married Count Alexander zu Castell-Rüdenhausen. Lothar had stipulated in his will that the Faber name must live on, so the two were joined and Faber-Castell was born.

Count Alexander brought two things you'll still spot on the shelf today. First, the colour: in 1905 he had a new top-tier pencil range painted in the deep green of his old military regiment — the very green that runs across our celebration display. Second, the emblem. He commissioned a painting of two knights jousting with pencils instead of lances, a cheeky nod to the brand seeing off its rivals. Those jousting knights are still on the logo more than a century later.

1908: the birth of Polychromos

Here's the fact closest to the pencils on our anniversary poster. In 1908, Faber-Castell released a range of artists' colour pencils called Polychromos — Greek for "many colours." More than a hundred years on, they remain the professional's colour pencil of choice: oil-based, break-resistant, and gloriously lightfast, so the work you make with them today will still look right decades from now. If you've been curious about them, an anniversary is as good a nudge as any.

A few things worth knowing

• Faber-Castell makes around 2.3 billion pencils a year. Laid end to end, that's enough to circle the equator roughly ten times.
• The company grows much of its own timber — some 8,200 hectares of managed forest in Prata, Brazil, replanted with around 300,000 seedlings every year. That woodland is now home to more than 700 animal species.
• Every Faber-Castell pencil is made from wood certified as responsibly sourced, and the brand was a pioneer of environment-friendly water-based paints for coating them.

That mix — old-world craft and genuinely modern conscience — is exactly why we've stocked Faber-Castell for as long as we have. Whether it's a child's first set of colouring pencils or a professional's Polychromos tin, you're buying into 265 years of getting it right.

Pop into bradburyART on Callender Street this week — the balloons are up, and we'd love to see you.