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Photo courtesy of Stephen Watts

This collection comes from Stephen Watts. Stephen writes:

Over the last five years I’ve bought and sold a number of individual Blackwings and boxes and have obtained versions of all the box types I’ve seen. My collection of the various Blackwing versions continues. I discount references to a definitive number of versions because it all depends on how you differentiate. In my accompanying photo, I have 18 of what I consider to be independent versions of the Blackwing 602. I’m counting, for example, misprinted Boston Athenaeum and different length “no ferrule” pencils as different types.

I do have the only metal-capped red tip Blackwing I’ve seen. Exactly why and how it came to be likely will remain a mystery.

My most interesting acquisition was two boxes of “Steven Spielberg Blackwings” purchased from a seller in the United Kingdom. He didn’t say anything about the story behind the boxes until I had already made the purchase. Only then, almost in passing, did he mention that Steven Spielberg had given him the pencils in 1991. I had to go back and forth over e-mail a couple of times to get the rest of the story. The seller had been an artist at Spielberg’s Amblimation studio in London. On one of his visits, Spielberg brought boxes of Blackwings and handed them out to the artists, telling them these pencils were the “crème de la crème.”

I remained skeptical until I did more research on my own and discovered the timing, place, and seller’s name all matched up. Steven Spielberg imported Blackwing 602s which he then personally handed out to his artists at Amblimation studio in London. Nearly thirty years later I’d acquired two of the boxes before I was aware of the backstory.

I only have one arrow-stamped ferrule and it’s on a sharpened pencil. I’m on the hunt for an unsharpened example and I know there are some out there with black arrow-stamped ferrules. I occasionally find them for sale but the prices have gone through the roof. The hunt continues . . .

Thanks to Stephen for sharing his collection with us.