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 Perhaps you can
assist. I'm trying to find out when pencils began being graded as
"H" for "Hard" and "B" for
"Black". It's certainly far earlier than I would have thought,
as the following quote attests. The author is Robert Hay, one of those
Englishmen of means who became artist-travellers dedicated to recording
information about ancient Egyptian monuments. It is 1824 and Hay is
working at the Great Temple of Rameses II at Abu Simbel:
The
paper becomes quite damp with the atmosphere and a very curious thing I
have remarked is that an HH pencil which is in this climate as soft as
an HB in a cold climate becomes so hard that it even scratches the paper
. . . on quitting the temple is soft again.
Did you notice
the "HH" (as opposed to "2H")? It could be that
there were two stages in this labelling of pencils: originally they may
have been marked "BBB", for example, then at some later date
this got abbreviated to "3B", etc. I suspect, too, that this
method may be confined to the UK and its old dominions, because there
seems to be a different grading system in the United States, which goes
"1, 2, 3 . . .", though this may be just for school pencils.
Anyway, the whole
question is intriguing, and any light that readers can shine on it will
be most welcome. Are there one or two calligraphers out there able to
help?
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