Wolff's Royal Sovereign pencil samples in a tin

Palimpsest had another moment of "Look what I found on @ebay!" This time is a Wolff's Royal Sovereign tin box full of different Royal Sovereign pencils - everything from the weird to the wonderful is here. I cannot possibly date these pencils but all come from an era when Britain insisted on being called Great and was proud of making things: most of the pencils are marked "Made in Gt. Britain".

Beautiful dark markings are produced by the BBB Wolff's carbon drawing pencil; the Royal Sovereign "Chinagraph" impresses with its very weird tip and produces great shading; the "Crayonette" is a blue hexagonal crayon marked "Royal Sovereign No. 02 and "Tough" inscribed within a decorative frame. The yellow round-barrelled "Pendant" pencil is a smooth writer which you can hang from a chain around your neck. The "Black Prince", a round monster pencil of a whopping 9mm diameter, is true to its name and writes very dark. And then there is a pencil for the gardener in you: the Garden pencil to be used presumably for plant label marking. There's a tiny red "Royal Sovereign" which feels like an HB grade; a "Washpruf" for marking linen and a "Tailor's pencil" because at that time not only Britain was Great but it also had lots of tailors who needed their special pencils to mark hems. 

A little piece of pencil archaeology in a tin.