Pencils and Companies That Make Them

[raspberryred]

I am looking for information here. I would like to know the evolution of the following brands of pencils if anyone here knows. I am having trouble finding any real historical information about colored pencils. Here are the brands if you can help and send me somewhere else please do. Are they, or were they all artist grade colored pencils? Seems like somehow they were Venus or Eagle through some where on the way to Sanford Prismacolor 900 series we have now. I have some of all of these pencils and I would like to know which were begat by which company. Thanks in advance for your help.

Venus Spectracolor
Eagle Prismacolor
Faber Castell Spectracolor
Design Spectracolor
Berol Prismacolor
Berol Spectracolor

[Elankat]

For Prismacolor...

Eagle, then Berol, then Sanford

http://www.pencilpages.com/mfg/berol.htm

[gemmag]

I don't know if this will help but try this link:
The Pencil Pages

Gemma

[raspberryred]

Thanks for the PencilPages link Elenkat and Gemma. I have been there and asked Dick Blick for help. I can't seem to differentiate the Spectracolor name. It is more of a problem than Prismacolors. If you know of anything else I will be happy to hear about it.

[raspberryred]

For those of you interested here is some information I received from a person at Dick Blick who was very helpful:

Our notes state that Eagle existed in 1970 in our catalog.
In 1980, Berol became Prismacolor.
Design Spectracolor was in the following years of our catalog:
1992, 1994, 1996, and 1997 as the last year it was in the Blick catalog.
For information on Mars/Venus products, you may wish to contact
Staedtler Inc. at 1-800-776-5544.
For information on the Faber Castell products, you may wish to try contacting
them at 216-643-4660.
Regards,
Jim Noble
Product Information Team
info@dickblick.com

[lene]

Hi
My guess about Faber-Castell Spectracolor is; that the Faber-Castell Polychromos is the present version / new name of the artist cp from FC.
Or
like Prismacolors having a different name in Europe (Karisma) could the Spectracolor-name be the US version of Polychromos ?