Pentel

Pentel Co., Ltd.
Private
Industry Stationery
Founded 1946 (1946)
as The Japan Stationery Co., Ltd.[1]
Headquarters Tokyo, Japan
Area served
 Worldwide [2]
Key people
 Yukio Horie, President [3]
Products Writing instruments
Website www.pentel.co.jp

Pentel Co., Ltd. (ぺんてる株式会社) is a privately held Japanese company which produces stationery products. The name is a combination of the English words pen and tell (as in, telling a story).[4] Pentel is also the inventor of non-permanent marker technology. Most Pentel products are manufactured in Japan, Taiwan and France. Yukio Horie, who was the President of the company until his death in 2010, invented the fibre or felt-tipped pen in the 1960s.[5]

Products

Pentel produces a wide range of products, mainly writing instruments such as pens and markers.[6]

Category Products
Writing instruments Rollerball pens, gel pens, ballpoint pens,
mechanical pencils, fountain pens,
Marker pens, highlighters, brush pens,
refills for all the writing instruments
Accessories Erasers, liquid adhesives, correction fluids,
correction tapes, glues
Artistic Oil pastels, crayons, watercolors

Artists

Pentel has recently launched the "Pentel Pocket Brush",[7][8] a "brush pen" that is refillable, using replaceable ink cartridges like fountain pens.

Brush pens (designed and recommended for calligraphy) have also gained popularity among comic book artists, who choose them to ink their works instead of dip pens or traditional brushes. One of those artists using Pentel is Neal Adams.[9]

Curiosities

Former Secret Intelligence Service officer Richard Tomlinson alleges that Pentel Rolling Writer rollerball pens were extensively used by agents to produce secret writing (invisible messages) while on missions.[10] An agent would write the secret message on a piece of paper, then place a blank piece of paper over the message, pressing the two pages together for a moment. When they are separated, the second page looks completely blank but in fact, contains a latent (invisible) copy of the message. The agent then destroys the first piece of paper. Simply rubbing the blank-looking second piece of paper with an ink pen reveals the latent message.

Notes and references

  1. ↑ "Pentel Corporate Report", Pentel Corporation, January 2014.
  2. ↑ Pentel international locations
  3. ↑ Pentel Japanese site corporate information
  4. ↑ 「ぺんてる」の社名の由来とは? Pentel Co., Ltd. history. Retrieved October 9, 2015.
  5. ↑ History of pen and writing instruments About Inventors site. Retrieved March 11, 2007.
  6. ↑ Pentel catalog as of 2011
  7. ↑ Pentel Pocket Brush features
  8. ↑ Pentel brush in Cult Pens website
  9. ↑ Larry Hama interview in Comic Book Resources June 3, 2009
  10. ↑ Tomlinson, Richard: The Big Breach: From Top Secret to Maximum Security, pg 44. Mainstream Publishing 2001 ISBN 1-903813-01-8
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