When he started collecting pencils at a young age, Aaron Bartholmey says setting a record wasn’t the point. Pencils were something he could look for when his grandpa would take him shopping at flea markets and antique stores.
“A lot of flea markets vendors would have, you know, a cigar box of pencils there on the table, and usually something cheap and small that I can pick up while grandpa was looking at everything else. And so, it was something for me to do and kind of make that connection with him,” said Bartholmey, 37, who lives in Colfax.
But over three decades, the pencils piled up. Today, they fill the drawers of a card catalog from an old factory in town, along with some additional cigar boxes and other containers.
That’s what it takes to store a record-setting collection of 69,255 unique pencils, all unused.
The entire collection was counted over two days back in July. Guinness required the count to be held as a public event. Bartholmey recruited board members from the American Pencil Collectors Society to do the counting.
“It was quite the ordeal,” he said. “We did not finish in a day. We started at 8 a.m., and by that night we still weren't done so we had to come back the next day and do a few more hours to finish.”
Most of the pencils in the collection are antique advertising pencils that Bartholmey keeps organized alphabetically by the city and state of the company they represent. There are also pencils from political campaigns and town festivals.
“I've got a lot that are from World War II era that I find really interesting. Anything with a date on it really catches my eyes, so whether that's an old town celebration or company anniversary or I've got ones with old sports schedules on it from the 40s and 50s,” he said. “I've got several from different presidential elections going back at least to the 1920s. Those are pretty unique. I've got one from the U.S. Sesquicentennial in 1926.”
Bartholmey says he’ll keep looking for rare and unique pencils to add to the collection.
“I really never imagined that I would get to this point," he said. "And just to have, you know, the most of something in the whole world is just crazy. And it's really cool.”
