The sign above the wrought iron gates clearly reads Faber-Castell, but in front of us looms a dark neo-gothic castle, complete with a turret and crenellated walls. Is this the pencil factory? Are we in the right place? As it turns out, the castle was once the home of Count Lothar Faber, the nineteenth century industrialist and marketing genius, who took his father's business and launched the A. W. Faber Pencil Manufacture. Crowded around his neo-gothic folly, other buildings sprawl, each a classic example of a different period of twentieth century industrial architecture. The conglomeration of designs bears witness to a century-long history of expansion. We are here in Nuremberg, Germany, on a blustery February afternoon, to learn how pencils are made.

Our guide is an energetic and articulate octogenarian, once the manager of the Faber-Castell slide-rule division, now retired. He is visibly proud of his more than fifty-year association with the company, and he proves to be a treasure trove of historical and technical information as he leads us on a comprehensive tour of the facilities.

We walk across a large courtyard, and stop in front of several tall, spindly, conifers. Compared to the sort we are used to seeing in coastal British Columbia, these are not impressive, huddling together on an island of dirt, in a sea of brick. Nonetheless, our guide respectfully reports that these trees are over a hundred years old. They stand as the last survivors of an attempt by Count Faber to grow his own California red cedar for the pencils that his factory was producing. It is apparent from the general reediness of their trunks, and the see-through quality of their greenery, that Bavaria and California do not share a common climactic zone, and we are not surprised to learn that this particular effort in increasing his self-sufficiency failed miserably. We pause a few seconds beside the long-suffering evergreens, before moving through blasts of sleety wind towards the building that now stands on the site of the unrealized forest.

We enter through a wooden door that our guide struggles to close against the weather. The staircase is bright with daylight and painted with different colours at every landing. When we reach the third storey, we pass through wide doors into a long room with wooden floors. The air is warm and dry, and smells deliciously of cedar. Natural light pours through windows running along both sides. Down the middle of the room, conveyor belts snake through a series of machines. Some of these look like illustrations from a nineteenth-century encyclopedia, while others are brightly coloured, and equipped with space-age arrays of electronic buttons. With pride, our guide explains that every year, these machines produce over a billion pencils.

He draws a slice of cedar planking from a box and places it on the first conveyor belt. With a dramatic flourish he presses a button and the machine shrieks into action. In a flash the plank is propelled into the teeth of a saw that splits it in two, and routs nine grooves down each half before spitting the two slices out the other end. A second machine coats the grooves with adhesive and lays a roll of graphite along each one. A third presses the two boards together in a cedar-graphite sandwich. The entire process is completed in seconds.

Over the noise of the motors, our guide barks information at us. The graphite is not pure; it is mixed with clay. The desired hardness of a pencil determines how little or how much of each ingredient is used. The "leads" are manufactured in a complex across the street from the pencil plant. Thanks to Lothar, who began the expansion of his father's pencil manufacture in the early nineteenth century with the purchase of a graphite mine in Siberia, Faber-Castell owns the mines that produce the graphite used in their production. We move to the next machines and watch as a rack of rotating blades slices through the board sandwiches, and sends ranks of nine cedar pencils jiggling down the conveyor belts towards boxes at the end of the room.

On our way to the painting area of the assembly line, we learn that Count Faber was among the first to use colour as a means of branding his pencils. In the mid-nineteenth century, he introduced the dark green that continues to identify Faber-Castell drawing pencils today. However, when we arrive in the next room, vats of candy colours are proof that they no longer rely exclusively on green paint.

The air is warm from the drying ovens in the banks of machines that stretch across the room. A continuous stream of pencils feeds each one. We watch the raw cedar rods jostle along trough-like belts and disappear into the sanders, before moving on to the painting vats where at least five coats of colour are applied. Some pencils then go on to have one end painted in a different colour, using dipping machines that are calibrated to ensure uniformity. At the end of each line, women discard any pencils that appear flawed. Bubbles of paint, uneven dip lines, streaks and scratches, any one of these is enough to warrant rejection. To our unskilled eyes, it is hard to see why many of them don't make the grade.

On our way to the final room where sharpening and packing take place, we pass a set of doors looking very much like an airlock. Although we are not allowed to enter, we peer through the windows at a large computerized machine spewing out silver-grey pencils with a pattern of raised dots on one end. Our guide explains that security is strict because the procedure is a trade secret. In 2000 Faber-Castell won a design award for this new pencil that comes with rubberized grip holds. As we watch employees in white lab coats boxing them, I marvel that industrial espionage can occur with something as basic as a wooden pencil.

The packing and crating is semi-automatic. Working in tandem with machines to sort and pack, women assemble the various Faber-Castell boxes and shuffle them along rollers and onto trolleys in case-lots. These are then wrapped, and loaded onto pallets for shipping.

And that is that. It all seems so simple. From kiln-dried red cedar to a shiny hexagonal rod, that draws a miraculous line.

Such is the legacy of Count Lothar Faber. He took a tiny family business and built it into an internationally recognized company. He put most of his energy, and much of his money into developing a marketing plan. Nuremberg had been the pencil capital of Europe since the seventeenth century. The fabrication of pencils employed many people in many different workshops, but it was essentially a cottage industry. There was no consistency of product. There was no quality control. Lothar made technological improvements in the fabrication of his pencils; he regulated and codified the hardness of the lead. But more importantly, he made them distinctive by making them hexagonal, painting them green, and branding them with his name.

Success was almost instantaneous. Medals and awards rolled in. Sales expanded to include America. Only a few years after Lothar began his great marketing scheme his factory employed over five hundred people and his product was recognized internationally.

Despite the major setbacks of two world wars and the great depression, Lothar's company, now Faber-Castell continues to create new products, patent new designs, and win awards of excellence at international trade shows. If one is to judge by an excerpt from a letter written by Vincent van Gogh, not too many years after Lothar began his great marketing scheme, there can be no doubt about the persuasive power of advertising, as long as the product it is promoting, lives up to its claims.

"I want to tell you something about a kind of Faber lead pencil that I have discovered?they are soft and of a better quality than the carpenter's pencils; they give a glorious black, and are very pleasant to work with for large studies. I drew a seamstress with it on gray papier sans fin, and got an effect like lithographic crayon. The lead is enclosed in soft wood painted dark green, and they cost 20 cents apiece."
- letter to Von Rappard, June 1883