Back in March, I had received the silver pencil above from CultPens in the UK. At that time, I knew there was a gold version, but I could not find where I could order one from, so I went ahead and posted about that pencil. I have deleted that post and am replacing it with this one, that now has the P205-1X Gold.
As I said above, I received this pencil from Cultpens. On the site it was marked as being a 50th Anniversary of Pentel UK pencil, but I have not been able to find when Pentel UK opened.
I have also seen this type of text on pencils before. Before the recent trend to going back to the big number 5 on the cap, the Pentel Kerry, for several years, said “Since 1971”. So, seeing this does not surprise me.
But, upon receiving these in and entering them in my database, I see that these do not appear to be registered out of Europe, but actually, out of the United States (it has a standard 12-digit UPC barcode). In my original post about barcodes https://nimrodd.net/2018/01/01/barcodes/, at that time, this company prefix was not registered to Pentel, but it is now registered to Pentel in Japan. I am not sure why this pencil has that barcode, and we have not seen it here in the US yet, but I am going to try to see if I can find out any information from Pentel of America at some point.
P205-1Z Silver
This appears to be the same color as the currently available P205MZX (https://nimrodd.net/2017/06/19/p205-metallics/), but instead of the standard text “0.5mm Pentel P205”, it now reads “Pentel P205 since 1970”.
Barcode: 884851054876
P205-1X Gold
This pencil is the same color as the 2015 Gold pencil released for the 50th Anniversary of Pentel of America (see same post as above). That one did not say anything special referring to the Anniversary, just came in a special package.
Barcode: 884851054869
Pentel XP205 Since 1970 Retail Packages
When I first saw an official advertisement for these pencils, it was on Pentel Taiwan’s website, announcing these on 5/25/2021.
At the bottom, I saw a couple of barcodes that I expected to find on these pencils, but as I said above they came with US barcodes. Once I received the above retail packages, I realized that the barcodes were for these packages. I should have been clued in by the “X” in front of the part numbers (XP205-1X & XP205-1Z), as the Asian packaging has used this format before on the P209 Kirari pencils.
Barcodes:
XP205-1X 4711577064437
XP205-1Z 4711577064444
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