Royal Sovereign Chinagraph pencil

In the movie Goldfinger (1964), James Bond and Auric Goldfinger use Royal Sovereign Chinagraph pencils.

When James Bond (Sean Connery) overhears the details of the Grand Slam operation, he writes a note to the CIA with a black (or very dark blue) Royal Sovereign Chinagraph pencil. Bond finds the pencil in Goldfinger's Kentucky mansion, so the pencil is actually owned by Goldfinger.

A "Chinagraph" pencil is the British term for a grease pencil, a wax writing tool also known as a wax pencil. The pencil is made of hardened colored wax and is useful for marking on hard, glossy non-porous surfaces such as porcelain, glass, polished stone, plastic, ceramics and other glazed, lacquered or polished surfaces, as well as the glossy paper that is used for photographic printing (particularly for contact sheets), x-rays, and for marking edits on analog audio tape and film. It is often used as a construction or handyman's marking tool as it rarely scratches the surface it is used on. This might explain why Bond finds the pen in the atelier he is hiding to overhear the meeting of Goldfinger and his investors.

The pen used by Bond reads ROYAL SOVEREIGN "CHINAGRAPH" (Chinagraph in quotation marks and written in capitals). It might the No.480 model, but unfortunately this can't be seen in the film.

The yellow pencil with eraser that Auric Goldfinger (Gert Fröbe) uses to note the score during the card game at the Fontainebleau Hotel, is also a Royal Sovereign Chinagraph pencil, with the same text ROYAL SOVEREIGN "CHINAGRAPH". The pen has a gold colored metal top part with red eraser and seems to be a normal grey pencil, instead of a grease pencil. Goldfinger plays the card game with Aristocrat 727 cards.

About Royal Sovereign Pencil Co.
The Royal Sovereign Pencil Co was founded in 1919 after a merger of the companies B.S. Cohen and E. Wolff and Sons. Royal Sovereign Pencil Co was renamed to Royal Sovereign Group Ltd in 1974, just before the factories where taken over by Staedtler. The rights to the name Royal Sovereign were actually not taken over by Staedtler and currently a family owned business, West Design Products, sells Indonesian-made pencils under the Royal Sovereign name.