Colfax pencil collector seeking Guinness World Record traces passion back to elementary school

Editor’s note: Newton News did not receive an updated count by press time Sunday, July 2.

Aaron Bartholmey has too many pencils to count, but last weekend he had no choice. If he wanted to break the Guinness World Record for largest pencil collection, the 36-year-old had to hold a public event where a full count of his roughly 70,000 wooden advertising pencils had to take place.

That is one of the requirements, he said to Newton News in a sit-down interview one week before the count. And since officials from Guinness World Records would not be attending the event in Colfax, another requirement is to have each pencil be different. Counters would be hard-pressed to find any duplicates.

If Bartholmey’s math is correct, his collection is nearly triple the size of current record holder Emilio Arenas from Montevideo, Uruguay, whose pencil collection was last counted at 24,026 in 2020. According to Guinness World Records, Arenas had been collecting pencils for more than 60 years.

Bartholmey’s pencils were on full display July 1 at the Colfax Historical Society Museum & Community Center. It was a surreal experience for him to see his collection exhibited in this way, and not at all similar to what may be the first time he shared his pencils, which was in a display case at his middle school library.

“I maybe had 10,000 at that time,” he said. “I really don’t know for sure … This is just so much bigger than it was back then. I’m just thrilled to have everything out in one place and have a chance for people to come and look at it and see what I have. I don’t get a lot of chances to really show it off like this.”

Two individuals from the American Pencil Collector’s Society — president Andrew Westberg and vice president Jeff Hoffman — were stationed at two separate counting tables in the community center, all the while a video camera recorded their every move to ensure the count was authentic. They needed to sort through 490 boxes.

By around 9:30 a.m., the counters had gone through about 18 boxes. This would take some time. Bartholmey was nervous. Not only was the count going slower than he thought it would, the two officers had differing counts. But not by much. The stress would lift ever so slightly the more community members showed up.

“I love bringing the community together and bringing in all of these people from all these different slices of my life together,” Bartholmey said. “I love having an event like this and just having something like this for Colfax and get a positive word out there for us.”

Pencil collecting started as early as first grade. Bartholmey remembered his teacher gave him and his students three or four Christmas-designed pencils for the holiday season. From there, Bartholmey’s collection would steadily grow over the next three decades, though it really started to pick up after college.

Bartholmey graduated with a teaching degree from Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa, about 107 miles from his hometown in Albert Lea, Minn. After working two years at a school district in the southwest corner of Iowa, he made his way to Colfax to teach middle school math for the next 10 years.

For the past year-and-a-half, Bartholmey has been working for the Iowa Department of Transportation at the driver’s license station in Ankeny. Off the clock, Bartholmey looks for any chance to add to his collection, which he painstakingly organized during the pandemic.

Tens of thousands of advertising pencils are neatly tucked away in containers. Many are labeled and sorted alphabetically by the states the pencils came from. When it comes to Iowa and Minnesota pencils, they are divided even further by the cities they came from. This is the result of years of dedicated collecting.

Upon his graduation from Wartburg, Bartholmey found more free time to expand his collection by going to flea markets and traveling the state. Searching through flea markets and thrift stores was a hobby he was well accustomed to, in part because it was something he and his grandfather would regularly do.

“It was a magical time,” he said. “I’ve always loved old stuff, especially once I had something to collect. All the older dealers enjoyed seeing a kid run around, and they wanted to teach you everything they could. It was at one of those flea markets early on that somebody told me about a pencil collector’s club.”

It would be several years later before Bartholmey joined the American Pencil Collectors Society, some of whom were present during the count at the Colfax museum. The nonprofit hobby group of about 130 members traces its roots back to the 1950s. Bartholmey now serves as the group’s secretary and treasurer.

“We have members from all across the country and a few international members. Every other year we have a convention. We have a newsletter that comes out every other month,” he said. “Everybody’s got their own niche. Some do the bullet pencils or the mechanical pencils. You just kind of find your own little area.”

Bill Bean, of Rochester, Minn., is a longtime member of the American Pencil Collectors Society, and he has even served as board president at one point. At the count in Colfax, he would unbundle all of the pencils in their boxes before presenting them to the two counters.

“This is a very good collection,” Bean said while unfastening the paper strips holding the pencils together. “I think it’s even bigger than mine. Of course I’ve never counted mine, which I think is around 45,000. I was surprised to learn the record was 24,000. I could have beat that. But I don’t want to go to all this work.”

As far as Bean knows, Bartholmey is but a handful of the younger collectors in the group. Pencil collecting may be more of an older generation’s game, but Bean again emphasized that Bartholmey’s collection far exceeds his own. As different as their collections may be, they both enjoy “the hunt” the most.

Bartholmey loves the camaraderie and life-long connections by being a part of the American Pencil Collectors Society. Conventions, he said, feel like family reunions. For many members of the group, the Colfax count was the first time they had ever seen Bartholmey’s collection in full. He was thrilled to see their reactions.

“It’s fun to see the other big collectors who have their own massive collections dig through the stuff and go, ‘Oh this is cool!’ or ‘I don’t have one of these!’”

His collection has never been a secret, and it was never meant to be either. As a seventh- and eighth-grade math teacher at Colfax-Mingo Community School District, he frequently shared his collection with students. The novelty pencils in his collection were clear favorites.

“It was something they were all well-aware of,” he said. “I’d bring them in and show them off. They all knew that I was the pencil collector.”

Bartholmey’s wife, Allison, knew of the pencil collection almost immediately. They have been married for four years, but they first met in college around 2008. His wife was originally from Oskaloosa, and around that same time the city was hosting a pencil convention. Bartholmey recalled meeting her for dinner.

“She knew what she was getting into,” he said with a laugh. “She is very patient and puts up with it well.”

Between summers off as a teacher and the connections he made with fellow collectors, Bartholmey always found time to find more pencils. After collecting for so long, he knows the best places to look. It’s not the fancy-schmancy, high-end places, he said, it’s the junky flea markets with boxes under the tables.

The kind of flea market where someone might find, for example, a vintage Vendex Pencil Vending Machine, or the Vendex-brand pencils produced by the same machine. Through a collector, Bartholmey purchased the 1920s antique to add to his pencil collection, which led to a small TV appearance.

The machine — which actually printed names on pencils for a nickel — wasspotlighted in Antiques Roadshow in 2020. Footage from the episode shows appraiser James Supp particularly excited to talk about it. Bartholmey mentions his pencil collection right off the bat.

“How many do you have now?” Supp asked him.

“I have about 60,000.”

Supp probes Bartholmey a little more, asking him where he thinks he ranks in the echelons of pencil collecting. He modestly replies he is somewhere in the middle, suggesting there are others with far more pencils than him. But for Bartholmey, it was never about making collecting a contest. It was about preserving history.

“Especially local history,” he said. “It’s interesting to learn about life back then and see what was around and what companies were in town. A lot of it has been about meeting the people and some of the experiences I’ve had. I made a lot of good friends through the society, and it’s fun to have that thing about you.”

Up until he left the school district, he was “the pencil collecting teacher.” For many students, he still is. Which is partly why he’s proud of that title.

To this day, Bartholmey is not exactly sure what initially drew him to collect pencils. He just remembers the urge to collect. Like when he visited Walmart and saw the bins of vibrantly designed Pentech pencils. For him, it was cool to collect all of the different designs. Later on he found his own niche: advertising pencils.

Those handheld billboards that have since become a relic of the past. These days, if a company wants to put its name or slogan on a writing utensil, it is likely the pen that makes the cut. For Bartholmey, it was a love of history that sharpened his fascination with advertising pencils.

“It’s pretty incredible what you can learn from these little sticks of wood,” he said. “There’s a lot of local history seeing all of the businesses that were around back in the day, especially around World War II. The metal rationing and all of the patriotism. It was the heyday of pencils.”

Many of the Iowa advertising pencils he finds are focused mainly on agriculture, banks and insurance companies. Others in Bartholmey’s collection promote a long-gone business or were clearly featured as samples for pencil salespersons. The logic behind putting advertisements on pencils was sound.

“You give them a business card they can chuck it in the garbage. But if you give someone a pencil, they’re going to use it. It’s something that kept your name out there,” he said. “This is something that nobody’s going to throw away.”

And Bartholmey has the collection to prove it.