I love crayons! I remember the excitement as a young girl when I would get a fresh new box - the one with the sharpener. The only problem - I never wanted to use them, because once you did, they were never the same again. Even if you sharpened them to a new point, they were no longer new and pristine. This is a box of crayons that I found in an antique shop years ago. The shop keeper didn't know what year they were actually made. The box says "No. 336 Crayola Drawing Crayon - Sixteen Colors". Then it says - Gold Medal and Made in U.S.A. Binney & Smith Inc., New York. I would love to know more about them. As soon as I saw them, I knew they HAD to come home with me. O.K., I just googled Binney & Smith and this is part of what I read: The first Crayola crayons were made in 16 colors; the eight-stick box sold for five cents and the 16-stick box sold for ten cents. Crayola Rubens crayons for art students and Perma Pressed fine-art crayons that could be sharpened were added to the product line. A new Crayola 48-stick box introduced in 1949 featured new colors, such as bittersweet, burnt sienna, periwinkle, and prussian blue. Nine years later, prussian blue was renamed midnight blue in response to teachers' observations that students were no longer familiar with Prussian history. (Note: The small p was an intentional grammatical error to keep the word consistent with the way all Crayola crayon names appeared on labels. Tests had shown that words written in lowercase letters were easiest for elementary school children to read.) By 1955 B&S had placed some 464 different items on the market.I can't remember what I paid for these at the antique shop, but it was much more than 10 cents - LOL!
