OK, I know, I know. It's a pencil, not a pen. Don't ask me, that's what it says on the box, Montblanc Sketch Pen. Maybe it's a German thing.

But boy, what a pencil this is!

The Sketch Pen from Montblanc is a short, fat handful of a pencil. From the name I'm assuming that it's designed for drawing. Or sketching if you prefer. I'm not what you'd call an award winning artist, but I like to draw, and I found this Montblanc pencil to be just about perfect.

First of all, I like big pens. The bigger the better, and I have yet to run across anything too large. The Visconti Titanic is about where I get started. The Namiki Emperor? Just right!

So you can imagine my feelings towards the ordinary number two pencil...

The Sketch Pen (or pencil) manages to answer that concern quite nicely. At just five inches long, it's a full three quarters of an inch across at the widest point. Very chunky. Of course, it tapers down towards the tip, so you can choose where to grip it for comfort. If you prefer something a bit less intrusive in the hand, just hold it lower down on the barrel.

The weight is fairly substantial, it's no lightweight. But not as heavy as an all metal pen, either. A bit weightier than my 149, actually. It feels pretty good in my hand, the weight is towards the top of the pen, and as short as it is overall, it balances pretty well.

There's a flat section on the barrel, I'm assuming that this is to allow for the engraving of a name or initials, but it also serves admirably to keep the thing from rolling off the table. For all I know, that could have been the desired purpose, I suppose!

Pressing on the button on the top of the barrel extends the lead from the tip. If you wish to retract the lead into the barrel, you just hold the button down and press the tip down on the paper, and the lead slides back up into the barrel.

The lead is very wide, a full 5.5 mm. A tenth of a millimeter less than the bullet from an M-16. No reason for that, just thought I'd throw it in to see if you were paying attention! I'm quite sure that Montblanc had no intention of standardizing their lead sizes to the current standard of NATO ammunition.

I quickly fell in love with the large sized lead on this pencil. SO much easier than messing around with those tiny little .7mm leads that break as soon as you look at them! The lead loads from the front, holding the button down allows the new lead to be slid into the tip of the pencil. Easy enough.

That wide lead does make for a lot of fun once you get busy sketching away. The lead supplied with the Sketch Pen is a fairly soft lead, and one that works very well on paper. I guess that if you're a "real" artist, you might want more of a selection in lead hardness, but for all of us humble amateurs, it's pretty good right out of the box.

When the lead gets worn down from all your fevered sketching, simply unscrew the top end of the barrel, and it serves as a sharpener. A neat touch that I like a lot.

The barrel is black, and yes, according to the brochure, it is made of precious resin: "This material is characterized by scratch-resistance, surface sheen and enduring beauty similar to that of bone china. Please treat it with appropriate care. Under extreme conditions it could shatter. Protect it from being dropped."

Well, there you go. Nothing could be fairer than that. It's like bone china, whatever that might be, so don't drop it. Simple enough, I try pretty hard not to drop any of my pens! All kidding aside, this seems to be a very sturdy pencil. The material is fairly thick through the barrel walls, and I really wouldn't worry about fragility.

There is no clip on the Montblanc Sketch Pen, but it does come with a very nicely made leather carrying case, and of course, the compact overall dimensions allow for it to fit into pretty much any pocket. I didn't find the lack of a clip to be any kind of real drawback, really, but for me this was a pencil that would live in a briefcase, not a pocket.

I hadn't really thought about needing a pencil like this until after having gotten my hands on one. But now that I have, I think I can say it's going to be a part of my collection. Not just my collection, I should say, but rather part of that smaller subset of the collection that get used daily. With any luck, and maybe enough practice, I might even began to draw well!