Faber-Castell AG is one of the world’s largest and oldest manufacturers of pens, pencils, other office supplies (e.g., staplers, slide rules, erasers, and rulers), and art supplies, as well as high-end writing instruments and luxury leather goods.

Headquartered in Stein, Germany, Faber-Castell employs a staff of approximately 8,000 and does business in more than 120 countries. The House of Faber-Castell is the family which founded and continues to exercise leadership within the corporation. They manufacture about 2 billion pencils in more than 120 different colors every year. Today, the company operates 10 factories and 22 sales units, with six in Europe, four in Asia, three in North America, five in South America, and one each in Australia and New Zealand.

Faber-Castell was founded in 1761 at Stein near Nuremberg by cabinet maker Kaspar Faber (1730–84) as the A.W. Faber Company and has remained in the Faber family for eight generations. It opened branches in New York (1849), London (1851), and Paris (1855), and expanded to Vienna (1872) and St. Petersburg (1874). It expanded internationally and launched new products under Kaspar Faber’s ambitious great-grandson, Johann Lothar Freiherr von Faber (1817–96).

Beginning in the 1850s Faber started to use graphite from Siberia and cedar wood from Florida to produce its pencils.

Faber-Castell is well known for its brand of PITT Artist pens. The pens, used by comic and manga artists such as Adam Hughes, emit an Indian ink that is both acid-free and archival and comes in a variety of colors.

According to Wikipedia