Is 70,000 Enough For The World Record For This Iowa Man?

Could Iowa be adding another world record holder to the list? Most people from Iowa are pretty familiar with the World's Largest Truck Stop, located in Walcott. Iowa is home to one of the world's largest frying pans, located in Brandon. In Dubuque, you could check out the world's steepest railway. There are actually a lot of interesting world records located in Iowa.

One man out of central Iowa is hoping to add another world record to the Hawkeye State as he has 70,000 utensils that are used in schools and offices every day. I was always a fan of mechanical pencils when I was in school so I didn't use a ton of these but he has been collecting this kind of pencil since he was a kid. This man has a collection of about 70,000 wooden advertising pencils.

In 2021-2022, there were around 485,630 students who attended public schools in the state of Iowa, according to Educate Iowa. After some quick math, this man could give 1 pencil to a little over 14% of Iowa's student population.

Aaron Bartholmey, from Colfax, believes he can blow the current Guinness World Record for the largest pencil collection out of the water and to be fair, it's not even close.

According to KCCI, the current Guinness World Record for the largest pencil collection is around 24,000 pencils. Aaron should beat that current record by about 46,000 pencils.

According to KCCI, Aaron has just about every kind of wooden pencil you could imagine and maybe ones you didn't even know existed. His favorites are ones he's kept from his hometown local businesses.

He told KCCI

I love seeing local businesses, you know, for so many of these places, these pencils are the only place where there is any record of that business still, and I think it's just a neat way to preserve the history.

This past weekend (July-1,2), Aaron put his collection to the test and had every single one of his pencils counted by two members of the American Pencil Collectors Society. All Aaron has to do now is wait to see if the record count is approved by Guinness World Records. It will take about 3 months for Guinness to respond. If approved, Aaron will surely hold the record which will now be up to at least 70,000 pencils