School blackboard slate

You might look long for school slates like these made from 3.3 mm thick Italian slate. And the lines were not printed. They were etched in the traditional way, filled in with red enamel and polished.

The landscape where the sedimentary Devon rock extrudes into the earth’s surface forms strange mountainous terrain with wave-shaped plateaus and gentle heights rutted with craggy valleys and cliff-like walls. That’s how the Rhine and Thuringia slate mountains look. "Blue Gold" as it is called in the German building trades, is used as facade cladding or roofing material in a geometry typical for the area, the famous "old German roofing". Along with the clay shale for construction in Sauerland (Fredeburg), on the Mosel (Katzenberg), in Hunsrück and in Thuringia, the familiar school and pencil slate is still mined.

Where the foliated (schistose) rock from the Devonian comes to the earth's surface, it forms peculiar mountain landscapes with undulating plateaus and mild heights, which are furrowed by rugged valleys with cliff-like rising valley walls. In Germany, this is the case in the Rhenish and Thuringian Slate Mountains. There, the "blue gold" has become culture, namely building culture, as facade cladding or roofing in the typical local geometry or the famous "old German covering". In Germany, clay slate is still mined in the Sauerland (Fredeburg), on the Mosel (Katzenberg), in the Hunsrück and in Thuringia - for construction purposes, but also such, which is the subject here: in addition to roofing slate, there are also known as the table and stylus slate.