Wear it Well

This is one that I’ve had for a while, and I’ve been waiting for the day that I could write about it and say something better than "I don’t know."

The day has come, and yet as I started writing this, I went right back to "I don’t know" – as in I didn’t know where I’d put the darn thing, leading Truman the Cat and I to spend half an hour scouring the museum for this one! Fortunately, my recollection of what it looked like and roughly (very roughly) were I had seen it last eventually turned it up in the stuff-not-yet-photographed zone:

This fairly typical metal pencil, apparently from the early 1920s, has "Bonnwear" imprinted on it. I hadn’t seen the name before, and after a bit of poking around with nothing to show for it, the pencil quietly slipped into my dead letter office years ago. Until the other day, about the closest thing I’d ever found to that name was the "Bon-Ton," but I knew that probably wasn’t right. And it wasn’t.

Then I stumbled across that 1922-early 1923 volume of issues from The Jewelers’ Circular, the same bunch that unraveled J.C. Wood & Sons for me recently. No focused search took me down this road, and I was just electronically thumbing through old issues when I ran across this advertisement in the November 22, 1922 issue . . .

To learn more, this full article is included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 3, available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and everywhere else you buy books, or you can order a copy signed by yours truly through the Legendary Lead Company HERE.