A First Round of Sheaffer Balance Updates

I’ve often joked that A Field Guide to Sheaffer’s Pencils is a book about the Sheaffer Balance, flanked on either side by the little bit that came before it and the little bit that came after. I’m only exaggerating a little bit: Chapter Three, concerning the Balance, is a quarter of the entire book.

Of course I’ve got several updates to offer about the Balance, and by no means will they fit comfortably in just one post. We’ll get a good start today.

This first one came my way just as I was closing out the book, and there wasn’t time or space to include it:

The Sheaffer Balance is a series that requires thought on several levels at the same time whenever you find one. At first, nothing looks out of the ordinary about this one, because all of its elements are so familiar. What is unusual here, though, is how they come together on this example. The pencil is a Tuckaway and is probably from around 1942, after the earlier metal Tuckaways were redesigned to match Sheaffer’s new Triumph line. Similar pencils are shown on page 88 in the book . . . almost . . . 

At top is one of the 1942 Tuckaways shown on page 88. When production returned to normal after the War, the Tuckaway’s lower section was made longer, the bands were narrower and a stubby clip was added (the one shown is a Valiant Tuckaway from 1945 or 1946, as shown on page 152).

What’s wrong in that picture is the over-the-top military clip. You might think there’s a simple explanation for that: obviously, you might think, someone replaced a clipless Tuckaway cap with one from a full-length Balance model of the same era.

You thought wrong.

Full length Balance pencils with those military-style clips had narrow bands - occasionally you’ll find one with an uncataloged “jeweler’s band,” but those measure at widest a quarter inch or so - I haven’t seen an over-the-top jewelers’ band pencil in carmine red, and I’ve never seen that clip on a pen or pencil with the extra-wide, wartime Triumph band. Triumph models had regular “radius” clips. Even if this cap was swapped over from something else, I have no idea what that something else would have been.

Speaking of Tuckaways, a minor note to add with respect to page 152, Figure 6-26 in the Field Guide. I only showed four colors, but I am pleased to report that the 1947 Valiant Tuckaway, as with the other Tuckaway models, are found in all five colors. 

In this next image, these striated celluloid models include subtle details not shown in the book, because I didn’t know they existed:

At top, this striated Balance ringtop surfaced in an ordinary online auction and it is so easy to miss that I was pleased that it slipped under the radar and cost me so little. Ringtop Balance pencils in marbled plastics are more “normal,” although the double banded ones are quite a bit tougher to find.

This was the first time I had seen a striated celluloid Balance in ringtop configuration. In marbled plastics, it might be dismissed as a marriage of parts, since it is easy on the earlier marbled ones to replace a separate end piece with a ringtop. Once the striated celluloid era began, however, the caps were made from a single, uninterrupted piece.

The pen and pencil set at bottom in that earlier image took a long, winding journey to my doorstep that was more interesting than a few clicks on my cell phone to place an online bid.

 I had first seen this set at the Don Scott Antique Show – the frenzied first show of the season –  in November, 2022, just as I was finalizing what I was going to include in the book. There’s this one dealer whose tables are covered with shallow box lids full of random little stuff, and I’m always finding a handful or two of odds and ends. I pondered whether I should get it to include in the book.

Alas, as Rob Bader says, the dealer wanted a fair price, and I was looking for an unfair price. Besides, I thought, I’ve been spending a lot of money buying things to photograph for the book, and the only thing that is odd about it is there’s no Sheaffer’s imprints on the clips . . . that isn’t so unusual, right?

Wrong. After Janet and I left the show, I went through the images I had included in Chapter Three - this image, now memorialized on page 71 in the Field Guide, illustrates that when a Sheaffer Balance is found with an unmarked flat ball clip, it was accompanied with a special, wider ribbed “jeweler’s” band, not a simple thin gold filled band. 

Dang it . . . that’s nearly all the time, not all the time. David Isaacson recognizes these as a scarce but recognized variant, something that he refers to as a “fusion pen,” since the fountain pen combines the plain trim band and unremarkable Sheaffer number three nib (features usually reserve for Sheaffer’s lower tier offerings) but also has a white dot on the pen cap and an unmarked flat ball clip (features generally reserved for Sheaffer’s higher quality pens). 

Dang it again . . . I wish I had at least mentioned that in the book. No worries, I thought, I’ll pick it up at next month’s show. I returned to the Don Scott show in December and tracked down that same dealer, turning his display upside down looking for this set, but it wasn’t there. I asked the guy about it – no matter how many consecutive months I drop money on him, he never remembers who I am – and he casually waved me off. “Oh yeah, I already sold those,” he said.

Double dang it, with a side of grrr. He had answered me too quick; there was no way he had any idea what he had on his own tables, I thought. He just wants me to go away, and go away I did.

Of course that didn’t prevent me from stopping by and browsing his stuff month after month, usually buying a few things each time. At the March 2024 show nearly a year and a half later, I made my usual stop by his booth and . . . there it was. I didn’t even tell the dealer how happy I was to see it . . . I just stood there like a human ATM and robotically handed him the fair price noted on the tag. It was a long-awaited day, memorable mostly for how anticlimactic it was, leading up to a picture that should have been in the Field Guide.

The new set is at top, followed by a “normal” Balance pencil with the narrow band and Sheaffer’s clip as expected, and a normal-ish example with plain clip and jeweler’s band.

Sigh. The dumb things we remember . . . like the fact that this next set was in an online auction that closed as I sat in the lobby at the tire store, waiting for them to charge me a lot of money to reshoe my horse while I was looking for ways to spend even more money on my phone over a tiny styrofoam cup filled with black liquid. I think they called it “coffee,” but I don’t think that word means what they think it means.

Suffice to say I paid dearly on both fronts, and David Isaacson has dibs on the pen in the event I ever choose to split up the set. The wallet this set came in is marked Sheaffer’s on the inside and the outside - it was made by Farrington, a well known maker of wallets, money clips, and other stuff along these lines.

Apparently the wallet is collectible in its own right; I started down a rabbit hole of research into that subject, then quickly came to my senses. This is about a spectacular pen and pencil set, not the container I said as I slapped myself silly. These off-catalog, special cap bands are a special niche for Balance collectors, and the vast majority of the time they occur in the earlier marbled celluloids. It is only in vary rare instances that they are found in striated celluloid, as shown on page 78 of the Field Guide.

The short example in Sheaffer’s “Rose Glow” shown in this image from the book is mine, and the other two pictured were on loan from Gabriel Galecia Goldsmith – I mention that only because Gabriel has expressed such pride in the fact that two of his pencils made the book that it’s worth acknowledging him for his help again. 

There’s also a niche within a niche here. Within the world of these special bands, and without any apparent rhyme or reason, sometimes the spaces between these split bands are painted over with black paint, and other times they aren’t. This set combines both.

Yes, the trim is worn . . . but as I like to say, if you don’t like that, go out and try to find a better one.

I have one more addition to report to you now - with more updates later, after I get them photographed. This one also came from an auction, but not of the usual online sort: my friend Pearce Jarvis has started a writing instrument auction house in Canada called North American Pen Auctions, and he’s been attracting really interesting lots, including this nifty little set:

These are the smallest pens and pencils in the Balance series (excluding the golf pencils), referred to as the “Petite Balance” in Sheaffer’s 1930 catalog, its one and only appearance. They are shown in the Field Guide with narrow gold filled bands on page 59, and in bandless configuration on page 61. Here is the image from Figure 3-65, showing the bandless ones:

Actually, this was the fourth version of that image I shot for the Field Guide. The original included only five of these, but as I bought up variations that I didn’t have to photograph I kept adding to the group. Any more examples, and I figured I might need a fold-out centerfold so readers could really take all of it in. After the book went to press I found something else that might have tipped the scales in favor of such a dumb idea . . . 

While I figured something like a bandless Petite Balance in jade might be out there – after all, there was no reason to think it wouldn’t be – I had no idea that there might be an “Autograph” version of the Petite Balance with all 14k trim. It seems like overkill for what was marketed as a budget product, more novelty than practical . . . but here we are. 

That makes four configurations of the Petite Balance: a bandless ringtop, bandless with clip, narrow band with clip, and Autograph with 14k trim . . .

Wait a tick . . . I think I found a bandless marine green with clip, maybe at that last Chicago show, in my pile of things waiting to be photographed . . . I’ll have to dig a little and reshoot that last image.\

Again.

And so it goes with the Balance - if you think you own or have even seen every obscure variant that might be out there, you are fooling yourself.

The Philadelphia Acquisitions

This year’s Philadelphia Show in January yielded a few more updates to A Field Guide to Sheaffer’s Pencils:

That top pencil probably belonged in yesterday’s installment of updates about Sheaffer’s metal pencils, but the condition of the paint is the best I’ve seen and its worth showing alongside my better examples.

The second one down was an unmarked pencil I found in a junk box, and I bought it primarily as a curiosity. Sheaffer Balance golf pencils are typically marked with the Sheaffer name, but on occasion they do turn up without any markings. Could this be a more gargantuan unmarked Sheaffer golf pencil?

I’m on the fence with this one - if the black and pearl color carried all the way to the top of the pencil, I’d be more convinced . . . but then again, if you subtract that the length of the part that is all black, the black and pearl part is about the right length. What the heck – it’s fun to display alongside my other Sheaffer golf pencils.

The two cherry red flattops both came from David Isaacson. The Titan is really special, but it takes a second to recognize why: in addition to the color, this is a Titan equipped for .076" checking leads, which is more clear when it sits alongside its “normal” brother:

My only other example of a Titan checking pencil appears on page 35 of the Field Guide, and it’s worth showing you them together for another reason:

You’ll notice that the gold cap is a bit shorter on the cherry red example. As explained on page 34 of the book, the way these pencils were built was changed at some point between 1925 and 1928. Those shorter caps indicate that the cap has a post with the eraser mounted on the end, a feature carried over from the earliest Sharp Point pencils since 1917. Longer caps indicate that the eraser is attached to the pencil itself. For me, that is more than a purely acedemic distinction: it means that Titan Checking Pencils were made, even if in very limited numbers, over several years. 

David’s other cherry red example neatly filled out a gap in my flattop collection. 

The two coral examples shown here were pictured on page 36 of the Field Guide, and note that there are three different clips represented here: the top one is the “Little S” clip in use when the Radite (celluloid) flattop pencils were introduced in 1925, carried over from the earlier metal pencil line. At center, the “Big S” clips (note the larger letters at either end of the word “Sheaffer’S” are illustrated in Sheaffer’s 1928 catalog. At bottom, David’s pencil has the flat ball clip introduced on the Sheaffer Balance between 1933 and 1934; this one was likely a leftover barrel put to good use after flattops were no longer in production.

This last one from the Philly Show is my favorite in this batch, because it’s one of those that you really need to understand what you are looking at before you can see what is different:

Steve Wiederlight had this one, and I passed it a few times before I could figure out why I had to have it. The Craig was a Sheaffer subbrand, named after Walter Sheaffer’s son. Flattop Craig pencils are not a particularly rare sight, and Sheaffer pens and pencils in jade are downright common. What is unusual here is the combination of those two things: I have never seen a Craig flattop in jade green. That makes for an interesting family picture:

There’s all of the known colors, with the exception of cherry red; the image of flattop Craig pencils on page 94 of the Field Guide shows one, but that example was on loan from my friend Jonathan Pollack. Another cherry red example surfaced in an online auction recently . . . I bid the stupid money, and someone else bid money that was even stupider. 

You can’t win them all and besides . . . there’s always Philadelphia next year.

A Breather

 The last few weeks here at the blog have been intense. Time and time again I have started what I thought would be a simple article, and time and time again it became more intricate than I dreamed it would be. For today, I’m taking a step back to offer a few simple updates to update my 2023 book, A Field Guide to Sheaffer’s Pencils. 

This installment is the first of many updates, beginning with a few odds and ends concerning Sheaffer’s metal pencils, offered between 1917 and 1930. Here’s a good start:

I don’t remember who sold me this Sheaffer Sharp Point, as those earliest Sheaffer pencils were named when they were introduced in 1917, but it came to me at the DC Show in 2023 – just after the book was published. The box is as good as these get, with clear lettering and the writing hand still very legible:

The “knobby” cap and “bowler” clip, both of which are nicknames I use, are a combination of features in production during late 1918 and early 1919; since this barrel is marked patent applied for rather than bearing Sheaffer’s November 5, 1918 patent date, I’d believe it was produced in the second half of 1918, before the patent date was added and flared caps and Sheaffer-marked clips were introduced. Pencils like these are shown on page 6 in the book, but no, I didn’t have this pattern:

Model designations were very simple during the Sharp Point era: BD meant sterling silver (B), pattern “Puritan” (D). Of course, that is much easier to decipher when you have a price band containing all of that information:

Moving on -- “Sheaffer metal pencils were offered in five configurations,” I announced with authority on page 26, accompanied by this image:

Sigh. And now there are six. I think Daniel Kirchheimer either sold it to me or pointed it out on someone’s table aa a show and told me I needed to buy it.

This pipsqueak is in the smallest size, and it has both a clip and a ringtop. Even if you thought the ringtop cap might be a replacement, I haven’t previously seen any evidence of the existence of a side clip model this short.

Next is one with a very subtle feature that I didn’t notice until David Nishimura pointed it out to me:

Although the pencil is an ordinary silver-nickel model, what sets is apart is the stippling on the lower half of the barrel:

Sheaffer’s 1928 and 1929 catalogs show a similar treatment applied to oversized utility pencils. With this “satin finish grip,” it was Model SAA, or the AAA if equipped for .076" checking leads. The catalogs are silent, however, with respect to standard diameter pencils receiving such treatment.

I photographed this next group last March, but I don’t think they all arrived in one go - I think I was just catching up on taking pictures of things that had accumulated around the museum:

Starting at the top is that long ringtop with a handwritten tag. Longer than usual, yes . . . 

. . . but was this the “1921 diamond pattern”? At first blush, that seems about right.

That's what Wahl called this pattern on metal Eversharps, but that isn't what Sheaffer called it. I ran down all of Sheaffer's cataloged pattern names and production dates on page 27 in the book, and this one appeared in 1923, not 1921. While “diamond” seems logical, Sheaffer referred to it only as Pattern L: “hand turned chasing.”

That handwritten “PFC p76" reference resonates with those of us who know our pen collecting history.  Pen Fancier’s Magazine was one of our earliest periodicals, produced by pen collecting pioneer Cliff Lawrence. In addition to the regular magazines, Cliff produced a few PFC Pen Guide books. I have a few different editions, and I was looking forward to seeing this exact pencil in one of those old books. Alas, it must have been a different edition, because it doesn’t appear anywhere in these.

Moving on to the next one, a short gold-filled ringtop, I noticed something weird about it. I have a few similar ones, but the chasing is different.

The bottom two are easy to identify – they are also shown on page 27 in my book. Sheaffer cataloged them as Pattern H - “Craig style chasing.”

That top example, though, isn’t the same thing. It is much earlier, cataloged in 1920 and 1921 simply as Pattern G. The full length version with clip is shown on page 28, but I did not have a ringtop to show when the book went to press.

The next one up for discussion in this group is that badly deteriorated, hand-painted pencil. Ordinarily I might have passed on it due to its poor condition, but in my experience nearly all of the hand-painted Sheaffer pencils were the short models. I’ve only seen one other longer ringtop with this treatment – it’s in the book, on page 32:

The last two in this group are easily dispatched, and I’m not sure why I even included them in that picture. The silver nickel example upgraded the one I had with a broken clip, and the plain gold filled one was just really, really clean:

This last one – at least for now – came to me via Daniel Kirchheimer, who brought it to the Baltimore Show last year. He says it was found among what was left of a Sheaffer repairman’s business:

The finish is called Guilloché enamelling, and it is much more prevalent in Europe than it is in the United States. It is created by layering and then firing enamel and glass over chased metal. 

My first impression was that this might be a marriage of Sheaffer parts with a European barrel, since I’ve never seen a Sheaffer pencil with this sort of treatment. Sheaffer didn’t use the underlying pattern, at least to my knowledge:

I don’t think it’s a marriage, and neither does Daniel. No, this exact pattern was not cataloged, but it is close enough to Sheaffers “diamond” or “hand turned chasing” discussed earlier that nothing more than a flick of a few switches on the same machines might have produced it. Also, there’s so much that would be involved in transplanting a Sheaffer pencil’s guts into something else, and while this Guilloché shows evidence of wear, it doesn’t have the sort of damage one would expect from that sort of procedure. Besides, “junk box provenance” suggests that nobody would go through all of that effort only to leave it behind.

The cap has Sheaffer’s 1918 patent date but lacks the “Lifetime” name, which was added to the pencil caps in 1924. As I showed on page 32 of the book, Sheaffer’s hand-painted pencils also lack the Lifetime name, but they were cataloged in 1928 - I theorized in the book that hand painting old stock might have been a way to clear out obsolete models. Perhaps around the same time, Sheaffer dabbled in Guilloché as another way to do the same thing.