First Blood

This was the first thing that caught my eye at the DC show.

Ah, that first purchase at the pen show, when it seems nobody has anything smaller than a twenty, and this was only five bucks. People could have been selling Lincolns for six bucks all day long and done pretty well, I’d imagine.

This wasn’t quite what I’d remembered of the Trupoint, which usually turns up in a lizardskin sort of pattern, like that seen on page 158 of The Catalogue . . .

NOTE:  This article is now included in the print version of The Leadhead's Pencil Blog, available anywhere you buy books, or also from The Legendary Lead Company.

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Like Bread and Butter

Pen shows and cigars go together. It’s a tough call even to decide which is more fun – the action in the show room or the time spent talking and catching up over a few cigars in whatever area the guys decide to light up their cigars. In fact, it’s so much of a tradition that even at the Ohio show, a dozen or so guys will be huddled outside in the November wind, sitting on metal chairs that your tongue would probably stick to (not that anyone has been triple dog-dared to do so), puffing away furiously over some good conversation and a nip of scotch.

It’s probably no coincidence that the quintessential junk box at a pen show is a cigar box. Any box could hold the junk, but we usually have an empty cigar box or two on hand when the time comes to clean house.

So when Janet and I stopped in Barnesville on our way to DC, it was no surprise that this non-pen, but definitely pen-related item caught my eye . . .

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Unique

Here’s one that comes up so infrequently that it doesn’t show up in The Catalogue.

This one, owned by Frank Tedesco, is a John C. Wahl "120," complete with the original box, which I saw and photographed at the Triangle Pen Show in Raliegh. I’ve been looking for one of these for a few years – the last one I saw was at an auction at the Ohio Pen Show, and Joe Nemecek took it home for around a hundred bucks. Frank’s is still owned by Frank, because he paid several times that amount for his.

These pencils represent an interesting footnote in history. John C. Wahl is one and the same as the founder of the Wahl Adding Machine Company, which later scooped up Charles Keeran’s Eversharp and got into the writing business overnight. Although John was the founder of the company, he wasn’t in charge. Not by a longshot. According to Syd Saperstien, he was vice president, with a phone line extension at the company and the title of "Experimental Engineer," but he had a lot of time to putter around and invent things on the side. Not much is known about his separate company or this pencil, but it appears that John C. Wahl applied for his patent for this pencil on June 9, 1939, and he was issued patent number 2,210,845 on August 6, 1940 . . .

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Dixon Redux

As I was shooting photographs of Joe’s Victorian collection, one piece he had caught my eye.  Look familiar? This is one of those Dixon or Mergott pencils I was writing about a few weeks ago, and this one, unlike the stubby ones in those articles, more closely matches the design shown in the design patent drawing . . .

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Score One For Joe

Joe Nemecek brought this one along to our photo shoot in DC, and I’m really glad he did.  This is a Parker Bridge Pencil, not to be confused with the bridge set from a couple weeks ago. . .

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Not a Pencil

A few weeks ago, Janet and I were getting pretty stir crazy. After the big storm here in Ohio, we’d spent weeks cleaning up our three-acre property, which used to be heavily wooded. Nothing like a few weeks with a chain saw in hand to make you want to get out of Dodge for a bit!

Janet, ever the planner, explored our options for a trip to Northeast Ohio and suggested we hit the AAA Antique Mall in Ravenna, Ohio, and since that was the furthest one out, we decided to make that our first stop. And what a stop it was! This place went on and on (and on) and I found . . . well, as far as pencils went, one lousy pencil marked "Red Dot" on the clip (like the one on page 124 of The Catalogue); I was thinking the clip might be a little bit different, but it wasn’t. No story there!

But I didn’t get skunked, even if the pencil pickings were slim. Here’s something I found . . .

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Stylish

You won’t find the Alexander Products Corporation of Bloomington, Illinois anywhere in The Catalogue. I knew the brand was out there, but I just didn’t see fit to include it because all I had seen out there were cheap, giveaway advertising pencils.

So when Joe Nemecek called me before the DC show to ask if I’d be interested in buying a fully stocked card of Alexander pencils if he brought them to the show, I agreed but I was skeptical. I think Joe could hear it in my voice, and since he has had the same general experience with Alexanders, he reassured me. "You’ll like these," he said. "They’re stylish."

When I saw them, I had to agree with him . . .

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A New Discovery Thanks to an Old Book

When I saw Lee Chait at the Triangle Pen Show in Raleigh, Lee had a problem. Actually, he had several hundred pages of problems. Lee had a pile of old books on pens on his table that he really didn’t feel like hauling home with him. Most were from the early 1990s – not antique, but not filled with the state-of-the-art information that research by the pen community, coupled with the power of the internet, have added to the knowledge pool over the last two decades.

Still, I love reading the old books written in the days before authors thought they knew everything, when all they could do is take a stab at putting out there everything they knew. And besides, often times people put stuff out there in those early books, whether it be a picture or a bit of information, that we have collectively forgotten about.

Needless to say, as the show wore on and Sunday packup loomed, Lee’s price got better and better, until it reached the point of irresistability, and I bought the whole stack. I’ve had at least one of those books by my side ever since then, poring over one thing or another.

One of the books I got from Lee – a classic by most standards, is Fischler and Schneider’s Fountain Pens and Pencils: the Golden Age of Writing Instruments from 1990. There’s a lot of great information in that book, and it’s loaded with pictures, including a fantastic picture at the end of the owners of Fountain Pen Hospital, complete with Miami Vice hair and dressed in scrubs, preparing to do "surgery" on a few pens laying in a surgical tray!

I’ve been lazily thumbing through that book, casually admiring all of the ultra-rare pens that just seem to have disappeared over the last few years, wondering what it must have been like to go to an antiques show or flea market and actually see some of them once in a while.

And then I saw something in an online auction that rang a bell somewhere in my head. I went back to Fischler and Schneider, looked more closely at one of their pictures, and I wondered . . . could it be?

The lot contained about ten pencils, most of which were your common dollar-bin fare. Towards the bottom of the picture was a coral Carter’s pencil, but the tip looked a little messed up. The seller didn’t seem to know beans about pencils, other than what he or she could read on the clips, but one of the names in the description was "Waterman" and that name certainly didn’t fit anything else in the group. So I bid, and I think I now owe Lee Chait a drink, or maybe something from Lord & Taylor, because if it hadn’t been for that old book he sold me, I wouldn’t have known what this is . . .

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And Another Thing . . .

Saturday at the DC show I was still basking in the glow of my Carey find. I’m sure I was driving everybody crazy showing it off to anyone that looked remotely interested – and to several people who didn’t look the least bit interested. I could have gone home happy right there, but then I would have missed what happened next.

My father, Roger Veley, and Jim Stauffer stopped by my table with the news that Roger had found another Heath clip pencil they wanted me to see, so off I went, this time remembering to take my loupe with me.

They led me to Jim Carpenito’s table and showed it to me. My father had already made him an offer on it, but I must have looked pretty excited about it, because he stepped aside and I brought it home. Here’s it is, posed next to the Carey . . .

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Easy to Miss

Early metal pencils are hard to collect, because at first glance they all look alike. Unlike brightly colored plastic or hard rubber pencils, they are all either gold or silver, and most share the same basic shape.

But as I was trolling around the DC show early on during Friday’s preshow, I stopped to spend a little quality time with one dealer’s display of metal pencils. They may all look alike at first, but this one practically jumped out of the box and into my hands, where it has remained ever since . . .

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Setting the Stage

I’ve got a couple of really neat things to show you that I found at the DC Show, but before I do, I need to back up for a second and set the stage if this is going to make any sense.

Charles Keeran applied for the patent for the original Eversharp pencil on October 10, 1913, and the patent was issued as number 1,130,741 on March 9, 1915. Here’s the patent drawing . . .

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THE Best Eversharp

During my photo shoot of the pencils Joe Nemecek brought to DC, one of the boxes was unmarked and had a plain black velvet sleeve inside. When I went to remove what was inside, Joe suddenly sat up sharply. "Be careful with that one!" he said.

It wasn’t like I was throwing pencils around the room, willy-nilly, or that I’d developed a habit of dropping them while attempting to juggle them. It was just Joe’s instinctive (and understandable) reaction to someone about to handle what is arguably the rarest and most beautiful Eversharp ever made . .

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Joe's A Very Photogenic Guy!

Joe Nemecek doesn’t like having his picture taken. The only reason I was able to get the picture of him standing behind his Victorian pencil display was that I was pointing a camera at him when he was standing behind it, and wild horses wouldn’t have been able to drag him away from his collection!

On the other hand, Joe loves to have his pencils photographed, and he brought several pieces with him to the DC show for me to photograph, so at the end of the day on Friday he brought them to my room, where I’d set up my photo studio (such as it is), and we spent a couple hours documenting some of his great finds. Here’s one of them . . .

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Right Next Door

I’m always flitting around at pen shows, much to the chagrin of some who stop by my booth and try to buy things. Janet once threatened to nail my foot to the floor if I didn’t settle down and stay put for awhile (she was getting tired of saying to people "You’ll have to wait until he gets back . . . no, I don’t know where he is . . .").

So it’s usually at the very end of the show that I finally remember to check the tables right next to mine. For some reason, I never remember to do that.
Francis Bulbulian was set up next to me – well, just on the other side of Michael Little. It wasn’t until late Sunday when I thought to see what he had over there, after I’d already spent more than I wanted to on that humongous Wahl Eversharp display set and resolved that I was not going to spend any more money. Looking back, I should have. Francis was just starting to pack up, so I didn’t have time to run back to the room with this one to take better shots, and although I should have bought it, I didn’t . . .

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Just How Long Was That Worlds' Fair?

I stopped by Carl Daniels’ table in DC, and he had this great Esterbrook pencil on his table. This one put the "Show" in Pen Show – he wasn’t ready to sell it just yet, but he did allow me to take it back to my room for a little alone time in the photo studio.

This one’s an easy one to overlook. Since it’s black, it doesn’t exhibit the telltale marbling that identifies it as an Esterbrook "Pushmaster" pencil, but the chrome-plated top button with "Esterbrook" on it, coupled with the absence of the word "Esterbrook" on the clip, are dead givaways . . .

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The Ping Pong Kid

At page 46 of The Catalogue, frame 4, I’ve displayed several Eagle metal pencils.  Today’s story is about the two on the right. At the DC show, I found one in navy blue, not the bright blue shown above. The clip has a stylized Eagle logo with neat lettering that slopes up and down . . .

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The Quicker Picker Upper

Janet said she had never seen me as bummed to see a pen show end as I was at the end of the DC show this year, and she was right. I thought about it for a while, and I think I figured out why: it was the first time I’ve seen the show actually end. In years past, when I arrive things are already underway and when I leave, I’m one of the first ones to go on Sunday afternoon so that I can get home Sunday night.

This year, Janet and I decided to spend the night on Sunday and leave on Monday morning. It was the first time ever I’ve passed where the ink testing area is set up and not seen tables full of ink bottles with a few people hunched over the table. It was the first time I’ve seen the ballroom without my friends and tables full of pens and pencils in it.

I’ve never seen the Sheraton Premiere look empty and – well – lonely.

So even though we had a nice day to take our time and enjoy a few stops on the way home, I was a little melancholy. When we stopped off in Frederick, Maryland, we had a pretty good time rummaging around a few antique stores, but I just couldn’t get into it. After three days of being surrounded by literally anything a pencil collector could want, now it was all I could do to turn up a ballpoint that some dealer wants eight bucks for!

By the time we made Hagerstown, where we found "Memory Lane Antiques and Collectibles" right off of Route 70, it was beginning to feel like there was nothing to do but sit around and wait for the next pen show to roll around before there would be something interesting to look at again. But as I wandered up and down aisles of NASCAR and Harley Davdison "collectibles" (yeah, I suppose you can collect stuff made in China last week, if that’s what you really want to do), something did catch my eye . . .

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Ubersized

On Sunday morning at the DC Show, I was feeling really good about how things were going. I had a lot more money in my pocket than I had when I came, a real rarity for me, and I’d bought everything I’d wanted to buy. Yep, nothing to do but cruise through the rest of the show, right?

Of course, then Rick Fernandez struts by with a Wahl Eversharp set in his hands. He’d just picked it up from someone else that brought it in, and from the minute Rick bought it, he knew he’d sell it to me.

He knew. He didn’t think he might sell it to me, he knew he would. And when I saw it, I knew he would, too. Mike Little, who was sitting next to me, said he got a kick out of the grimace on my face – the look that said I knew was going to spend a lot of money and give back all the gains I’d made over the weekend. It was going to hurt – it was only a question of how much.

Rick wasn’t too easy on me, but he was easier than he could have been. It helped that Cliff Harrington already had one of these. Or three or four of them. So I peeled the agreed price off of my hard-earned wad of cash and knew I was done for the weekend, like the gambler in Vegas who knows the only way he’ll get home is the fifty he’s hidden from himself at the car parked at the airport.

So here it is . . .

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Leadhead's Tread: DC Supershow Report

As I’m sitting here, at 6:00 in the morning getting ready to make the long drive back to Ohio, I’m suddenly finding it difficult to describe this year’s DC Supershow in Washington. Maybe it’s because so much is going on in my head about the show that I don’t know where to start. Maybe it’s the sheer exhaustion.

But I think mostly it’s because for me, the DC Supershow is the high water mark of the year. I spend most of the year looking forward to it, and it’s kind of hard to admit it when it’s over.

As far as the hotel goes, I was pretty sure going into this show what I was going to say about the Sheraton Premiere at Tysons Corner, the same venue for the show as long as I’ve been attending, but I am pleased to report that everything I thought I was going to say about the hotel I’ve had to take back. The hotel, long overdue for a renovation, has finally received the updates that it has sorely needed in the past – a nicer bar and restaurant area, an updated registration area, and the rooms have been updated and redone.

Nicer still is that all the positive changes have also carried over to the staff’s attitudes. This is the first time in years that I’ve actually felt like a guest here rather than an annoyance to the help! Well, ok . . . mostly. The manager and his rent-a-cop were pretty annoyed with those of us enjoying our traditional evening of scotch and cigars on Friday night. We did receive quite a lecture on Virginia liquor laws, which left me imagining the cover of The Pennant Magazine with a shot of us all being loaded into a paddy wagon and hauled off to jail (being the hardened criminals we all are).

While each of the shows I go to in the course of a year has its own flavor, what makes the DC show different from all the others isn’t surprising. Since it’s the biggest, and more of my friends come here than attend any of the other shows. And this year was a little bigger yet than any of the others. Here’s a shot of the main ballroom from my table on Saturday, way back in the back corner next to Roger Cromwell’s traditional place (he was there as always this year) . . .

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The Victorian Guy

The Catalogue doesn’t say much about Victorian pencils, and Joe Nemecek likes it that way. On the few occasions when I’ve ventured thoughts about Victorian pencils here, I’ll usually get an email from Joe saying, "Hey, I’m supposed to be the Victorian Guy!"

I agree. He is. And this year at the DC Supershow, Joe displayed his collection. Here he is, carefully removing each one of his more than 350 examples from their individual little velvet pouches . . .

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The Silent Underbidder

There was plenty of good stuff at the pen (and pencil) auction at the Triangle Pen Show in Raliegh, this year, but Joe Nemecek and I only had eyes for one lot.

This is a complete set of Parker "Bridge" pencil stands, as mint as they get with their stickers and original boxes. Ordinarily the set would be equipped with red and black pencils to match the suits, but according to the story behind this set, it came from a Parker salesman who was interested in showing off more colors than just the boring red and black ones. Besides, who’s going to complain about getting a yellow one instead?

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Eastward Ho!

Yesterday, Janet and I loaded up the car with all things pen and pencil and made our annual pilgrimage to the "DC Supershow" in Washington, DC. Normally I’d just do a show report when we got back, but since getting there really is half the fun for us, here’s the fun we had . . .

Our first stop is a great 1950s-style Denny’s diner just on the other side of Zanesville . . .

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Hold the Phone

At the Chicago Show, in my waning days of "I’m not normally a wood pencil guy" denial, I just had to have this one.  Terry Mawhorter had it on his table. The chrome plated holder contains a tiny Eagle Mikado pencil, and with a great patent number on it, I knew there’d be more to the story . . .

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God Speed, John Glenn's Pencil

Francis Meinhardt pulled me aside to show me an interesting set of Parker 21 pencils at the Triangle Pen Show in Raleigh.

These commemorate the astronauts of the Mercury Program, from 1961 to 1963. They are unusually heavy, given their sterling lower barrels. Each is engraved with the name of one of the astronauts . . .

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Oxford's Beginnings

Wahl Eversharp, unlike most other companies, was proud of its subbrands. Usually it takes quite a bit of detective work to sort out which company made which subbrand, because quality manufacturers generally didn’t want to be associated with low-end products, although most gladly competed in the low-end market for dollars that were every bit as green as the ones they brought in on their flagship lines.

When Wahl decided to introduce a lower priced line, it was the Wahl Oxford, and if using the Wahl name with it weren’t enough, many were stamped "Made in USA from the makers of Eversharp." Wahl Oxfords – at least as far as the pencils went – tended to be every bit as good as the company’s Eversharps, and they were even in many cases identical.

Here are about the earliest Wahl Oxfords I’ve been able to find. They surfaced as a pair in an online auction a couple months ago . . .

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The Wrath of Kahn

If there’s ever a second edition of The Catalogue, some years down the road, there’s one great injustice in there that I’m going to be sure that I correct. I will need to call one of the most influential men in the American pencil industry by name. After all, he earned it.

David Kahn was a man who arguably holds the title of being the most prolific producer of mechanical pencils in the United States. Although I haven’t tallied how many patents and design patents are credited to him or assigned to his company (David Kahn, Inc.) in George Kovalenko’s book, he’s got to be right up there with Eagle at the top of the "most innovative" list.

And his most recognized brand? Wearever.

OK, I didn’t say recognized was necessarily a good thing, because many of Kahn’s innovations involved ways to make more and cheaper pencils, not necessarily better ones. But not everything that the company made was terrible – at least as far as the pencils went (the pens, however . . . sheesh).
Take this one, for example, from the late 1920s or so . . .

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Making a Federal Case Of It

Here’s another of the named no-name variety.  The clip reads simply "Federal" . . .

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From the Last Few Remnants

Thanks to Edgar Nichols, I’ve learned that those Tripp-Barr pencils with the all-clear barrels came in two sizes.

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Another "Pencil in the Iron Mask"

Back on April 2, I posted an article about Harry Esterow’s unique clip. Another one surfaced recently that added another clue.

This one, in addition to the patent number, indicates that it’s from Brooklyn, New York and sports the moniker "Ballerina Jr." . . .

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An Autopoint of a Different Color

This one surfaced in a group of things in an online auction.

It’s one of the short-tipped Autopoints along the lines of those in the June 25 article, but with a two-facet clip similar to the 1940 "Ford Deluxe" advertiser from July 21, although I think this one might be a little earlier than the latter. I don’t have anything concrete to prove that, it just looks a little bit older . . .

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Keeping It Light

Between work in the office and the yard, it’s been difficult finding the time to put up posts lately, so for the next few days I’ll just introduce a few that, beyond "here they are," I don’t have much to say about.

For today, here’s a pair of cheaper metal pencils that look identical at first . . .

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