The Most Expensive Pencil I Ever Saw

No, I didn’t buy it.  Let’s just get that out of the way right up front.  I don’t even know what the price is.

On page 16 of The Catalogue I included some pointers on how to use the price guide the book includes.  Of course, the cautionary text has largely been ignored (every so often I receive an email from someone with a pencil I listed as “unique” and assumes that means their pencil is worth meeeeelyuns of dollars).

But another part of what I wrote hasn’t been ignored – the part in which I described “pen to match syndrome”:  when an otherwise ordinary pencil is accompanied by a highly collectible pen, the pencil will command a premium just because collectors who own the high-dollar pens want to put sets together.

So what happens when there’s a stratospherically spectacular pen out there and a matching pencil turns up?  Say, for example, one of the fabled Parker “snake” pens from the 1910s?

You could stop me right there.  “Parker didn’t make pencils in the 1910s,” you could say, and you would be right.  Parker’s first pencils were the “Lucky Lock” pencils introduced in 1922.  But . . . remember that Parker had the silver work on the company’s snake pens done by George W. Heath & Co.  And Heath not only made Parker snake pens, they made these:

To learn more, this full article is included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 2, 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.