Like a Ninja

Collectors of pens and pencils all know the excitement of finding truly quality pieces at general antique shows.  Usually, when a dealer says “yes, I have some pencils,” what they offer up might be a couple rusty Scriptos or a bag of wooden golf pencils – all of which must have tasted delicious to whoever was chewing on them.

Last Saturday at the Springfield (Ohio) Extravaganza, imagine my surprise to find a dealer with a Conklin Nozac pen, an Eversharp Skyline pen in silver moire and a few other goodies at his outdoor booth.  The pens were in great shape, but the dealer knew what he had and wanted what I would consider to be the high end of reasonable (as my friend Rob Bader likes to say, “That is a fair price -- I’m looking for an unfair price”).

We went back and forth for a few minutes – he didn’t want to take much less because he’d just put them out, I didn’t want to pay so much . . . hem, haw, hem, haw . . . finally, I started looking around the rest of his booth to find a couple other things to throw in that might make a deal make some sense.  With the addition of three other bits of what he considered junk, we struck a deal.

No, I’m not posting pictures here of the Skyline or the Nozac, for two reasons.  First, they are pens.  Second, you’ve seen those before.  The real headline of the deal turned out to be one of the bits of junk I persuaded the guy to include in the deal:

What attracted me to this one was that goofy dip pen nib, which obviously has absolutely nothing to do with the holder it’s been stuck in.  I’ve got a disorganized mess of dip pen nibs I’ll go through someday, but I was confident that among them I didn’t have a “Jordonian No. 6 Oblique Pen”:

I know, I know . . . it’s a pen, so I shouldn’t be posting pictures of this, either.  But I had to show you this one (ok, I wanted to show you this one) because it explains why I hadn’t paid much attention to the “holder” into which it was wedged.

This one went into my pocket along with all the other treasures I was finding that day.  After we got home, I started sorting through all the neat stuff I’d found and when I came to this one, as I was pulling the nib out to clean it up, I noticed something:

That crescent-shaped slot is where the dip pen nib is inserted, but I hadn’t noticed that round hole in the middle.  Usually, that’s an indication that this isn’t just a dip pen holder, but a pen and pencil combination.  

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.

Truth in Advertising

When this one popped up in an online auction, I thought the seller was confused and posted the wrong pictures with the pencil:

That’s a Cross, I thought to myself.  But yet there was something a little weird about it; I wondered why the top was silver instead of black.  Here’s the online find shown next to a typical Cross Century ballpoint:

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.

Better Than The Real Deal

The Springfield Antique Show in Springfield, Ohio is a monthly affair, and most of the time, it’s a lot like most other antique shows.  But a couple times a year, the show takes a big dose of steroids and turns into a monstrous, 2,000-plus dealer, indoor/outdoor, four-day affair called the “Extravaganza.”  It’s impossible to see everything in one day, so Janet and I have taken to getting a room over in Springfield and spending Saturday and Sunday browsing at a more leisurely pace.   Janet swears it’s all me stressing about whether we get to see everything, but secretly, I believe she can’t help but wonder what she might have missed, too.

We try to do all of the outdoor stuff first, because we never know when the Ohio weather will stop cooperating and besides, the indoor dealers are there every month – it’s the outdoor vendors you’ll typically see only on Extravaganza weekends.

Sunday morning, while we were browsing around outside, a big breakfast and a few belts of coffee caught up with us, so we ventured inside one of the main buildings to answer nature’s call.  Of course, it’s nearly impossible to walk down an aisle full of antiques without stopping to look at anything, and of course, the first vendor inside the door was someone I see every month and buy something from every month.

Usually it’s nothing spectacular she has for me – maybe a couple cheaper pencils in colors I don’t have or a few dip pen nibs that look just interesting enough to shell out a buck or two.  This time, I saw a great box marked “Zaner-Bloser” on the side, about half full of erasers, lead and ballpoint refills.  Since Zaner Bloser is a Columbus, Ohio company, I couldn’t resist.

But there was a problem.  The dealer wanted $12.00 firm for the box, I’d spent all my small bills and the dealer couldn’t break a fifty.  She said she’d hold it for me while I went to break a larger bill.  Just as I was about to leave her booth, I noticed this laying nonchalantly out in front, separate and apart from where she usually keeps her pen and pencil stuff:

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.

Probably Mabie . . . Maybe

Sometimes I’ll buy a pencil I know absolutely nothing about, just because I’ve never heard of the name before and I’d like to learn a little more about it.  Such was the case with this one, which turned up at the DC show.  I don’t remember from whom I got this one:

In tiny letters on the side of the upper barrel, there is an inscription barely visible with the naked eye:

“R M & Co.”

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.

Maybe Not Mabie?

John Mabie’s patent of October 3, 1854 was stamped prominently on many of Mabie’s early writing instruments  – even ones to which Mabie’s patent didn’t apply, like this one:

This one, along with another pencil, came from an unwise gamble in an online auction.  From the terrible pictures the seller had posted, all I could tell was that the barrels were black and that there appeared to be a little bit of writing on them.   I was pleasantly surprised when they arrived to find that there were no cracks in either of them, both were in perfect working order, and the imprints were clear enough to respond favorably to highlighting:

But there’s something very curious about this Mabie Todd:

“Pat. Dec. 24 1867 Mabie, Todd & Co.”

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.

Maybe Mabie

About a year ago, I received an email from David Moak, author of Mabie in America: Writing Instruments from 1843 to 1941.  He was thinking about selling his collection of Mabie Todd pencils, he said, and he wanted to know if I was interested.

Sure I was, I told him.  At the time I had just two Victorian-era Mabie Todd pencils (see “Marie’s Patent” on December 2, 2011 – http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2011/12/maries-patent.html), and an opportunity to acquire the definitive Mabie Todd collection – not to mention the collection from the book on the subject – doesn’t come along every day.  We went back and forth for awhile, because I couldn’t afford everything David had.  In the end, while I decided to pass on most of the solid gold stuff in favor of the items I thought were more historically significant, we struck a deal on almost all the rest of it.   The collection arrived at my office on the first day of the 2012 Ohio Pen Show, and it made for a nice display:

One of these days, I tell myself, I need to do a blog article or two about these.  I haven’t yet only because I like writing about things that haven’t been written about before, and in the case of David’s Mabie Todd collection, not only is David’s book out there, but you can still see all of these pencils online at David’s Mabie Todd website (www.mabie-todd.com).    I can’t help feeling like these have been done before.

In the last couple months, though, I’ve stumbled across a few curiosities that aren’t in David’s book and haven’t been done before.  The first is this one, which someone brought to the DC show in the hopes of selling:

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.

I'm Sure That's What They Were "Shooting" For

Here’s a couple of pencils, both of which came from the DC show.  Well, sort of.

The red pencil (painted over brass) came from Frank Hoban, whose table was just a few doors down from mine at the show.  The moment I saw it, I knew I had to buy it – I was expecting a second one to arrive within just a couple hours, and I wanted to photograph the two together.  Later that day, Sue Hershey arrived at my table, and sure enough she had the green one in tow.  Sue had sent me a picture of it some months earlier, and she said she was bringing along a bag of goodies to the DC show for me to look at.  I had hoped (a) this would be one of them and (b) I’d get to bring it home with me.  Yes to both!

Neither of these is a particularly expensive pencil, but what had me fired up about Sue’s pencil – and had my radar in tune by the time I found the one on Frank’s table – was the name on the clips:

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.

The Art of the Metal Sheaffer

Normally, I don’t chase after early metal Sheaffer pencils.  With a couple hundred metal Eversharps laying about, I realize how stupid it sounds to say that most of them look alike to me, but it’s true – for whatever reason, a metal Sheaffer really has to stand out of the crowd to get my attention.

Twice at the DC show, metal Sheaffer pencils stood out of the crowd and really, really got my attention:

The sterling silver example is unusually long for a ringtop – that’s part of its charm to me.  And the pencil’s outstanding state of preservation is another attention-grabber.  But what struck me about this one even more is the quality of the engraving, which is more elaborate even than what you’ll find on a full jacketed sterling engraved Eversharp:

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.

The Monster Footnote

As I was researching yesterday’s article concerning the Nu-Type Manufacturing Company  (for those who hotlinked here, yesterday’s article is at http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2013/09/a-nu-take-on-nu-type.html), I’d stumbled across my own footprints when I found a reference in an earlier article I’d written to the fact that the Nu-Type Manufacturing Company registered a trademark for “Nu-Point”:

This was one of those things I had forgotten that I knew, and it was also a pretty weird coincidence.  Earlier this month I posted an article in which I had finally established that by 1926, “Nupoint Propelling Pencils” were in fact produced by Samuel Kanner (see “It Would Have Been So Much Easier Had I Known This” on September 3, 2013 – http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2013/09/it-would-have-been-so-much-easier-had-i.html):

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.

A Nu Take On The Nu-Type

If you look up the Nu-Type in The Catalogue, the book will direct you to the entry under “Ditto” where, on page 41, you’ll see a grouping of these oddballs, posed with a typewriter ribbon tin bearing the same Ditto logo:

I didn’t know quite what to make of these at the time the book went to press.  All of the Ditto-marked examples I had found also had “Nu-Type” imprinted neatly around the lower ring, in addition to the word “Ditto” imprinted neatly around the cap:

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.

Knives, Fireworks . . . Or Something That Eclipses Them Both?

This one came from the DC show in early August.  From what I recall, it was among the ones Sue Hershey brought for me to look at:

The pencil barrel is made of red hard rubber, and there’s a curious name on the clip:

“UNXLD,” with the “X” a little bigger than what comes before or after it.

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.

Uwanta Pencil?

John Coleman sent me a picture of a couple of his other “mystery pencils”:

Both are fitted with accommodation clips with eerie faces on them.

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.

Expensive Tuition: Part Two

I have nothing but good news to report to you concerning the Parker Imperial Vacumatic.

A couple days ago, I posed the question: whether an ordinary (but less than common) “squiggle line” Parker 51 cap posted atop an ordinary Parker Vacumatic would create a pencil indistinguishable from a Parker Imperial Vacumatic worth many, many times more than the sum of these parts.

The answer, for those who have been hoarding their brown Vacumatic pencils these last two days, is no – two plus two does not equal three hundred.  Three frequent contributors here at the blog – Matt McColm, George Rimakis and Daniel Kirchheimer, all emailed me to let me know how the Parker Imperial Vacumatic pencil differs from what I’d put together – and in the process, they gave me the opportunity to circle back around to something I’ve been wanting to write about for a long, long time.

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.

Three and a Half Patterns of Note

It’s possible to spend a lifetime just assembling a collection of metal Eversharp pencils.  Any more, I only pick them up when there’s something really special about them.  Lately, a few have turned up that have definitely fallen into that category – one pattern that’s just hard to come by, two that I’ve never seen before, and a half of a pattern that ... ok, we’ll get to that one in a minute.

Starting with the hard to come by one, both of these turned up at the DC show:

The longer tips and the ribbed clip on the full-sized one indicate these are post-1924, and the patterns are groups of eight lines, with an intermittent wave of the four in the middle every so often:

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.

Expensive Tuition: Part One

This article is really going to upset some people, so for now, I’m going to call this “part one” on the subject of Parker Imperial Vacumatic pencils.    When someone comes forward and explains to me why you can’t build a Parker Imperial Vacumatic pencil out of about $20 worth of spare parts, I’ll clarify that in part two.

But I wouldn’t be writing this article if I wasn’t pretty sure there wouldn’t be a part two.

The Imperial Vacumatic is pretty rare, and the pens cost hundreds of dollars.  I caught up with one of the pencils at the 2012 Ohio Show, but I don’t remember who had this one.  Forgive the quality of the pictures – these were shot in the dark, dark hallway outside the ballroom:

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.

Yammerworthy

I can’t remember which of my collecting friends once asked me why I’m always yammering on about Slencils.  I didn’t think too hard about the question – after all, I don’t want to risk having an existential moment during which I wonder why I yammer on about any of the things I write about here – but I think the answer is easy.  When it comes to the Slencil, there’s a lot to yammer on about, and no one’s really yammered about it before.

Carl Harris, inventor of the Slencil, supposedly came upon the idea when he was riding on a train, and his pencil kept rolling off the table.  What may seem today as a single idea – a flat pencil that won’t roll – proved to be fodder for Harris to invent and patent dozens of improvements, attachments and accessories over a period of decades.

In the Slencil’s last incarnation, Harris’ interesting mid-barrel knurled mechanism was abandoned in favor of a conventional nose drive, inserted into a plastic rectangular barrel which was intially marketed as the “Stag Slencil.”    The design patent, number 119,263, was issued on March 5, 1940:

A few months ago, this turned up in an online auction, and since I’m a sucker for pencils with a card-playing theme, and I was hunkerin’ to do some yammerin’, I couldn’t resist:

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.

Other People's Fair Children

A few years ago I read a book titled “I Hate Other People’s Kids” by Adrienne Frost, which was an amusing hundred-page or so rant about the things other people’s children (and the parents who fail to control them) do to annoy the author.   This book is a must read for parents who think it’s cute to let their kids run around a restaurant – or a bar – while they meet up with friends.

But that’s the people sort of kids.  Yesterday I wrote about my “Fairchildren,” four examples of pencils made by Leroy W. Fairchild that I’ve picked up recently.  At the DC show, I saw quite a few examples of other people’s Fairchildren, and they don’t annoy me at all (I even secretly wished they were mine).

Here’s one that Dave Glass had on his table at the DC show:

On the one side, “L.W.F. & Co.”:

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.

My Fair Children

Lately I’ve been getting more into Victorian pencils.  Here’s a few I’ve found recently:

All of these were made by Leroy W. Fairchild, the New York manufacturer who supplied nibs to the L.E. Waterman Co. early in Waterman’s history.  With the mechanisms advanced, they look like this:

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.

Joe Couldn't Lose On This One

Joe Nemecek called dibs on something in an online auction awhile back.  He was excited to acquire it – so much so that he wanted to personally write a guest blog article to introduce it.  So I snapped the pictures for Joe, and he went to work.  Without further ado, here’s Joe --

Several months ago I was doing my usual weekly search at an online auction site for mechanical pencils. Up popped a  beater Ingersoll with an accessory shirt clip imprinted Kant-Luz-It.

My jaw almost hit the floor.  I sent Jon a very polite 'dibs'. The clip looked eerily similar to the one found on my chased black hard rubber Crocker pencil.

I always assumed Crocker made this clip for its pens and pencils. This article will attempt to establish that the Kant-Luz-It Klip Company made this particular clip for Crocker.

The research started.  The patent date imprinted on the clip is April 12, 1921:

The date refers to patent number 1,374,515.  Sylvester M. Nathan of Fitchburg, Massachusetts applied for it on November 9, 1920:

The text of the patent describes a short shirt pencil clip, with hidden spring attached to a trigger bar. When a pencil with this clip is placed in a shirt pocket, the tension of the spring holds the trigger to the pocket. Pressing down on the trigger releases the clip and allows the pencil to be removed from the pocket. Hence the name 'can’t lose it'

This clipping from The American Stationer dated July 15, 1922 establishes the link between Sylvester M. Nathan and Kant-Luz-It Klip Company of Fitchburg, Massachusetts.  Sylvester M. Nathan was an incorporator of Kant-Luz-It Klip Company, along with Ubert C. Russell and Blanche R. Nathan. This clipping also establishes that the company at least initially produced paper clips.
 

So what happened to the pencil clip side of the company? This article from Typewriter Topics dated November 1922 establishes beginning production of the shirt clips.

Below is an advertisement from the November, 1933 issue of Popular Mechanics that provides some interesting tidbits about the sale of the clip.

So the Kant-Luz-It clip began production in 1922 and was still being produced in 1933.  By 1933, according to this, the company had moved to Pittsburgh.

You are wondering what happened to Crocker in this blog article? I've saved the high temperature best stuff almost for the last. The following excerpt from the article in the Fitchburg Sentinel dated January 9, 1926 is significant. There was a fire and ...

“The fire proved especially disastrous to the Kant Luz It Clip Co. as the Crocker Pen Co. of Boston had practically completed arrangements to move to this city and were expected to locate here next Friday. The local company had just shipped most of its finished product, thus reducing the actual loss at this time. Valuable plans were destroyed and much property so S. M. Nathan places the loss between $2500 and $3000.

“The Crocker Pen Co. had notified its employees that it was to move to Fitchburg and made arrangements to transfer its entire manufacturing plant to the Kant Luz It Clip quarters. Whether the fire will delay the move or not is unknown today. If the fire keeps the industry away from Fitchburg the loss will be hard to estimate as the Crocker company is a rapid growing concern which would give employment to a large force.”

Did Crocker ever move to Fitchburg? I do not yet know. Anybody?

The Crocker company started using this clip from 1923 onward, per Rob Astyk's article in the January/February 1991 issue of Pen World.  Crocker folded in the early 30s. The company was a smaller producer of quality pens and pencils that are highly prized by collectors today.  My Crocker is about one of my all-time favorite pencils.

For the Crocker crazy, here is a picture of the full company imprint:

“Crocker Ink-Tite / Boston / Pat. Jan. 30 ‘17 / Made in USA” (editor’s note: give me a break – Joe didn’t want the lettering highlighted on this one!).

(Editor’s note: the only patent with a Crocker connection issued on January 30, 1917 was number 1,214,310.  Stormont Josslyn applied for a patent for a fountain pen on September 18, 1916, and he assigned a one-half interest in the patent to Seth Chilton Crocker:

Huh.  No clip, and the patent has absolutely nothing to do with pencils.)

That's what I got.  No big period to my beginning proposition, but almost a complete sentence.

-Joe Nemecek