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.