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.