The Patent Book has arrived!

Thanks to a terrific pre-holiday effort by my friends at Greyden Press, I pulled into my driveway just a couple hours ago with a truckload full of copies of my new book, American Writing Instrument Patents 1799-1910:

We built this book to withstand years of everyday use, with a heavy-duty PVC coil binding and heavy stock paper.  I also designed it to be easy to use -- taking a cue from the legal books I frequently use, the book has tabs to make it a breeze navigating around the different sections:

The book is 348 pages long, and peppered throughout are reproductions of many interesting patent drawings:

The book opens with a short history of the development of the patent system in the United States, an article on what a "Writing Instrument" is (you'd be surprised how many inventions do everything a fountain pen or pencil does but aren't meant for "writing"), a glossary of terms and a guide to using the book.  Here's a couple pages from the history article:

The heart of the book, of course, is the tables of patent data.  For ease of reading, I set the typeface in 10-point Constantina.  This made for precious little space between the columns and narrow margins, but in the end, this proved the best way to pack a lot of information into the smallest possible space:

To break things up, I gave 75 of the most significant patents full-page treatment, with a reproduction of the full patent drawing page and a short summary explaining what makes it important, interesting or just plain goofy.  These are shown in chronological order, beginning with the earliest writing instrument patent for which a drawing survives (James Bogardus' pencil patent of 1833). Here's the page featuring Roy Conklin's first patent:

Of course, no book covering nineteenth-century pen patents would be complete without Lewis E. Waterman's patents:

But the book goes further -- explaining why the first patent Waterman applied for wasn't the first one to be granted! 

At the end of the book, there's an index to guide you through the illustrations.  George Parker's name came up quite a few times:

I'm officially launching the book at the Philadelphia Pen Show on the weekend of January 17, 2014.  If you are going to attend the show and want to avoid shipping charges, you can send me a Paypal for $39.99 and I'll have it there for you.  For those who won't be attending the show (or can't wait until then for a copy), you can order the book through my website, http://www.jonathanveley.com/books.  International buyers, please contact me first so we can get the shipping charges right.  

Coming soon . . .

Things have been pretty quiet here at the blog for awhile, but not without good reason.  No, there haven't been any bodily injuries or illnesses, and no, I haven't run out of things to talk about (to the contrary, I've got a lot of new stories bottled up inside just bustin' to get out).

Truth be told, I was researching the October 1 article when things went horribly wrong.  The patent databases just weren't cooperating, and nothing I was doing was turning up the patent that I just knew was supposed to be there.  Not even George Kovalenko's book could help me, since the patent in my crosshairs was from around 1880 and George's book starts with patents issued in 1911.

I was frustrated, annoyed and sheepish all at once.  I decided that someone needed to write a book about patents issued before 1911 so that I wouldn't spend so much time rooting around for these things when I need them, once and for all.

And I decided it might as well be me.

A couple days before the end of September I forced myself to put Leadhead's out of my mind and focus exclusively on writing just such a book.  I wanted it to be both usable and readable, so I wrote articles on general American patent history, on how to research patents and on how the words our Victorian predecessors used have evolved into the terms we use for pens, pencils and pieces today.   I even included an article on how I decided what to include and not to include in the book (question:  is a machine used to stripe tennis courts a "writing instrument"?).

And then I pulled together a massive amount of information together.  I started by going through every patent issued from the patent office opened in 1790 through 1910 in Category 401, weeding out the things that weren't pens, pencils or some other writing instrument as I went.   Then I went back through the blog here and pulled out all the patents that weren't in category 401, such as patents for clips, coatings or other integral parts of writing instruments).  Then I followed up in those categories to pull out a lot of the really obscure stuff.

The hardest part, however, was figuring out how to present the data so that it would be more than just a list.  I decided to create a massive spreadsheet, then resort the list in different ways so that the database is searchable by different criteria.  Here's the back cover:

The thumb tabs will make zeroing in on the right patent faster than I believe has ever been possible before. However, even though this provides a massive amount of information, the 250-page list that was just about as much fun to read as a telephone book.

So, to add a few spoonfuls of sugar, I pulled out 85 of what I considered to be the most historically significant patents of the era (with the occasional irresistably goofy ones) and added full-page illustrations of the patent drawings from each, accompanied by a few short paragraphs to explain why they were as important.  Here's an example:

That's a 1907 patent for a pen that's a dead ringer for a Conklin Nozac.  Who knew?

The last step, however, was the most important -- trial by fire in the field.  The Ohio Pen Show was this last weekend, and I had a copy of what I hoped would be the final draft of the book printed off in a 3-ring binder.  Joe Nemecek spent some time at Leadhead's Spread before and after the show, and we went through some examples he had on hand to make sure all the patents he knew of were in there, and they were.  Then, off to the show for four days of looking at obscure patent dates imprinted on barrels in the wild. I'm pleased to report that without exception -- every patent date I found imprinted on a pen or barrel and looked up in the book was right where it was supposed to be.

So today, with my beta tests complete, the finished project has been emailed to my publisher.  I'm told that the book will be ready in December, so I'm planning a formal launch at the 2014 Philadelphia Pen Show (for anyone that can't wait for Philly or isn't planning to go, yes I will make advance copies available).  The cover price will be $39.99, but through the Philadelphia show I'll offer it for $35 (plus shipping, if needed).

And yes, in answer to the question I've been asked quite a bit lately -- I'll be back with new stories soon.  When?  Well, today I cleaned off the kitchen table, so for the first time in weeks it isn't covered with notes, bits of paper, reference books and my laptop:  that will make Janet a happy woman.  But she still has a long list of deferred projects awaiting me for the day I wasn't up until midnight every night working away on this project, so after I get through all that, I'll take a few deep breaths and maybe a nap . . .

then I'll be back.  I've already got the first few articles written in my head.

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.