Placing the Medford

The Medford was another of the Rexall Drug Company’s store brands.  The brand appears on page 99 of The Catalogue:

I didn’t have enough evidence when I wrote the book to say that these were made by the Eagle Pencil Company, although I've always suspected it.  In the last year a couple of things I’ve found have helped me pin this one down.

To learn more, this full article is included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 3, 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.

McColm Stops the Presses

As October, 2013 drew to a close, I was starting to feel the weight of the world begin to lift – or at least the weight of the first volume of my patent book. I had examined thousands of patents one by one, carefully documenting each as I went in a spreadsheet. For several weeks my day job had been just the middle part of my day, my break in between the early morning and late night sessions of tedious database building and editing. Many days I spent more time working on the book than I did at the office – and I was spending full days at the office.

But with the most difficult and mind-numbing part of the process done, I was having fun writing the short stories which accompany the illustrations in the book. Light was beginning to show at the end of the tunnel, and Janet was relieved as I assured her the book would be done before the Ohio Pen Show in November (little did she or I know that work on Volume 2 would start after the new year).

It was during that time that Matt McColm sent me an email of a pencil he’d found in a coffee can full of Coors bottle openers (since Matt’s from Denver, that’s not much of a surprise – the Coors part anyway):

The Coors part might not have been a surprise, but you have to wonder what made an antique dealer think that’s where something like this belonged. "Hmm, here’s a pencil . . .looks really old, possibly gold, works good . . . beautiful mother of pearl . . . ah, I’ve got the perfect place for that in my display, in that coffee can over there with all those rusty old mid-century bottle openers." Really?? I like to think things like this look just a little more special than that, even to the untrained eye!

I shouldn’t complain. Matt knew something like this was right up my alley and the method to this particular dealer’s madness made it that much cheaper for him to snap it up for me. And with the draft of my book about done, I thought I’d show off a little bit and asked him if it had a patent date. It did:

"Fairchild / PL Pat. Mar.8.81." I flipped to the first section of the book, in which patents are organized by date, and thumbed to March of 1881, and . . . nothing. I didn’t have even a single patent listed for March 8, 1881. The light I had seen at the end of the tunnel suddenly looked so much farther away. How did I miss this one? And if I missed this one, how many others did I also miss? 

To learn more, this full article is included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 3, 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.

Naming a No-Name

This one showed up in an online auction awhile back.

Ordinarily I’m not interested in a pencil unless it’s marked with a name, but perpetual calendars are a pretty cool feature and besides the fact that it’s a great looking pencil, even though it isn’t marked I can tell you with absolute certainty who made this one.

To learn more, this full article is included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 3, 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.

Not Quite Right

I know that I must have circled by this one three or four times at the Ohio Show last year:

It’s a Sheaffer "Titan" from the late 1920s, but there was something about it that just didn’t look quite right to me. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t anything about the pencil itself: it works perfectly and it’s in excellent condition, and I really like that classy black barrel. I just have never gotten around to organizing my Sheaffer flattops, so I don’t normally buy them at shows because unless I haul the ones I’ve got to the shows, I’m not certain whether or not what I’m looking at is a duplicate.

But there was just something about this one that kept drawing me back. After about the fourth time I picked it up, I decided that even if I did have one at home, I liked it well enough that I wouldn’t even mind having two.

Back at the house, I did find that I had another black Sheaffer Titan, and when I put them side by side, it became clear what it was that just looked a little strange about this new one:

To learn more, this full article is included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 3, 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 Pencil That Launched (More Than) a Thousand Patent Searches

It’s happened to all of us at some point. You’re in the garage looking for a particular screwdriver, and it’s nowhere to be found. You become increasingly frustrated as you scrounge around in the mess. You start straightening things up a bit as you hunt around in the hopes that next time it won’t be so hard to find things. One thing leads to another, and next thing you know, you look up and the whole garage is organized. Maybe you found your screwdriver, maybe not. Maybe you cut the process short by giving up and sulking off to the hardware store to buy another screwdriver.

This sort of thing happened to me in a big way about a year ago, although it wasn’t with a screwdriver, the figurative garage was far more enormous and quietly closing the garage door and slipping off for a cheap replacement simply wasn’t an option.

I’m referring to that shambles of a garage known as the United States Patent databases. I had wandered in there in search of a pre-1911 patent for a particular pencil that I had been meaning to write about for some time, and I thought I had everything I needed to find it – to carry on the metaphor, I knew exactly where that damned screwdriver was supposed to be.

It wasn’t there. I tried everything, and I simply couldn’t find it. In fact, even though I was sure it was an American patent, I couldn’t even find anything issued on that date.

The problem, as it turned out, had nothing to do with the patent itself or with the feeble skills of one hapless researcher: the patent databases were malfunctioning on that particular day, so no matter what search I ran, there were no results to be found. Although the databases were back up and running a day or so later, the experience started me thinking: what if all the tools I currently use were suddenly no longer available?

The question gained greater urgency a week or so later, when the United States government shut down over a fiscal squabble, and the USPTO posted an ominous message on its website. Despite the shutdown, they said, their website would remain available – for the time being.

That’s why, for the next six weeks, I took a break from Leadhead’s and compiled a database of every writing instrument patent I could find prior to 1911 – not just for pencils, but for pens, penholders, stylographs – anything that lays down a line on a sheet of paper. Call it pessimism that our government might not be able to reopen. Call it determination never to lose another freakin’ screwdriver. Janet called it the mess that occupied the kitchen table for weeks, but when it was finished, I called it American Writing Instrument Patents 1799-1910.

And I am pleased to report, in the process I did find my proverbial screwdriver. Here’s the pencil that started the project:

To learn more, this full article is included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 3, 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 Things I Need to Know

When I first started practicing law, I got my start examining real estate titles at the Recorder’s Office here in Licking County, Ohio. No fair snickering like a bunch of sixth-graders at the name out there: my home county is named for the salt licks that once dotted the landscape.

My job as a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed associate involved (to show that I’m older than I look) pulling huge leatherbound volumes of documents from the shelves, bringing them back to a stand and opening them up to review the documents that had been filed. These books were dusty, enormous and heavy, so those who did not possess or acquire an aptitude for remembering numbers would make many more trips back to the shelves and carry around a lot more of these big books than necessary.

The lesson I learned from the experience and still carry with me today is the ability to commit six-digit numbers (say, "204696" for Volume 204, page 696) to memory very easily – in my case, even easier than I can remember a person’s name. Seven digit numbers, such as patent number 2,028,855, also stick, especially if I’ve spent some time studying that patent. I remember them like phone numbers, playing them out on a keypad in my head and remembering the shapes they trace as I do.

Whether my years of lugging big books around beat it into me, or whether some innate ability made me well-suited for my profession, it is a gift that frequently becomes a curse. While most people would stumble across yesterday’s Hicks repeating pencil and just be thrilled with it for what it is, I couldn’t focus completely on that, because there was a thought playing on a loop in my head:

2,028,855. 202-8855? 2 . . . 0 . . . 2 . . . I’ve seen that number somewhere before.

To learn more, this full article is included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 3, 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.

Tying a Couple Things Together . . . Sort Of

The nicest pencil I found at the Philadelphia Pen Show last January was this one, which was on Menash Murad’s table:

That turned-up ball clip is a dead giveaway that this one falls within the Hicks/Edward Todd family, but this one had an interesting twist. Well actually, maybe it’s more accurate to say that it’s interesting that there’s no twist at all about this one:

To learn more, this full article is included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 3, 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.

Ladies and Gentlemen: Check Your Junk Boxes!

By the time you reach the end of this article, you’ll probably find yourself pawing through your junker box looking for something like this:

To learn more, this full article is included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 3, 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.

Occam Needs a Shave

One of the best parts of corresponding with my fellow enthusiasts is adding to my vocabulary, as was the case a while ago, when during an email chat with Roger Wooten he indicated that I was using "Occam’s Razor."

One of the best parts of corresponding with my fellow enthusiasts by email, rather than face-to-face, was that Roger could not see the blank expression on the face of a man who had absolutely no idea what Occam’s Razor was. I’m so much cooler online, as the song goes.

So I gave Roger the binary equivalent of a sage nod while simultaneously I researched this mysterious razor – and found that it was in fact a tool I had been carrying with me for years yet never knew what it was called. Occam’s Razor isn’t a physical tool, but an analytical one attributed to the medieval philosopher William of Occam that one should make only those assumptions that are necessary. Boiled down, Occam’s "razor" slices away unnecessary assumptions and leaves the simplest answer to a problem.

That means I know exactly what Occam would think of this one:

I like to think Occam might have gulped and said "Wow, that’s a big honkin’ burgundy Vacumatic pencil," but I doubt he would have been so impressed. Nevertheless, big honkin’ and burgundy would be accurate, as this one measures 5 1/4 inches stem to stern and is a bit bigger around than one usually sees. It’s at the top end where Occam would take issue:

To learn more, this full article is included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 3, 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.

Oscar Tweeten Strikes Again

I’ll always have a soft spot for Oscar Tweeten’s bowling score pencils, since one of the first articles I wrote here was about them -- see http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2011/11/tweeten.html

I was ecstatic at the Chicago Pen Show to find what appeared to be another example. Here it is, the shorter of the two:

To learn more, this full article is included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 3, 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's Outstanding Eagle

When Joe Nemecek and I compare notes, I’ll send him a photo of the particular pencil I’ve got a question about. Since Joe’s got his pencils photographed in slotter boxes (his pictures are over at "Joe’s Pencil Pages," http://home.comcast.net/~joe120/site/?/photos/), when he replies to me the picture he sends to me will include the pencil he wants me to see, along with a few others.

Often, as was the case with the pencil I’m showing you today, there will be something else in the tray of pencils Joe is showing me that gets my attention. Once in a great while, as was the case with the pencil I’m showing you today, I’ll completely forget about whatever pencil we were talking about and the conversation shifts entirely to its neighbor. After appropriate oohs and aahs were exchanged, Joe brought this one with him to Raleigh and I got some shots of it all by its lonesome:

To learn more, this full article is included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 3, 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 Philadelphia Distraction

When I traveled to the Philadelphia show last January with my friend John Hall, it was a long, cold drive from Columbus. Of course, any drive along the Pennsylvania Turnpike seems twice as long as it really is!

We decided to push through as far as we could on Thursday night after work, hoping that we would at least shave enough hours off of the trip that we could arrive at the hotel early enough on Friday to enjoy the sights and set up my book display. And push hard we did, all the way through to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, just a couple hours outside of Philly. By the time we reached the state’s capitol, we were DONE. D-O-N-E, get-me-the-hell-out-of-this-truck done, so we paid our three pints of blood at the toolbooth and wandered into town looking for something to eat.

Since I’d been hoping we’d make Harrisburg, I’d searched around a bit online to see what there was to do in town, and I’d found a place called Dockside Willie’s, on the west bank of the Susquehanna River. The view was more like looking out over the Susquehanna Glacier, with enormous chunks of ice accumulated along the banks, but I swear that first beer was in my top five best-tasting beers I ever had.

And as we waited for our food, weary from our travels and with hard earned-alcohol in hand, John and I did exactly what you’d expect a couple collectors on their way to a show would do: we checked out cell phones to see how our online auction bids were faring. I was delighted to see that I won the only auction I was hot and heavy after – and particularly delighted when it appeared that either no one else caught on to how unusual this pencil is, or just as likely that no one else was interested in another obscure Eversharp variant the way I am.

I’ll back up a bit first to give this one a bit of context. Here’s three full-sized Wahl Eversharp pencils from the mid-1920s:

The top example is the earliest of the three. When Wahl first began to dabble in barrel materials other than metal, the simplest way to add different materials was to replace the middle part with a straight tube, threaded onto ends machined using the company’s existing equipment. Eversharp catalogs available at the Pen Collectors of America’s online library are helpful in putting together a timeline: thin models the size of the company’s usual metal pencils were introduced in the 1924 catalog (the innards had to be shrunk a bit to accommodate the thicker walls of a hard rubber barrel); oversized models were catalogued beginning in 1925. 

There’s a bit of a gap in the documents available at the PCA, and I’d love to see the company’s regular 1926 and 1927 catalogs. All I know for certain is that by the time Wahl’s 1928 catalog was published, Wahl had developed machining to eliminate the large metal nose-cone and fashion attractive tapered barrels out of the new materials. The bottom example matched the pens in Wahl’s sleek new plastic line of pens, and all the examples I’ve ever seen have the tapered barrel and small tip to complement this slick new design.

All, of course, except the example that had me whoopin’ and hollerin’ over a beer in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania:

To learn more, this full article is included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 3, 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.

Topping Off a Pearlie

I have more fun with the stuff costing just a couple bucks than I do with those costing hundreds of dollars. Take this one, which turned up at last year’s Ohio show:

It took a minute for me to figure out why this one looked a little different. It’s a Sheaffer "Pearlie" (or "Pearl Center" pencils, if you choose to speak the King’s Sheafferese). But it’s no ordinary Sheaffer Pearlie – in fact, it’s the only one like it I’ve ever seen. This one is a thin model (shown here next to one of the usual girth):

To learn more, this full article is included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 3, 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 Last Two Nails

"Back to the Drawing Board" (http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2013/08/back-to-drawing-board.html) was the second article I wrote in an attempt to identify who made a pencil marked "Guild" and owned by my friend John Coleman:

In the first installment, I’d incorrectly concluded that John’s pencil was made by Mabie Todd & Co., due to a few examples conclusively traced to that manufacturer. In the second, I had learned about the Guild Products Corporation, which purchased products from many different manufacturers, including Mabie Todd but not necessarily exclusively. With the field open to any possibility, I concluded that John’s pencil was probably made by Conklin, based on the similarity of John’s pencil to some Conklins in my collection:

In this article, we can scratch the word "probably." Insert "definitely."

To learn more, this full article is included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 3, 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 Other Fairchild

I’ve been on a Victorian pencil kick lately. I’m probably making up for lost time, since I didn’t pay much attention to them for the first decade or so I collected, but these days, whenever I’m checking out online auctions, I’ll search for some of the Victorian makers – "Todd" (which will pick up both Edward and Mabie), "Hicks," and another standby: "Fairchild."

One day a few months ago this one popped up during my Fairchild search:

The seller had faithfully indexed the item under "Fairchild" due to what’s written on the other side of the barrel:

To learn more, this full article is included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 3, 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.

What Might Have Been

One thing that I’ve found takes away a lot of pressure when I’m chasing these dumb pencils around is to think of a great pencil as being like a bus: when one comes around, if the time isn’t right or the fare is too high, you can always wait for the next one no matter how nice it is. They didn’t make just one, I’m always telling myself.

But every so often, something comes along and I know I’ve probably only got one shot to pull the trigger – and as was the case this time, I knew that in fact they probably did only make one. Well, two actually. Get a load of these:

To learn more, this full article is included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 3, 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.

Fun For On The Road

I picked this one up awhile back, not because it solved some earth-shattering mystery that I’m going to lay on you on a lazy Sunday morning, but just because I thought it was really cool and I liked it:

To learn more, this full article is included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 3, 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.

Nice To Think About, But No

At the Philadelphia Show in January, Joe brought this Parker Vacumatic along for show and tell. He doubted its legitimacy, but wanted a second opinion:

What was unusual about the pencil was the lead size: a full 2.0 millimeters, comparable to a modern drafting pencil:

To learn more, this full article is included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 3, 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.

One Creepy Little Dude

When this thing showed up in an online auction last week, I felt compelled to bid on it.

I didn’t bid because it was a Sheaffer that would fill a spot in my collection, and I didn’t bid because it was in the best condition. I bid on it because of that frame welded onto the clip, with a weird little guy in what looks like a red nightshirt and yellow cap waving at me. The seller said that his sash read "Hospitality," but nothing in my preliminary poking about turned up anything that made sense about this.

There just has to be a story behind this one, I thought.  When the pencil arrived and I examined it more closely, the word imprinted on the little guy’s nightshirt wasn’t "hospitality," but "Hotpoint":

To learn more, this full article is included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 3, 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.

Best Buck (Less a Penny) I Ever Spent

As I’m dusting off the blog and getting back into the swing of things, there’s no pipeline of articles on the shelf ready to go. So as long as I’m doing articles in "real time," I thought it would be fitting to write about the item that arrived in the mail just yesterday:

This little gem was in a lot of five items in an online auction, and it was the one thing in the bunch that caught my eye. With time winding down and no takers at the opening bid of 99 cents, I figured what the heck – at that price, I’ll pay the shipping just to see what this thing is. I bid a dollar, but that last penny proved unnecessary when I was the only taker.

To learn more, this full article is included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 3, 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.