I had speculated that the "M" was "Mabie," as in John Mabie, and that the "R" might have been John Rauch, one of America’s earliest pencil manufacturers. Mabie apprenticed with Rauch during the early 1840s, and there’s no evidence that there was anything adversarial about the younger John’s decision to move on and start his own shop. It may seem like an obvious conclusion that the "R" stood for Rauch, but there was a reason I hesitated: none of the Rauch-marked pencils I’d seen look anything like a Mabie Todd . . .
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