The 2014 "Leadies"

It’s been a really strange year here at Leadhead’s – a short year as far as blog posts go, with an extended break for the first three quarters of it while I wrote and published two volumes of the patent book project. Great stuff was finding me even during the hiatus and there are a lot of things I know now that I didn’t know a year ago. So, without further ado and in no particular order, here are my top ten discoveries from 2014:

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.

Which Part To Use?

Oversized Autopoint pencils are a lot of fun to collect. There were a wide variety of clips, caps and configurations, and the company would let you special order any combination of features you wanted – ordering from Autopoint must have been like picking a slushee flavor at Sonic.

Here are examples of some common configurations:

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.

A Couple More Tumblers Click into Place

It’s been a little more than a year (http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2013/09/it-would-have-been-so-much-easier-had-i.html) since conclusive proof surfaced that the Nupoint, Hi-Speed and Presto pencils all traced back to 1920s enterpreneur Samuel Kanner:

The plot thickens.

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.

Where Do These Fit In?

When I saw this one in a junk box a while ago, I had to spend a few dollars on it, even though I already had one at home:

These slim model, twist mechanism Eversharps have a clip that is a lot like what you’d find on a Skyline Press Clip 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.

A Couple New Details, Anyway

Nardi pencils are an interesting breed. One of the first articles I wrote about the brand here at the blog was about the brand and the later-production Nardi which indicates that the Nardi remained in production for quite a few years, probably as late as the 1940s.

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.

Of Course

I suppose I could shine this one up a bit so that you can see just how clean it is:

But that tarnish is a badge of honor, showing just how little this pencil has been used over the course of nearly a century. The clip is a dead giveaway as to 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.

Twelve Eagles . . . Eagling

I know, the twelve days of Christmas start on Christmas day. I just don’t want to wait that long to tell you about these. The Eagle Spear is a longtime favorite of mine:

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.

A Bit of Red and Green . . . Well, Red Anyway

The last time I came around to these, I came so close to telling you what I meant to say about them:

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.

I Was Hoping

This neat little sterling pencil case showed up in an online auction, and there wasn’t a lot the seller had right in the description:

The one thing he or she did have right was a date the seller said was on the barrel . . . August 9, 1892. It was right after I’d finished the first volume of my patent books, so it seemed like a good opportunity to see what I could find out. And there it was – the only pencil patented on that date:

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 Isn't

Joe Nemecek asked me some months ago if I had ever heard of a "John Birch" pencil. I hadn’t:

The spring-loaded button on the rear end opens the jaws, which close and clamp around a piece of lead when the button is released – exactly like an Eagle Automatic. But there are two problems:

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.

Enough To Keep Me Up At Night

I’ve only got a handful of unidentified, unmarked pencils in my collection, and out of that handful, only one or two of them did I go out of my way to pick up. This is one of them:

I saw this thing in an online auction and had to bite, because I was convinced there must be a marking on it somewhere to identify 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.

The Do-Over

Until about a year ago, I used an Olympus camera that belonged to Janet for the pictures I post here. The camera was a gift she had received from her employer on the anniversary of her hiring, and she was a very good sport about the fact that I had commandeered it for my pencil stuff.  There have been only a few times when she has pointedly asked, "Can I use my camera?"

When I finally decided to invest in a new camera, it was partly to return Janet’s camera to her – in great condition, excepting ordinary wear and tear from about four years service – and partly because I was no longer happy with the results I was getting and I wanted to do better. When I came home with a new camera, new lenses and some fancy new lighting, I could hardly wait to snap off a few shots, and this was the first pencil I reached for:

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 Sneaky Immigrant

It takes a minute to notice what’s interesting about this Wahl Eversharp.

The trim isn’t all that unusual . . . the color likewise isn’t unheard of. It’s the combination of the two that isn’t what you’d expect to see – and when you see it, there’s no question what it is. Here’s a spread of other Wahl Eversharps in that same color:

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.

EHCO (ehco. . . ehco . . . ehco . . . )

The Don Scott Antique Show is a monthly show at the Ohio State Fairgrounds, running from November through April. The November show, which begins on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, is really something to see and I always end up spending about twice what I plan to spend.

This year was no exception, and one of my best finds of the day was in the very back row of the larger building:

No, that’s not Echo – that’s EHCO, as in the Eggens Hambler Company.


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.

Overcompensation

When I saw this pair of Wahl Eversharp pencils come up in an online auction, I found myself tilting my laptop screen around as I tried to figure out whether I was really seeing what I thought I was seeing:

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.

A Sheaffer . . . If Only On The Outside

I looked at this one just one too many times at The Ohio Show. Something just didn’t look quite right, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was:

After I’d carried it around for a couple hours it dawned on me what was different . . .

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.

Layer Upon Layer of Wicked Cool

This one had me all stirred up the moment I saw it, for several reasons:

For starters, just look at this thing. The barrel is enameled metal and looks more like a cartridge from a machine gun than it does a pencil. Starting at the nose, the cone screws off to reveal something pretty close to an Autopoint or Dur-O-Lite . . .

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.

Why Didn't Anyone Roll This Before?

It seems like a lot of pencil brand names might have been concocted using a pair of dice with short words instead of numbers on the different sides. Roll once . . . "Ever" and "Sharp." Walter Sheaffer rolls . . . "Sharp" and "Point." American Lead Pencil gets "Ever" and "Point." "Rite" and "Point" goes to . . . ok, you get my drift.

I found the first one of these about five years ago, during one of my annual stops at the Barnesville Antique Mall in Barnesville, Ohio on the way to the DC Supershow:

I remember feeling ridiculous paying more than a buck or two for it, but it was the only thing in the entire mall that piqued my interest during that visit and so I sprung for it just so I wouldn’t get skunked

If I had to guess who might have made them, I’d say Lipic (note particularly that bottom example with the lower joint). The clips on these read "Sharpencil"

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.

A Good Day For A Few 3-Ways

I don’t know which would be funnier – whether during the straight-laced Ozzie-and-Harriet days of the early 1950s the makers of the Monroe hadn’t considered the double entendre, or whether they knew exactly what they were doing.

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.

Speaking of Trupoint . . .

In yesterday’s post, I concluded that a pencil marked "Trupoint" was made by Eclipse, because the clip and overall construction were identical to that of another Eclipse subbrand, the Marxton:

That’s worth circling back around to for a minute. "Trupoint" was a brand name used by Sears, Roebuck & Co. for pens and pencils, and what appear to be the earliest examples I’ve found – earlier than the ones I pictured here yesterday – also appear to have been made by Eclipse . . .

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.

Stepping It Up

Well, at least it didn’t take me a year.

On one of the online forums late last December, one of the users had found an "Enduro" fountain pen and requested information. I said that I thought the Enduro was an Eclipse brand, and I promised to come up with some photographs to show why I believed that.

I then promptly forgot to do it.

So at long last, here are a Trupoint, an Enduro, a Moderne and a Marxton together:

I’d noted the similarities between the Trupoint and Moderne clips here before (http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2012/08/first-blood.html), but I still hadn’t made the connection with Marxton. As for the Enduro, I’ve had it laying around the museum for a couple years, but it wasn’t until I saw the Enduro pen in that online post that I thought to pull it and do some comparing. Note that while the four have slightly different trim configurations, the clips with those stepped upper sections are identical . . .

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 "R"

A little more than a year ago, I posted an article here about a mysterious pencil marked "R.M. & Co." that was a dead ringer for an early Mabie Todd ("Probably Mabie . . . Maybe" at http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2013/09/probably-mabie-maybe.html):

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 . . .

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.

A Couple More Eagles

When Joe Nemecek and I got together last month, we made sure to get a few pictures of some of the Eagles Joe has been turning up lately. First, he managed to score another of the goliath Eagle Automatic pencils:

I wrote about my red example a couple years ago (http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2012/05/will-gentleman-from-bulgaria-please.html); here it was compared to a normal Automatic . . .

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 Little Detail

I’ll admit I get fatigued seeing double-ended Autopoint pencils. Neat as they are, they were also so successful that they are everywhere. In fact, I’d lay odds that out of all the people who have said "oh, you like pencils? I have a bag of them here somewhere," a majority of them have at least one of them in that bag. I do have a few representative examples that have made their way home with me over the years:

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.