Wednesday, February 4, 2015

A Few Great Realites and Autopoints

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Out of the mother lode’s great box of wonders – that largest of totes containing more than 500 pencils from the 1930s through the 1950s, came some great pieces like these:


The larger of the two is marked "Realite," the brand name Autopoint continued to use long after the old Autopoint merged with Realite in the early 1920s. However, note that the two clips are identical:


The Realite has very small, inconspicuous Autopoint markings near the top of the barrel:


That large Realite is a good match for the other large example I’ve had in my collection, in a barbershop-pole style brown and green marble. Note, however, that the brown and green example has a flat ball and more of a teardrop shape:


I’m pretty sure that the flat ball clip was transitional to the two-faceted Realite clips found on those weird advertisers so often found in wild, unique colors. I’m also pretty sure that both were used by the company in 1937:




Scratch that. Make that dead sure:

2 comments:

Jim Stauffer said...

I agree that the flattened ball end pocket clip appeared prior to the ridge clip. However, the 1937 date on both models could simply mean that some of the flat ball clip models were left over from 1935 or 1936 production. Without a catalog from those years, all of this is just a guess.

Jim Stauffer said...

Jim Stauffer said...
I wholeheartedly agree that the flattened ball end pocket clip appeared prior to the ridge clip. However, the 1937 date on both models could simply mean that some of the flat ball clip models were left over from 1934 or 1935 or 1936 production. Without a catalog from those years, all of this is just a guess.