I'll Bet You Didn't Know This

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I was pretty excited when Rick Krantz had this unmarked pencil on his table at Philly – it was the missing piece I knew was out there that connected two interesting dots:

I had always heard that this clip was associated with the Moore Pen Company, and this example seems to prove the point. Here it is flanked by a couple others along these lines:

Note the overall shape and size, the two center bands, and the identical tips on the green and burgundy examples.

But connecting this clip to Moore isn't what had me excited about this one. It was connecting Moore to something else. Here’s the new Moore next to a couple of metal Slencils in my collection:

Slencil was headquartered in Orange, Massachusetts, not far off from Moore’s operations in Boston. You are justified at this point to be suspicious if I suggested there was some connection between Moore and Slencil – after all, Slencil was a one-trick pony turning out flat pencils, while Moore offered a wide range of high (and not so high) quality writing instruments. It’s possible, you might think, that similar clips might be all these two have in common.

But I’ve got something else up my sleeve to show you.

The clip on this one also looks Moore-ish, but that’s not what’s important about this one. Did you see the sticker on the side of the box?

"Slencil by Moore."

At this point, you can ask me any question you want – other than "yes, at some point there was some connection between Slencil and Moore," the answer is "I don’t know."