Maybe Not All

This article has been edited and included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 3; copies are available print on demand through Amazon here, and I offer an ebook version in pdf format at the Legendary Lead Company here.

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If I had a nickel for every time an online seller claimed that some junky unmarked pencil they had was a Sheaffer golf pencil . . . ok, maybe I’d only have a dollar. But still, it happens waaaay too often. After all, it’s really easy to detect whether a golf pencil is a Sheaffer, right? The fact that they are marked "Sheaffer" is a dead giveaway, right?

Until the Philly show, I would have said right. Gimme a dollar. Today, however, I say "maybe." As I was going through the pencils in the "mother lode" that turned up at the Philly show, I found this one in a bag of unmarked golf pencils:

If this one had a ringtop, I’d swear it was a Sheaffer. OK, if it had "Sheaffer" marked on it, I’d swear it was a Sheaffer. But them are cheap words. Suffice to say when I was going through things with a friend looking over my shoulder, I looked at it under a loupe, saw it was marked and nevertheless turned around and asked, "doesn’t this look like it’s a Sheaffer?"

John Hall, who was set up at the table next to mine, overheard the conversation and happened to have a couple Sheaffer golf pencils for sale. So we lined them up to see just how close it is:

Wow. Close. Very, very close. Interestingly, John’s black and pearl example was a little bigger around, but the marine green and pearl example was exactly the same diameter, so I tried swapping the tops to see how they fit:

They are threaded differently, so that wasn’t possible. However, as you can see from this picture, everything about these two is otherwise identical: identical proportions, nose cones, everything. So these days, when I say if I had a nckel for every time an online seller claimed to have a Sheaffer golf pencil that wasn’t marked, I might have ninety-five cents in my pocket . . .

And one other instance when I’d say maybe, maybe not.