The Murco Revealed

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When I embarked on a project to document little known advertising pencils a few months ago, one of the groupings of pencils I assembled was this bunch, all marked “Murco” on the clip:

Each of these bears a strong resemblance to products manufactured by the Ritepoint Company, but I hadn’t gotten around to writing about these yet because I didn’t have any idea what Murco meant:

Jim Carpenito answered this question for all of us at the Baltimore Show weekend before last, when he revealed a stash of new old stock Murcos he’d found:

It’s nice to find an example this clean, since the plating wasn’t that good on pencils intended to be given away:

Underneath these pencils was paperwork explaining everything:

The Thomas D. Murphy was another calendar company - just like Shaw Barton, Gerlach Barklow and Osborne among others, Murphy also chose to offer advertising pencils to its customers – also made by Ritepoint, but in much smaller numbers.  

After I read the paperwork that came with Jim’s pencil, I couldn’t wait to get home and ransack pencil central, because I knew I had a pencil marked “Murphy” somewhere at home that Mike Little had sent to me.  Took a bit of rooting around, but I found it:

This one sports a little nicer clip, with Murphy and a little picture of a tree on it . . .

. . . and there’s a band of unusual little red trees around the lower cap, as well:

I had no idea what those little trees were all about until I unfurled the Murco paperwork.  Those aren’t just trees:

Those are oaks.  Red oaks, to be specific!