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About the only clue is the clip, which is shared with the Equipoised Purse Pencil line. The rest looks so un-Eversharply that frankly, I pulled all but one of these out of junk boxes at pen shows (the red one, with a price sticker, came from that collection which included the snake clip Eversharp and was a nice upgrade). Maybe they knew, maybe they didn’t . . . maybe they didn’t care. One man’s pencil is another man’s treasure.
I didn’t get away with stealing these, though:
Eversharp marked some of these specially for the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933. I’ve had the green one for some time, but when Larry Liebman had a black one in DC and was interested in my duplicate red one, it was a trade made in heaven. I’ve also seen one in red. These have my vote for “world’s coolest imprint”:
Then out of the blue, this one showed up in an online auction last week:
Eversharp called this celluloid “coral,” and I think it’s about the nicest color any manufacturer ever used. Here it is alongside some other Eversharps in that same plastic:
I thought when I found this one that I had discovered some rare, off-catalog variant, but when I opened my 1932 Eversharp catalog, the colored barrel pencils cam in six colors – including also lavender, which I’ve seen, and lapis blue – which I haven’t. Two more to look for, I guess. The ones with the longer tips are cataloged with three different colored tips: “borneo,” “ceylon” and “india,” which corrolate to color names in the purse pencil line. Two of the three have been identified:
Identification of what color “ceylon” was, however, remains elusive.
But then again, all of the pencils in this series are elusive.
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