What Color Is This?

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This Eversharp “half Coronet” came out of that same collection from which that snake-clip Eversharp I wrote about recently came:

Now before you say “oh yeah, I’ve seen one of those, let me show it next to a blue “half Coronet”:

I’ll back up a bit and explain the air quotes around “half Coronet.”  That’s not an official name, nor does it signify that these are only half as good as a real Coronet.  The fact is that the word “Coronet” gets thrown around a lot, and most of the time it’s used wrong.   Although pencils like these have clips that were made from the same molds as those from which Coronets were made, and although they have the same mechanism as a Coronet pencil, Eversharp didn’t use the name Coronet on pencil like these.

Add to that the fact that the pencils were made in a whole variety of colors in which the pens were never made, and pencil guys like me are left to our own devices.  We came up with “half Coronet” to describe pencils styled after the Coronet line, but never officially conferred with that title.

Now to get back to our pencils du jour, the blue ones come along often enough that while you might call them “half Coronets,” you wouldn’t call them “rare.”   Is that other one blue, or does it look gray to you?  A few years ago, at the DC show, I picked up a considerably more weatherbeaten example, wondering whether it was in fact gray, but the plastic was so beat up that I hesitated to put it out there as a possibility that it was a different color rather than an old, abused, faded blue one.

This one, however, is pristine.  If it’s faded blue, then it faded – perfectly and uniformly, all the way around, mind you – over the last eighty years.

The difference, I’ll grant you, is a subtle one . . . but it isn’t so subtle when you put the two right next to each other:

I’m inclined to believe there were truly gray half Coronets.