Now You See It . . .

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We’ll start with the now you don’t.  Here’s a pair of Sheaffer “rigid radius clip” pencils in one of the most desirable colors, called “roseglow” by the company:

The upper one I’ve had for awhile.  The lower one I picked up from Rich Lott at this year’s Ohio Pen Show.  I knew I had one at home, but when I looked at Rich’s pencil from the side, I was fairly confident it didn’t look like this:

I asked Daniel Kirchheimer if this didn’t look a little strange, and he set me straight on what’s going on here.  The difference is that the upper one is wrapped celluloid, where small squares of celluloid are wrapped around a mandrel and the stripes are therefore uniform all the way around.

The lower one is bored celluloid . . . not bored in the non-pencil-fanatic-reading-this-article sense, but meaning that strips of celluloid were laminated together like plywood, then a hole was drilled (bored) through the solid block.

Is one more unusual than the other?  Daniel didn’t seem to think so.  All I know is that the bored celluloid stood out to me as being different from what I usually have seen.  I’ll be keeping my eyes out for these in the future now.