Saturday, January 2, 2016

Putting the Bumble in the Bee

This article has been edited and included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 4; copies are available print on demand through Amazon here, and I offer an ebook version in pdf format at the Legendary Lead Company here.

If you don't want the book but you enjoy this article, please consider supporting the Blog project here.

A while back I posted about Eversharp’s dollar pencils in plastics approximating the “bumblebee” pattern used by the company in the late 1920s (the first was back in 2012, at 
http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2012/04/big-bumblebees.html, with a follow up article in late November, at http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2015/11/vestigial-eversharps.html):


However, you might have noticed something: the “bumblebee” collectors’ nickname comes from the bright yellow and black coloring of the most commonly encountered of the three:


Sue Hershey recently posted pictures of an Eversharp dollar pencil in a much brighter yellow . . . she was pretty excited about it, and since I didn’t notice the brighter coloring, the reason for her excitement unfortunately sailed right over my head.  Joe Nemecek commented on that later – too late for me to add productively to the conversation at the time.

At the Ohio Show, I ran into Don Lavin, who had one of these available.  I bought it so that I could compare it to the less bumblish examples I have, and I’ve noted a pattern:


I don’t think this is fading, because like the greyish “half Coronet” (or, as Vance Koven wryly suggested, “Coronot”) pencil about which I posted a few days ago, the color on all of these is even all around.  It’s almost as if Eversharp was gradually running out of yellow dye as the years passed.

No comments: