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.

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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.

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