Tuesday, September 13, 2016

More on the Rauch/Mabie Connnection

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I’ve written here before about John Rauch, the early New York manufacturer for whom a young John Mabie went to work in the early 1840s.   A while back, I think it was at the Baltimore Show in 2015, I found this specimen:


This is a dip pen and pencil combination, with a conventional slider at one end, but unlike most, the pencil protrudes out the end of the extender, rather than from the same end as the nib:


At the top end is a patent date that’s a little hard to make out – the June 22 is clear, but unless you know that patents were only issued on Tuesdays, you wouldn’t know that the year was 1869:


The patent is for the unusual way the pencil protrudes from the back end rather than the front, and refers to John’s patent number 91,665:


As I was going through all of the Victorians I had lining up for photographs, I also found this pair of Mabie Todds, or sort of . . .


The smaller one is a more conventional sort of magic pencil and dip pen combo, but despite its small size and rather conventional construction, I really liked that rose gold:


But as for that other one, there’s that same unusual pencil:


The Rauch patent date is found, just as on the other example, and there’s no other imprints on the barrel:


Yet this one has a Mabie Todd nib in it:


Ordinarily, I don’t put much stock in what nib I find in these – they are too easy to replace, and over the last 150 years or so who knows how many times these have been replaced.  But in this case, with an established connection between Rauch and Mabie (see http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-r.html), I’m prepared to accept this “as found” as being arguably original.

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