Wednesday, December 21, 2016

Leaving a Little Meat on the Bone

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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Some time ago, my friend David Nishimura wrote an article titled “Who Designed the Eversharp Pencil?” which was posted over at his blog (the link is 
http://vintagepensblog.blogspot.com/2013/12/who-designed-eversharp-pencil.html).  He rightly states that the earliest Eversharps, which were made by Heath, were made by retrofitting barrels and caps from Heath’s clutch pencils with Charles Keeran’s new mechanism.

David showed a picture of several Heath clutch pencils from his collection, and one caught my eye: the barrel was covered with strange bumps and there was some curious script lettering at the top of the barrel.  After I asked what that was all about, he ran a follow up article, telling me (and the rest of the world) that the inscription at the top read “Every Pound Pulls,” the slogan for the Concrete Steel Company’s line of Havemeyer Bars (what we call “rebar,” the metal rods used to reinforce concrete) and the bumps on the barrel mimicked the contour of Havemeyer Bars:


Then David sent me a follow up email – in addition to the gold filled example shown in his article, he had found one in sterling silver . . . and it was available.  It didn’t take me long to pull the trigger:





Forgive the older pictures - I’ve been meaning to write about this one for awhile.  What David didn’t mention in his article – leaving me free to break the news – was that Heath wasn’t the only manufacturer swayed to make special Havemeyer-contoured advertising pencils for the Concrete Steel Company: David sold me two other pencils along with the Heath:




Brown and Bigelow, makers of the Redipoint line of pencils, also made “Every Pound Pulls” pencils for the company.

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