Wednesday, December 27, 2017

Making Sense of the "Square 4"

This article has been edited and included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 5; 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.

Note:  This article - well, most of it anyway - appeared in the fall, 2017 issue of The Pennant.  

During the 1930s, Wahl Eversharp introduced a line of long, slender pencils designed to use leads that were square and four inches long. These pencils were produced in great numbers and in a wide range of features and colors, and their availability and variety makes them popular with collectors today.

A portion of the author’s collection of what he has referred to – until now – as “Square 4” pencils.  
Until now, however, not much has been known about them. The Depression presents a challenge for researchers, because pen companies as a whole cut back on the production of catalogs to showcase their offerings. The PCA’s online reference library includes Wahl’s full 1932 catalog, a sharply scaled-back 1935 catalog, and a “Fall Promotion” brochure that must be from 1937, as it includes a page of the company’s “new” repeating pencils, which were introduced during that year.

None of the available catalogs shows these long, slender pencils. Since some have imprints on their caps that appear to read “Square 4,” I referred to them generally by that name in my book, The Catalogue of American Mechanical Pencils, and for better or worse, the name has stuck. 

Detail of caps showing various imprints, all of which suggest that the name for this line of pencils was the “Square 4.”
Recently, I learned that while these “Square 4” pencils were not illustrated in Wahl catalogs, they were heavily promoted in newspaper advertisements across the country. These advertisements show that Wahl added and dropped different features of these pencils over the course of several years, allowing us at last to precisely date the different variations.

These advertisements also reveal that Eversharp referred to these pencils by several different namesbut unfortunately, they were never called the “Square 4.”

Eversharp’s ill-conceived square leads were invented by Robert Back, who applied for a patent on August 24, 1932, and was awarded patent number 1,916,199 on July 4, 1933. The idea, according to Back, was that square leads would fit in a wider range of pencil tips without jamming. The leads never worked very well in practice, though: lead dust generated by the corners shaving off inside the pencils frequently caused them to clog, especially in humid conditions.

Robert Back’s patent number 1,916,199 for square lead, issued on July 4, 1933.
In February 1934, advertisements appear for a new pencil, which Eversharp introduced as a promotion for its new square leads, in extra-long, four-inch lengths. The best illustration of this new pencil was found in a Gimbel’s advertisement published in the Philadelphia Inquirer on February 13, 1934, indicating these new pencils came “in black only.” Stock advertisements that ran in several newspapers also describe this same pencil as “unbreakable black pyralin,” suggesting that like Henry Ford’s famous statement about the Model T, you could have any color you wanted, as long as it was black. Identical but slightly shorter pencils in different colors are sometimes encountered, and were probably introduced later in 1934.

One of the earliest advertisements for Eversharp’s new line of pencils promoting 4 inch long square leads, published in The Philadelphia Inquirer on February 13, 1934.
This stock advertisement appeared in several newspapers in early February, 1934, suggesting that the new line of pencils was only available in black when it was introduced.
The black Eversharp pencils at the top in this picture were originally introduced in February, 1934; slightly shorter and more colorful models such as the others shown in this picture might have been introduced shortly thereafter.

In late February, several advertisements were published that provide a name for the new pencil, and these advertisements prove that the author has had it backwards for all these years: the pencil was called the “4 Square,” not, as the imprint suggests, the “Square 4.” One such advertisement in the Edwardsville Intelligencer (Illinois) on February 18, 1934, suggests the name was derived not only from the four-inch square leads they accommodated but also from the fact that the pencils wrote four times as long, included four extra erasers and also came with four extra leads. Whatever the inspiration, the name didn’t last: by May 1934, advertisements referred to the pencil as the “4-in-1 pencil."

The author has had it backwards all these years . . . this advertisement from The Los Angeles Times on February 18, 1934, calls these pencils the “4 Square,” not the “Square 4”  when they were introduced.
Beginning in May, 1934, advertisements such as this one, which ran in the May 17, 1934 edition of the Davenport (Iowa) Daily Times, had renamed the 4 Square to the “4-in-1 pencil.” 

The 4 Square or 4-in-1 pencils had square barrels and a neat feature that isn’t immediately apparent. Some examples appear to have cap imprints that are upside down, and some appear to have exposed erasers while others have a smooth metal top. These are not in fact different variations: the cap is reversible. Kenneth Garvey applied for a patent for this feature on May 4, 1932, and it was issued as number 1,943,792 on January 16, 1934.  

Kenneth Garvey’s patent 1,943,792, issued on January 16, 1934.  Note that the design contemplates either a dual eraser or the smooth metal end found on the 4 Square pencils, and the cap as Garvey envisioned it was bell-shaped, not straight.
All but one of the examples in my collection have Garvey’s patent number stamped on the metal bushing under the cap; that last example, a sole example of the black pencil matching the earliest advertisements lacks this stamp.

Garvey’s reversible cap in operation.  Nearly all of the 4 Square have his patent number assigned in January, 1934 imprinted on the metal portion under the cap, further supporting a date of introduction in February, 1934.  The black example at center, however, lacks this imprint.

Each of these is imprinted “4 Square” on the cap; the ball clip and lack of features seen on the later “Red Spot” pencils suggest late 1934 production.

For 1935, Eversharp added new features to the 4 Square: the barrel was made transparent, and the mechanism sported a red line to indicate how much lead remained in the pencil. Eversharp renamed it the “Red Spot Pencil.” Most of the advertisements had very low quality artwork, but one in particular, which ran in the Muncie Evening Press (Indiana) on February 14, 1935, clearly shows brick-patterned lines on the barrel, Garvey’s patented reversible cap, and a curious arrow on the tip, pointing towards the top of the pencil. The suggested price was increased from 47 cents to 49although some advertisements indicated it was “made to sell for $1.” 

Advertisement from the Muncie Evening Press on February 14, 1935, with a detailed illustration of Eversharp’s “Red Spot” pencil.

Surviving examples of the 1935 Eversharp “Red Spot” pencil.

Detail of “Red Spot” barrel showing marking to indicate remaining amount of lead.

The arrows on the tip match those seen in the Muncie Evening Press advertisement.
At the beginning of 1936, Eversharp added one more feature to its “Red Spot” pencil: an awkward, bulbous tip that Eversharp marketed as a comfort finger rest. The price remained 49 cents, which provided the pencil with its new model name: the “Forty-Niner.” 

Left:  Advertisement from the January 24, 1936 issue of the Hazleton (Pennsylvania) Plain Speaker, showing comfort finger rest added.  Note that the advertisement refers to a “Red Spot,” but doesn’t identify the pencil by that model name.  Right:  Advertisement from The Baltimore Sun on January 25, 1936 for “Eversharp’s New ‘Forty-Niner.’”

The “Forty Niner” of 1936 was the high water mark of gimmickery for this series:  fully transparent barrels, red spot lead indicator, reversible cap and comfort finger rest.
For 1937, Eversharp abandoned the fully transparent barrels in favor of colored barrels with white, red, or green streaks and a clear window on the back side. To add further confusion to the names for these pencil, they were advertised sometimes as “Red Spot” pencils, sometimes as “Forty Niners,” and still others as the “Red Spot Forty Niner.” 

One of the few magazine advertisements for the series, from the February 22, 1937 issue of Life.

The “Red Spot Forty Niner” of 1937

Reverse of the “Red Spot Forty Niner” of 1937, showing the transparent lead indicator window.
In 1938, a new clip was introduced, and a black barrel with white squares appears to have been the only color offered. The price was increased to 59 cents, and it was marketed only as the “New Eversharp” with a “Red Spot Indicator.” 

Advertisement for the “New” Eversharp with “Red Spot Indicator,” from the Decatur Daily Review on February 9, 1938.

The front and back of the “New” Eversharp of 1938, showing the transparent “red spot indicator” window.

Beginning in 1939, the red spot indicator was abandoned and the barrel shape was changed from square to hexagonal. The finger rest and reversible top, however, were retained. 

Advertisement from the February 13, 1939 edition of Life.

The Eversharp of  1939.
I have a shorter version of this pencil imprinted with a date of December 4, 1939: in addition to being shorter, this shop piece is missing the finger rest tip but still has the reversible eraser top.

A production 1939 Eversharp next to a shop prototype dated December 4, 1939; note the absence of a comfort finger rest.

Imprint on Eversharp prototype.

If Eversharp continued to follow its pattern of making changes to this line annually, as the company had done since 1934, the Eversharp of 1940 was essentially unchanged from 1939, except the barrels were made round. 

Eversharp pencils, circa 1940.

Sometime after 1940, both the finger rest and the reversible top were discontinued, and the barrels were made slimmer; however, what the product line lacked in technical innovation it more than made up for with a bewildering range of colors. 

Later Eversharps (possibly late 1940 or early 1941) with narrow barrels, no finger rests and no reversible caps.  The plastics suggest these were carryovers from the 1940 line.

In addition to the more usual marbled colors, Eversharp borrowed plastics used on other lines, such as the silver with colored flecks seen on the company’s Bantam line, “bumblebee” plastic from the earlier dollar lines, and plastics found on the Doric series. There are also pencils made from distinctive plastics typically found on Sheaffer WASP pencils (the Lahn and birdseye or “howling souls” pattern) and Waterman’s gray with red flecks.

Later Eversharps with plastics matching other Eversharp product lines; from top, the Bantam, Dollar pencil in “bumblebee” plastic, and the Doric.

Eversharps made from plastics better known as having been utilized by other companies.  From top:  green and grey "howling souls" plastics more commonly found on Sheaffer's WASP line; green "lahn," also seen on Sheaffer WASPs, and a grey with red flecks usually seen on Watermans.

Finally, there are pencils matching this last incarnation of the model that are marked “W-Square” and “Olympian.” Perhaps the ball clips they sport suggest earlier production lacking any of the gimmicks found on the Red Spotsort of a budget version of an already budget line. Perhaps also they were made later, using up older parts on hand without using the Eversharp name.

The “W-Square” and “Olympian.”

Detail of W-Square and Olympian clips.


Hunting the different variations of these pencils is a lot of fun, and different, previously undocumented variations and materials continue to turn up.  The question remains, though, concerning what is a good catch-all name for a line of pencils that has been called the 4 Square, the 4-in-1, the Red Spot, the Forty-Niner, and the Red Spot Forty-Niner? Perhaps anything other than what I’ve been calling them!

Saturday, September 30, 2017

The Ghost Book

This article has been edited and included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 5; 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.

I've written one more book than you think I have.  There's the pencil book, the two patent books, the trademark book . . . and what I've called my "Ghost Book."   The story behind that phantom volume is half tragic, half funny and, in light of recent events here at the blog, suddenly very relevant.

So the story behind it is one well worth telling right about now.

After a few days of furious work, I've been able to restore all the articles that ran between January, 2013 and April, 2013.  That leaves only the initial run of articles, which started in November, 2011 and ran daily for a year.  

Still, that first run is more than three quarters of what was lost.  But it wasn't really lost.

When I wrapped up the first series of articles here, I had an idea to reproduce that first year of articles in book form, with the unimaginative title The Leadhead's Pencil Blog.  It took about a month, but I had a PDF generated and ready to print by December, 2012:


I even generated a comprehensive subject matter index for it:


I had the printer lined up to publish it, and I sent out copies of the PDF to publishers in the hopes of getting the project picked up.  At the last minute, just as I was ready to pull the trigger on another self-publishing project, I stopped the press.  Schiffer Publishing called, and they were interested in the book -- at their cost, paying me royalties on sales. 

We spent weeks negotiating a contract, and after Schiffer's initial runthrough of my manuscript, they delivered a bit of bad news:  the images I had shot were not high enough resolution for their purposes, and if the project was going to proceed further, I would need to reshoot the images.

1,791 images.

What the hell, I thought.  This is my big break!  I took off nearly a month from my day job as an attorney and spent the time in my basement, painstakingly recreating all the shots I had taken during that first year.

Then came the next request:  instead of printing the articles in sequential order, could I reorganize the book into sections grouped by subject?  

Why sure, I said.  I suppose it's possible that they did not detect sarcasm as I expressed my delight at the opportunity to rewrite a 425-page book.  But I did it.  What the hell, I thought again . . . I've come this far, and (sigh) I suppose this is still my big break.

After I reshot, reorganized, reformatted and then finally reaquainted myself with my day job, I was encouraged to see that things were starting to happen.  Schiffer had renamed the book American Mechanical Pencils, designed a cover, obtained the ISBN number and the book was showing up in the company's catalog online for a release sometime around the fall of 2014:


With cover art on file and an ISBN number, the book got picked up by Amazon and other online book retailers, with "coming soon" announcements across the internet.  And then . . .

nothing happened.

I finally contacted Schiffer to ask what was going on with the project.  The editor assigned to it was at first apologizing that he dropped the ball, then explaining how busy he was and promising to get to it within one week, then two weeks, then just "soon."  I liked those conversations a lot better than the one we had after he finally got around to doing his job. 

He called me up and announced that he didn't think the book I had written had broad enough commercial appeal.  He suggested that maybe I could write a different book about mechanical pencils for Schiffer, and if I did maybe they would publish that one instead.

I was furious, and I faced a choice.  If Schiffer didn't publish my book within 18 months, I could terminate my contract.  If I said "oh, ok, let me write a book for you about mechanical pencils," then under the contract arguably anything I wrote on the subject would belong to Schiffer, and I couldn't publish it at the blog or anywhere else until Schiffer had spent another 18 months deciding whether to print it.

Yet this was my big break, right?

I'm really proud of myself for what I did next.

I told Schiffer to get stuffed.  So much for my big break. 

American Mechanical Pencils remains a ghost book still floating around on the internet.  I still get occasional inquiries about it (one guy even sent me a payment to reserve a copy that I had to refund), and to this day Amazon still shows the book being released in October, 2014 with a notation that it is currently out of stock:


In fact, the project as I originally envisioned it is also still floating around, because I had obtained my own ISBN when I thought I was self publishing it.  Here's the google books entry:


Now I'm wondering if the Google catastrophe that wiped out such a large part of my blog might be a sign of things to come -- and a sign that this old ghost may be worth bringing back to life.  All the images that were lost were images too small to count towards storage limitations on Google Drive, and I suspect that Google would rather host a smaller number of larger images than an unlimited number of little ones that "don't count."  

I've worked really, REALLY hard to locate and restore images for all the 2013 articles . . . but with a click of the button somewhere in googleland, they could be wiped out again, maybe tomorrow, maybe in another five years.  Do I really want to spend countless hours messing with pictures and formatting for that first run of articles again, with no guarantee that the changes will ever achieve that permanence I was looking for?

Hell, for that matter, would I ever have written and posted all those articles in the first place if I knew this was going to happen?

What I do know is this:  the only way the book I've got waiting in the wings will see the light of day is if I print it myself.  If I restore the images from that first year of articles, (1) nobody will buy the book and (2) Google might knock them right back out again anyway.

So I'm going gravedigging next week, looking for ways that the book version of The Leadhead's Pencil Blog can finally become a reality.  Maybe that old ghost has some life in it after all!

Tuesday, September 26, 2017

Why things will be a bit quiet for awhile . . .

I started receiving reports a few weeks ago that images for some older articles here at Leadhead's weren't loading.  After I looked into it, I found that all images were deleted from articles posted prior to May, 2013 - 469 articles in all were knocked out.

I still don't know what happened.   Image storage space isn't an issue (I've only used 10 percent), and google has confirmed all of my settings are ok.   Google drive doesn't show the pictures, but they are still in there . . . somewhere.

There's a lot of good stuff in those early articles, and they still get quite a bit of use.  I think they are worth saving.

Since I don't have any better alternatives, I'm spending the time I used to spend writing restoring images.  I'm working backwards from April, 2013, so you can go to the bottom of the index (where the articles can be viewed by date) and check my progress.

It is a very slow and tedious process, but I'm taking the opportunity to use imaging editing software to improve the quality of the images as I'm reuploading them.

Sunday, September 24, 2017

The Brompton

This article has been edited and included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 5; 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.

I don’t know why I have three of these . . . whenever they come up, they command a bit of attention with their heavy aluminum barrels, even though the quality is just so-so:


The clips are marked Brompton, and whenever I run across these, they always have that baby blue anodyzed lower barrel.  The upper barrels, though, appear to have been anodyzed gold or bare aluminum – unless the anodyzing was so cheaply done that on some examples there’s no trace of it remaining.

Such a lackluster review is at odds with the glowing advertisement I found for these pencils in the September, 1946 issue of Popular Mechanics:


The Brompton Sales Company was located in Chicago and advertised that it’s “amazing new pencil” was “arousing unusual interest wherever displayed.”  Interestingly, the advertisement indicates they were available in maroon, black, blue and “natural;” I’ve only seen them in blue, although in my poking around online I also saw one in plain aluminum, which might have been “natural.”

Saturday, September 23, 2017

Collect Like An Egyptian

This article has been edited and included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 5; 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.

Forgive the Bangles riff . . . I know I’ll have “Walk Like an Egyptian” on the brain all day now.

At the DC show a couple years ago, I took a big gulp and paid a lot of money for an entire folder full of Victorian pencils owned by Alan Hirsch.  If I had that much disposable cash laying around (and a wife to whom the wisdom of such an investment must be explained), all of the things in that folder would still reside in my collection today.

So, I found myself prioritizing.  There were a few things in there I just had to keep for my collection, and the rest would be held out for sale at shows.  I told myself when I’d sold enough that I could stomach how much I had invested in the lot, maybe I’d go back and transfer a few more items from the sale bunch to my little museum.

There were two Egyptian mummy pencils in that bunch, both in flawless condition.  Whenever someone expressed interest in one or both of them, I would tell them the preceding story and quote an outrageous price.  As Rob Bader likes to say, “You will have to pay me enough that I can buy something I like a little bit better . . . and I like these a lot.”

Nobody liked them as well as I do, fortunately.  At the DC show this year, Ed Fingerman showed me a lovely bunch of Victorians, including a smaller Egyptian magic pencil and an obelisk figural with heiroglyphics on it.

I started doing the math in my head to figure out how much I still had out there on Alan’s collection.  Nope, I still couldn’t stomach that much, but Ed’s two examples had me cave a little bit.  The mummy pencils are no longer in my sale folder and are now safely esconced in Pencil Central alongside the ones Ed had that I couldn’t resist:


Friday, September 22, 2017

Faster Than A Speeding Bullet

This article has been edited and included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 5; 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.

“They didn’t only make one,” I’m always telling myself when I see something I’d like to have, but it isn’t available.  In this case, it was four years before another one of these came along at the DC show this year:


The clip is marked “Superpencil”:


Joe Nemecek has one of these, which he brought to the Raleigh Show for me to photograph in 2013.  There were a couple reasons I haven’t written about it before now: during my short introduction to Joe’s example, I wasn’t able to figure out how it worked.  Also, I wasn’t really happy with the way the pictures turned out, with a simpler camera and poor lighting.  I did play around with the first image in photoshop and it looks a little better than the raw image:


Note that from these pictures, Joe’s pencil looks a little longer than mine, but I think there’s a simple explanation for that.  When I got my first example, it looked like this:


That ttop piece of metal had slipped down around the celluloid center section, and it took quite a bit of wrestling to get it back up where it belongs.  I could have positioned it higher up on the celluloid so it would be as long as Joe’s, but there’s a simple reason why I didn’t:

It wouldn’t work if I did, and that may be the reason I couldn’t figure Joe’s pencil out.

When the Superpencil is disassembled, here’s what you get:


At the front end you have a simple leadholder: screwing the nose on tightens the clamps around a stick of lead, and unscrewing it a bit releases it. At the back, the top pulls off to reveal a metal cylinder with a slot and a little nub on the end:


That nub engages perfectly into the end of the spare lead compartments inside the barrel, lining up that slot perfectly with the adjacent compartment:


If I’d glued the top section in place any higher than I did, that nub wouldn’t engage with the spare lead compartments to line things up inside.  When I see Joe in Ohio, we’ll have to compare our examples to see if the back section on his is longer, indicating there were two sizes made and I just wasn’t smart enough to figure out how to use it.  If it’s the same length as mine, we’ll have to adjust his so that it works.

In operation, this thing is a real work of art.  I used .065-inch leads, which worked perfectly.  To load the spare leads, I loosened the tip, held the tip facing up and dropped in a lead, which passed through that center hole and back into that slotted metal piece at the back of the pencil.  Rotating the pencil around, the lead would fal to the outside of the slot in that back piece, so that when I point the tip down again, the lead falls into the spare lead compartment.  Pull the back out a bit and rotate the top until that nub engages in the next hole, and you can repeat the process filling the other slots.  To advance the next lead, the process is reversed: rotate the top to line up with a compartment containing a lead, point the tip up so the lead falls into the back section, rotate the barrel so the lead falls to the bottom of that slot, then point the tip down and the lead falls down through that center hole and into position at the tip.

It’s cool as all get out and I’ve never seen anything else like it, but there isn’t much information out there to tell me who might have made this thing or when.  The obvious reference that comes to mind is a play on Superman, which was introduced by Detective Comics (later DC Comics) in June, 1938 - the character, according to Wikipedia, was created five years earlier in 1933, by a couple of high school students named Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster in Cleveland, Ohio.

The most promising lead I found was a reference in the Library of Congress’ Catalog of Copyright Entries, which contains a listing for a copyright granted to the American Lead Pencil Company of Hoboken, New Jersey for the phrase “It’s a Super-pencil” on March 26, 1935:


But there’s a hyphen in ALP’s “Super-pencil” not found on these clips . . . and according to what the little bit of research I’ve done, prior to Superman’s appearance in Action Comics #1 in 1938 he resided in a desk drawer at Detective Comics – there was no popular comic book character’s name to emulate.

There’s a snippet view online of a reference to “superpencil” used in a generic sense to refer to “a pencil to correspond to the oversize pen,” which I found in a 1926 edition of The Magazine of Business, establishing that adding the prefix “super” to a word without adding a hyphen to denote superlative qualities – in that case, of size – was within the nomenclature long before it was associated with the Man of Steel.  I would think the Superpencils Joe and I have date to the late 1920s, maybe early 1930s.

More news as I’m able to learn it . . .