A Couple ZABCO Footnotes

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Recently I posted an article concerning how a goofy ZABCO pencil established to me immediately that an equally goofy Parker Zaner-Bloser prototype I acquired from Dan Zazove was the real deal – independently of the fact that I acquired it from Dan Zazove, whose expertise in such matters is beyond question:

That article was posted at http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2016/08/a-parker-zaner-bloser-from-zabco-era.html.  At the Columbus show last November, Dan added a bit of “junk box provenance” - or rather, “junk bag provenance,” when he approached me with a plastic bag full of Zaner Bloser pencils at an eeeeresistable price.  Of course I bit - no Columbus native should pass on a bag full of pencils marked with the hometown name.

Most were of the later plastic or painted wood varieties and weren’t very exciting, although there were some neat colors in there I hadn’t seen before.  But then there were three more ZABCOs  to add to my collection:

All three of these are built the same, except they use standard-sized leads rather than the fat checking lead of my red example.  The pencils prove that the reason my red example’s operation has been so confusing has been because it is in fact broken . . . the long tail telescopes into the metal center section when turned to advance the lead.

And . . .

What Columbus native could be without examples in scarlet and gray?