What I Wasn't Expecting

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Since I’m on a “plug the holes” mission with my Eversharp collection, now that I can see where they are, I decided to throw in a bid online on this group:

The one in the center was the target of my affection . . . it’s one of the Square 4 derivative pencils, in a gray pearl I haven’t seen used on these before.

Of course, with a proper cap fitted, it is much more handsome:

It is also a little unusual to find these with advertising on them.  This one advertises the Englewood Electrical Supply Company:

And so, with that little tidbit photographed and tucked away in its proper place, I set about examining the other two items that came with it.  The upper one is a maroon Eversharp Skyline Press Clip I – the most common color in the most common series – in nice condition but one that went straight into the duplicates for sale box.  The other one is an Eversharp checking pencil with a typical mechanism for that middle generation made between 1922 and 1928:

(I ran down the differences between the first year checking pencils from 1921, these pencils, and the late-1928 and 1929 version back in 2013, at https://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2013/07/good-thing-im-crazy.html.)

I didn’t have much hope for this one, since even in the auction pictures, I could tell that there was some serious wavyness in the barrel:

But when it arrived, I was surprised to see there wasn’t a single chip in the paint.  That’s a little odd, since my other black second generation checking pencil doesn’t have any dents, but it’s got a few big chunks of paint missing:

It didn’t make any sense that one of these could sustain so many dents without losing any of the paint, and on closer examination, I learned why:

Those aren’t dents, and that isn’t paint.  This checking pencil has a thin plastic covering over a brass barrel, just like the English Eversharps along the same lines, which has become distorted . . . also just like the English Eversharps along these same lines:

Just last month, when I was showing off “My (Latest) Favorite Weird Eversharp” (https://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2017/06/my-latest-favorite-weird-eversharp.html), I commented that that all the other Eversharps I had seen which were built this way were English.  Now, within the span of a month, two American examples have surfaced.

There’s a reason I never say “all of these are this way,” preferring instead “all the ones I’ve seen are this way.”  I may have seen a lot, but I know I’ll never see it all.