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!

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.

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.

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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.”

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.

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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:

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.

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“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 . . .

The Question I Hate to Answer the Most

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.

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I was determined to clear out my backlog of recent photographs before taking more pictures of things to write about, so I’ve been holding off on shooting the items I acquired at the DC Supershow last month - some 75 pieces added to the collection that I’ve been eager to tell you about.  With the last of those older pictures running in yesterday’s article, I let the blog tick along on autopilot for a few days while I finally got to spend some time behind the camera.  All the DC stuff has been shot, along with a few other things I thought were interesting, and the images are now sitting in the hopper just waiting for me to say something meaningful about them.

There are three questions people frequently ask me - one fairly simple, and two I hate.  The simple one: “What’s the oldest pencil you have?”  That’s easy.  My oldest American pencil is probably that Woodwards & Hale I wrote about recently (http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2017/05/an-unbelievable-stroke-of-luck.html), but I’ve got a couple English pieces that are a few years older still.

The first question I hate is, “What’s the most valuable thing you have?”  That’s a double hate there . . . I don’t really understand the question for starters, whether the person asking means monetary value or historical value.  I’ve got bits of junk laying around which I”d pay more for than a solid gold piece – but fortunately I haven’t had to do so.  Besides, asking what’s the most valuable thing in my collection is like asking me to show you my checkbook or my stock portfolio . . . it’s kind of rude and intrusive.

However, it’s that third question that really gets under my skin: “Which is your favorite?”  Even though on its face the question isn’t nearly as boorish as asking for a peek into my wallet, that’s the question that really, really, REALLY bugs me.

Because it makes me ask myself questions that I really don’t want to answer.

It’s not as though these inanimate objects are children I’m afraid to offend, so that I feel obligated to tell them I love them all equally.  The problem is that it forces me into this existential exercise of questioning why I like something and how much.  It makes me wonder whether I like the historical tidbit I found more or less than admiring a tiny work of art I found.

It also makes me stare into the face of my own greed.  I like to believe I can be equally happy taking a picture of something as I would be owning it, and I hope that’s true . . . there’s been plenty of times when I’ve had the opportunity to photograph things that weren’t for sale, or when the price tag is more than I can swallow, and I’ve satisfied myself (some would say “settled”) for that.  But the question isn’t what I have enjoyed seeing the most, it’s what I enjoy owning the most.

Besides, if there’s that one thing I enjoy owning the most, that means there’s something out there that I enjoy owning the least, which gives me a second crisis to deal with: if it's the thing I least enjoy owning, then why on earth did I buy it?

So far, I’ve only posted one article concerning something I acquired at DC – it was that sold gold Sheaffer with Craig Sheaffer’s name engraved on it, mounted on a card signed by Sheaffer and addressed to Edd Dawson, a pencil collector (see http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2017/08/craig-sheaffers-gift-to-edd-dawson.html).  Gritting my teeth, I’ve got to admit that is my favorite find from the show this year, and it’s probably in my top five finds of all time.

But as I sit here with a big pile o’ pictures of everything else I found at that show, I’m asking myself where I should start and the logical choice is which one out of all these is my favorite.  After much weeping and gnashing of teeth, I keep coming back to the one I picked up from Pearce Jarvis:

It’s not quite the Parker snake magic pencil I have only been able to admire from afar, but it’s darned close:

I could stare at that fantastic relief of a snake winding its way through the cattails all day long:

The artistry even extends to the top piece

and in the lower corner of that last shot, you can see who was responsible for this fine piece of art: Fairchild Johnson, represented by a shield with an F and a J inside it:

Fairchild Johnson was a partnership between one of Leroy W. Fairchild’s sons and Ephraim Johnson, Jr., sone of E.S. Johnson, which operated between 1898 and 1905.  The complete(ish) story, with thanks to David Nishimura and his excellent article in The Pennant, was posted here at http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2016/10/somebody-elses-news.html.

Whew.  The uncomfortable question has been asked and answered, and the ice is now officially broken.  Now I won’t have as much trouble figuring out what to write about tomorrow, and I’ll be showing off all the other great things which came home from DC with me . . .

in no particular order, of course . . .

I Get a Pixie Stick

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.

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It’s a saying around our house . . . when you finish the job, you get a pixie stick.  The turn of phrase comes from my wife, who remembers from her days in elementary school if you finished all the food on your plate at lunch, they would give you a pixie stick (those cardboard straws full of flavored sugar). 

I’ve been trying not to add to my enormous file folder called “pencil pictures,” in which are housed all of the images I haven’t gotten around to posting here.  Instead, when I started things back up at the blog this time, I resolved to take a large batch of pictures and then not take any more until I had posted all of them.  In theory, that would keep me from taking pictures I’d probably never post.

These are the last two shots standing between me and sugary goodness:

This tin of leads showed up in an online auction, and I was doubly impressed.  First, I hadn’t seen a tin of Conklin leads like this one before.  Second, I thought there was a very practical reason for that:

I thought maybe John Wahl and the Wahl Company had a lock on making metal tins for pencil leads, by virtue of patent number 1,428,195 awarded to John C. Wahl and Peter G. Jacobson on September 5, 1922.   However, note that dovetailed system which is present on Wahl containers – that is the special feature which was patented, not the idea of a metal box itself.  Still, it must have been a sufficient deterrent to most, since square boxes like this are not usually seen.

And in fact, I ended up seeing more than just one.  After I paid handsomely for this one tin, the seller contacted me to let me know he had the rest of the box, and he asked if I wanted to make an offer on the whole bunch:

Why yes . . . yes I did, thank you very much.

For What It's . . . Worth

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.

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A few months ago, I posted an article concerning a large flattop pencil marked with a W in a square superimposed over a feather, the hallmark for the Worth Featherweight Pen Company (

http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-one-pennant-rejected.html).  It was only because I had just written that article that this one grabbed my attention online:

The clip is marked “Worth,” with a W circled by a wreath above the name:

I’m not prepared to say that this is the same Worth, but I do think this one also has it’s origins in New York.  Unlike the one shown in my earlier Worth article, I don’t believe Conklin had anything at all to do with this one.  If this one bears similarity to anything, it’s to some pencils marked Morrison and Eclipse.

And also to these

These two, marked “Premo” and “Deluxe,” were introduced here five years ago (see http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2012/08/keeping-it-light.html) and, with the exception of a slightly different clip, they are the same as this “Worth,” pattern and all.

I’m noticing a pattern of names associated with value here . . . worth, premo, deluxe.  

Don't Be Too Quick to Assume

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.

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A glance at thisone in a junk box might cause you to dismiss it as just another Quickpoint:

It’s a habit of mine to read the clips, even when I assume I know what’s there, or should be there.  If I had a penny for every Quickpoint clip I’ve read . . . well, let’s just say reading this one is what keeps me in the habit of reading:

“Newton Mfg. Co. Newton, Iowa.”   A search of newspapers reveals that the company was founded around 1908; the earliest references I could find to the firm were in a burst of advertisements for salesmen which appeared in papers across the midwest in mid-August of that year.  The Company remained in business until 2015, when it filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy and was acquired in bankruptcy by HALO Branded Solutions.

This Newton dates to the late 1930s or rerly 1940s The Newton pencil raises a question which has led some in the advertising pencil collector’s circle to accuse me of heresy: I’ve never been fully confident that Quickpoint pencils were made by Quickpoint, and a pencil identical to a Quickpoint but bearing the name of another midwestern advertising specialty company indicates that either one was made by the other, or a third party made pencils for both.

Quickpoint is twenty years younger, founded in 1928 according to the company’s website.  Occam’s razor suggests that since Quickpoints are so common and distinctive, and this is the first Newton I’ve seen, that Quickpoint made its own stuff and for a time made a few pencils branded for Newton.  Yet Newton has “manufacturing” in its name, while Quickpoint does not, and Lipic and Ritepoint were in Quickpoint’s backyard . . .

In All Fairness

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I haven’t been terribly kind to the Camel brand historically.  Although collectors best remember the pens as high-quality pieces that “made their own ink,” when I wrote The Catalogue the only example I had was a Camel “Spaulding,” which appeared to be made by Eagle and wasn’t nearly as good.  Articles I’ve featured here have primarily documented Camel’s decline into cheap advertising pencils, later marked the Neark Pen Company, the Secretary Pen Company and (the horror of it) the Progressive Pen Company.  I’ve got a couple examples of the last of these I haven’t written about yet.

What can I say?  These companies are more interesting when they are failing than when they succeed.  Maybe that’s why Parker generally doesn’t interest me so much.

I did run a piece on a really nice deco Camel here at the blog very early on - see http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2012/02/couple-camels-for-hump-day.html.  In all that time, I haven’t had the opportunity to pick up another nice one until this one came my way just recently:

It doesn’t have all the deco flair of the one I ran in that previous article . .. But neither does it have that certain flair of desperation which fascinates me:

I do note, just as I did in that last article, that this also has hints of something that might have been made by Eagle.

A Memory Better Preserved

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.

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This one appeared on Facebook several months ago, so to many of you it isn’t news:

This little gem is unmarked, which usually puts me off a bit, but it has a feature I hadn’t seen before:

The slider button is a snake, complete with tiny glass eyes and a little turquoise button.  As big a fan as I am about snake clips, a snake slider was something I just couldn’t do without.

If it isn’t news, why run it here?  Two reasons: first, not everyone is on facebook, no matter how heretical that may be.  Second, facebook is like watching goldfish shoot through a firehose rather than in an aquarium.  Without remembering who posted something and when, going back to refer to a picture you saw on that site is an impossibility; and even if you do, it is a royal pain sifting back through a timeline or a group’s page to find something.

So here this one is, tucked neatly away at Leadhead’s under a new tag: “Unmarked Victorians of note.”  Should be easy enough to find now.

The Kastar Mystery

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Here’s a pair of objects I’ve been meaning to write about:

Both of these are marked “Kastar” on the clips:

I say “objects” because while the longer of the two is without doubt a pencil, the other . . . while it may look like a bullet pencil or something . . . isn’t.  That nose doesn’t come off.

When I found that shorter one and started thinking about what it might be if it weren’t a pencil, that got me to thinking about something unusual I find on every Kastar pencil I’ve ever seen:

On the back of the barrel, there’s an odd slot, like a coin filler slot on a fountain pen.  It made no sense to see one on a pencil, but when I saw one on something that wasn’t a pencil, my first thought was that maybe these are electrical testers, used to test for electrical current.  Although I didn’t find any evidence of a Kastar electrical tester being made in the 1920s or 1930s, when I estimate these were made, I did find an advertisement for a Kastar Tester in the September 14, 1973 issue of the Waco News Tribune, and it looks suspiciously like my pencil and its cousin:

Packing a Punch

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.

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While I was putting away things at the museum, I found a couple Edward Todds that are worth a closer look:

The gold example came out of a collection I picked up from Alan Hirsch last year.  It’s one of the more commonly encountered Edward Todd victorians, using the mechansim patented on December 19, 1871, which was itself a reworking of an earlier patent by Jacob Lownds (see http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2016/10/lownds-redux.html for the full scoop on that one).  On close examination, though, two things set this one apart:

It’s 14k, and the imprint is double-stamped.

The sterling piece is a different story.  If it doesn’t quite look like a pencil, you’re right.  I picked it up because it had an Edward Todd hallmark and a weird patent date, two things that always grab my attention:

Pat. June 24, 1902.   The reference is to Edward Todd, Jr’s patent number 703,162 for a “cigar piercer”:

An Edward Todd hallmark on a cigar piercer illustrates one of the problems I faced in writing American Writing Instrument Trademarks 1870-1953.  If I didn’t limit the scope of the book to those trademarks which were filed specifically with respect to writing instrument, there wasn’t any way to limit the scope to marks relevant to our field.  I didn’t want to fill the book with  jewelers’ trademarks on the off chance that a jeweler might have stamped his name on a pen or a pencil.  The example I discuss in the book of a mark which wasn’t listed is Eisenstadt’s trademark within a carpenter’s square, filed under a wide variety of items – but not pens or pencils

Edward Todd’s distinctive hallmark is another such exanple.  There are six Edward Todd trademarks in the book, none of which covers this mark.  Finding that needle in a haystack would send me back to the patent indices, searching first for marks registered by Edward Todd, the individual, and if that didn’t work, under every category of goods the company made.

The exercise may well prove to be a wild goose chase, if Edward Todd never sought Federal protection for his hallmark.  And I think that might be the case.

The Appendix to American Writing Instrument Trademarks 1870-1953 includes the writing instrument-related sections of Trade-marks of the Jewelry and Kindred Trades, published in several editions.  The Edward Todd mark is not shown in that section, so it isn’t in the book – however, I did find Edward Todd’s hallmark in the section for “sterling silver”:

Note that the entry beneath the Todd mark for A.F. Towle & Son Co. Has an asterisk before it.  The legend for entries in Trade-Marks of the Jewelry and Kindred Trades indicates that an asterisk denotes those marks which were registered under the Federal system.  If that’s true, then no registration was filed for Edward Todd.

I learned in the course of researching my book that Trade-Marks of the Jewelry and Kindred Trades wasn’t always accurate in this respect, but it’s a fair indicator that the odds are against finding a mark if I plunged myself down that particular rabbit hole looking for one.

Two's a Coincidence . . .

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I was never quite sure what to make of pencils like these:

From the looks of this slider pencil, it’s American and it dates to the 1840s.  It’s nearly a dead ringer for pencils made by Rauch during that same time frame.  The name, though, tells a differnet stroy:

It looks like “HENRV,” but I think that’s “Henry.”  I was so sure that this was made in the New York area that I’ve scoured New York City directories from the 1830s and 1840s for someone by the last name of Henry.  No luck.

There is a “Henry” of some pencil fame – Henry David Thoreau, author of Walden, dabbled in the wood pencil business.  The time is right and the location in the northeastern United States is also right, but I doubt that Thoreau would have his first name stamped on pencils – let alone that he would have anything to do with the mechanical sort.

When I called Joe Nemecek to see what he knew, great minds were thinking alike.   Joe was watching a pair of Henry pencils just like this one – one a little bigger, and one a little smaller – in an online auction, so we went in on the pair and I”ve brought one home.

Janet says two’s a coincidence, but three’s a collection . . . I guess between the two of us, Joe and I have a collection of these.

An Odd Name For This Sort of Thing

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.

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This one came my way online a year or so ago:

The name on the clip is “Bonded.”

Yes, it’s missing the cap, and while I have a suspicion what it looked like I’d rather wait until I’m positive.  That clip identifies it as a member of a series of flattop pencils which includes the Postal, Parrott, Thompson and Ever Last (see http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2015/07/two-cans-of-worms.html):

“Bonded” is a name frequently found in the world of pencils . . . but not the mechanical sort.  In the wood pencil arena, “bonded” refers to leads which are well secured (glued) inside their wooden cases.  Glue and mechanical pencils, though, don’t mix . . . although maybe it might have held that cap on.

A Bit of Junk with a Story

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 bought this dumb thing online even though the pencil part is misisng and the mechanism is all jammed up, paying too much money in the process because it’s sterling silver.  The sole reason for the purchase was the hallmark on the extension:

I’ve seen it a few times over the years . . . although it isn’t all that clear on this example, it’s the letter F, in what looks like a shield or a heart, skewered by a skeleton key.

I can’t see a hallmark containing the letter F without my mind immediately associating it with Leroy Fairchild.  Then there was also Fairchild & Johnson, started by Leroy’s son Harry and Ephraim S. Johnson’s son, which became Fairchild & Co. in 1905 . . . .   David Nishimura recently penned a very nice article for The Pennant, titled "Leroy W. Fairchild: The Little-Known History of a Well-Known Company," which appeared in my last issue as editor at the end of 2016.  David documented several marks used by the company . . . but not the F skewered by a key.

There’s an Online Encyclopedia of Silver Marks, Hallmarks and Makers Marks at www.925-1000.com, which does include the mark, and attributes it to Fairchild & Co., “successors to Fairchild & Johnson," and provides dates of 1919 to 1922, but there wasn’t a source quoted in the Online Encyclopedia.  My new book, American Writing Instrument Trademarks 1870-1953, doesn’t include the mark, which means it wasn’t registered as a United States Trademark . . . for writing instruments, anyway.  At the end of the book, I included excerpts from several editions of the 1922 edition of a publication from the Jewelers’ Circular Publishing Company, titled Trade-Marks of the Jewelry and Kindred Trades.  Alas . . . the only marks found in that edition were those documented in Nishimura’s article:

But wait a minute, I thought . . . I didn’t find the mark documented anywhere else but in a catalog of general silver marks, not writing instrument-specific marks.  And although I only included the writing instrument-specific sections of Trade-Marks of the Jewelry and Kindred Trades, it’s not like I don’t have the rest of that book to check . . .  And there it was:

There’s our mark, in use by “L.W. Fairchild & Co. (out of business).”

The exact wording in the 1922 edition is significant: Fairchild & Co., the successor to Fairchild & Johnson (that’s Harry Fairchild, Leroy’s son), is reported as using the name “Leroy W. Fairchild,” while L.W. Fairchild & Co. is reported as being “out of business.”

Nishimura reports in his article that Leroy W. Fairchild retired in 1890 upon his wife’s death, and Leroy W. Fairchild & Co. was subsequently reincorporated by his other sons in Newark, New Jersey.  After at least two reorganizations, spinning off part of the business in 1894 and reincorporation in New York in 1895, the failure of the business was reported in the press on September 12, 1896 – or rather, the apparent takeover by Leroy C. Fairchild, another of Leroy W’s sons, which had been competing with Leroy W. Fairchild for several years.

Harry set up Fairchild & Johnson, a wholly unrelated enterprise, in 1898, and it was renamed Fairchild & Co. in 1905.

Nishimura is silent about whether the name “L.W. Fairchild & Co.” was continued after 1896.  Since I also have the 1904 edition of Trade-Marks of the Jewelry and Kindred Trades, I checked that as well, and I think the question is fairly well answered:

The key mark was already long dead by 1904.

My best guess is that the F within a shield, skewered by a skeleton key, was used between 1890 and 1896 on products made by Leroy W. Fairchild & Co.