An Acid-Etched Eversharp

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This one had an appointment to meet me at the Raleigh show this year:

At first blush, it looks a lot like one of those sterling hand engraved Eversharps, but it isn’t . . .

The barrel on this one is acid etched to create that pattern, not hand engraved:

These are exceedingly difficult to find and, we know from the imprint, were a very early experiment by Wahl soon after the company took over production of Charles Keeran’s Eversharp:

The imprint is the two-word “Ever Sharp,” with no mention of Wahl.  Without the side clip, you might wonder how I could be certain this is Wahl-made: the answer is that there is documentary evidence that the ladies’ size was introduced by Col. William Smith at the 1917 Stationers’ Banquet in Chicago in January of that year . . . as reported in the February, 1917 issue of Office Appliances, at page 41.

I read this excerpt, which describes the ladies’ model as “a trifle shorter than the usual Eversharps” and . . . eequipped with a ring on the top” as an indication that these were new.  The tidbit surfaced in the course of researching “Wahl, Sheaffer and the Race for Boston,” which appeared as a two-part series in The Pennant in the winter, 2015 and spring, 2016 issues; I reformatted the article as a series of posts here, beginning at http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2016/12/wahl-sheaffer-and-race-for-boston-part.html (the installment which refers to this excerpt is the third installment).

Before there were Wahl Pens, Wahl’s only writing instrument was the Ever Sharp, and the Wahl name wasn’t included.  After the purchase, for a brief time Wahl continued to market Boston Safety Fountain Pens under its original name, not adopting the Wahl Pen moniker until a short time later.

Was this one of the pencils Col. Smith handed out to the ladies in attendance at the 1917 Chicago Stationers’ Banquet?  Sadly, no.  The article indicates that those were gold filled.  Additionally, this example doesn’t have a ring on top, whether the original top was replaced with an interchangeable cap from the side clip model or whether it was specially made for a special sort of barrel.  I also wonder if that original batch from February, 1917 didn’t also have the names of the ladies in attendance engraved on their barrels – after all, that’s what Col. Smith did when he handed out Boston Fountain Pens the preceding year.

So I’m fairly convinced that this pencil was made early in 1917 – after the Chicago Stationer’s Banquet in January, 1917, but before Wahl’s name was added to the imprint later in 1917, and before”Ever Sharp” was contracted to one word in 1918.  .