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.