The Brompton

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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.”