Settles the Issue In My Mind

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I’ve seen a few of these pencils over the years, and they are always unmarked:

I’ve always had my suspicions about who made these . . . call it “collector’s lore” whenever you hear from more than one source “oh, that was made by X” or “everybody knows that’s a Y.”   Particularly when you hear that from more than once source, there’s probably a source out there somewhere that’s ringing a bell – but absent chapter and verse, statements like that are worth about as much as the oft-perpetuated myth that the Eversharp was devised by a Japanese inventor.

People can remember things wrong, or read something correctly that was wrong.

In this case, whenever I’ve seen these pencils, the story that I hear is that they were made by Carter . . . odd, since they are usually of such poor quality that you wouldn’t typically associate it with the once-proud manufacturer (that continued as a proud manufacturer of inks after they gave up on the writing instruments business).

This one is a little better than average, and I gladly flipped a few bills Pearce Jarvis’ way at the DC show to bring it home – this time, I had something better than my suspicions and the lore of countless collectors to support those beliefs:

I had a marked Carter pencil in that exact, distinctive celluloid.  I’d still like to see chapter and verse to support the conclusion, but in the meantime, I accept the lore as gospel.