Two Finds, One Box, A Century Apart

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.

Here’s an interesting one I’ve never heard of before, as it came to me from an online auction:

“American Lens Pencil.”  The box lid and what you see on the card in the floor of the box are all that came with this one . . . what you see is all I know:

The pencil itself is completely unmarked, and the accommodation clip is a stock “Holyoke B” clip that appears in the 1931 Van Valkenberg catalog, a copy of which is posted at the Pen Collectors of America’s online library:

If I had one guess as to who made this one, I’d go with the American Lead Pencil Company of New York.  American specialized in lower end, gimmicky stuff, and another New York Company, the Pen-N-Pencil Co., introduced the "The New Marvel Two-In-One Combination Magnifier and Mechanical Pencil," also in the 1930s (I posted about the New Marvel here early on at the blog – unfortunately, it was one that google wiped out the pictures, but the article for what it’s worth is at https://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2012/01/just-one-point-on-these-but-its-good.html).

There is that wooden tube of leads in the box – however, that’s a bonus, not anything that originally had to do with this pencil.

The label says “2 / Everpoint Leads / H. Cohen & Co. Phila.”

These leads are earlier – almost a century earlier.  “Everpoint” is a term of art that goes back to the dawn of the mechanical pencil industry, a name coined by S. Mordan & Co. in the 1820s to refer to a pencil you didn’t have to whittle down to use  (as in, it ever has a point), but which quickly became a generic term for any mechanical pencil.

Henry Cohen & Co. was a stationer, listed in Sheldon & Company’s 1845 edition of the Business or Advertising Directory, at 3 South Fourth Street, Philadelphia:

In an advertisement in The American Stationer on May 31, 1883, Henry’s successor, Charles Cohen, claimed that Henry Cohen & Company was founded in 1838: