Dress Togs

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I don’t remember where I found this one, only that once I saw the box, I had to see what was inside:

Such cool styling proved to be the setting for a lowly Sheaffer pencil in “working togs”:

The clip is the earlier flat ball clip, the sort used on the series in 1940 or so:

Complete with sticker, referring me to some pretty serious technical instruction before I “attempt to operate” it:

. . . and, of course, no instructions . . . since I couldn’t pull up the floor of the box to see what was under it, I started looking around to see what I could see.  There was a clue on the bottom . . .

Patent number 1,838,102 is only for a means of attaching the padding material to the box, though, so that one was a dead end.

So I’ve got a lowly pencil in a pretty fancy box.  Sure, someone might have put an unrelated NOS pencil in a pretty nice box, but heck, I like to think someone decided to dress up a Sheaffer working togs pencil for a special occasion.

And speaking of Sheaffer pencils dressed up for special occasions . ..

This one is a later example, marked “Fineline” on the clip.  In fact, I can precisely date this one to 1952, based on what’s printed on the white portion of the barrel:

The Sheaffer Snorkel fountain pen was introduced in 1952, with what is widely considered today to have been the most complicated filling system ever devised for a fountain pen.  So excited was Sheaffer that it even pressed the Fineline pencils – known mostly as advertising pieces – into service promoting the company’s exciting new product.