Never Dull In More Ways Than One

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The early Eclipse pencils have been a bit of an obsession of mine – especially since I was finally able to connect the dots and determine that the earliest “Never Dull” pencils were in fact made by the Rex Manufacturing Company of Providence, Rhode Island . . . another obsession of mine.

Part of what connected the dots for me was the “Never Dull” imprints appearing on other brands more clearly associated with Rex .... brands like the “Albert Howard” and such.   The link was easy, since Never Dull always seems to appear on these:

But not so much on those that are marked Rex, which is why it was so hard to connect the dots:

I don’t remember if the imprint on this one is what excited me, or whether it was the fact that it was an Eclipse in sterling, something you don’t see too often:

What I do know is that if I had seen an Eclipse with an imprint like this, it might not have been so hard to connect the dots to Rex:

An Eclipse, with the same plain Jane imprint you’d find on a Rex.