The Completist

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.

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My friend Richard Fernandez was a bit puzzled at the DC show.  He had a big baggie of pencils for me to look at, and while he knew there wasn’t much in there to see, he gave ma a chance to paw through it.  Out of everything in that bag, there was only one thing I had to have, and it was covered in more rust than a railroad spike. 

But I didn’t have one and I’d been looking for one for a long time.  Even if I couldn’t get it cleaned up, I was glad to have a placeholder on the wall o’ pencils.

Fortunately, attacking it with a buffing wheel yielded some pretty good results:

The pencil is marked “Guild” on the clip, and closer up you can see there’s still some substantial pitting left behind after the corrosion was removed:

Still, I’m pretty happy with it.

The Guild Products Corporation was a scheme in the early 1920s by the Mid-Atlantic Retail Stationers’s Division of the National Association of Stationers and Manufacturers to squeeze pen manufacturers into more “reaonable” pricing – the idea was that members would band together and sell only Guild Products, so that any pen or pencil manufacturer that wanted to sell products in member stores needed to supply “Guild” branded products.  The whole story can be found in “Back to the Drawing Board” posted back in 2013 (see https://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2013/08/back-to-drawing-board.html).

To my knowledge, only two manufacturers signed up to make Guild-branded pencils — Conklin and Mabie Todd.   Each made pencils which looked exactly like their regular lines, but with a flared cap squared off at the top to set I apart a bit.

When I wrote the last article, David Moak, the author of Mabie in America, allowed me to use an image from his book of a boxed example of the Guild, complete with the paperwork to establish conclusively that Mabie Todd was its source:

It was driving me a little bit crazy not being able to find a metal Mabie Todd Guild all this time. 

Now I just need to find a ringtop.