Cult Collection

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The Swanberg is an interesting brand.  Most of the time, what you will find in the brand are thin aluminum pencils, some marked Swanberg and others marked Tubit, like these:

There was another chapter in the Swanberg story though . . . one which has a connection to Charles Keeran, inventor of the Eversharp. 

Keeran’s activities in connection with the Eversharp are well documented (see “Wahl, Sheaffer and the Race for Boston,” beginning at https://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2016/12/wahl-sheaffer-and-race-for-boston-part.html).  However, Keeran’s activities after he was ousted from Wahl in 1917 are still murky; he was a founding member of Realite, and also had involvement with Autopoint – two firms which merged (the surviving company was named Autopoint Products Co.) and, like Wahl, found themselves at odds with the intense Charles Keeran.  I’m not yet sure what happened between Keeran and Autopoint, but he wound up suing the company for patent infringement in 1922; whether he was still associated with the company by that point, I don’t know, but if he was the relationship must have been strained:

After Autopoint, I’ve documented what little I’ve been able to find out about Keeran, from his involvement with other Chicago firms, such as Keen-Point and Dur-O-Lite (https://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2013/03/keen-eye-for-keen-points.html) and Rite-Rite (https://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2015/01/silent-witness.html). 

He also came into contact with Julius Swanberg and Robert Chelton.  In 1924, Swanberg had filed a patent application for a screw drive pencil, which was issued as number 1,629,766 on May 24, 1927 and was assigned to Chelton:

On February 14, 1927, Charles Keeran and Robert Chelton filed an application for another screw-drive pencil, which was issued on September 2, 1930 as number 1,774,699.  It is one of the very few of Keeran’s numerous patents in which he had a co-inventor:

When I had the opportunity to pick up much of the late Jim Ryan’s collection of pencils last November, I jumped at the chance.  Jim was a Chicago collector, so he had acquired a substantial number of Swanberg’s more sophisticated offerings:

That salmon-colored pencil really pops, and the top closely resembles Swanberg’s 1924 patent application:

The crown top pencils at the top have a commanding presence.  They are marked “Swanberg / Made In U.S.A. Under The / Keeran-Chelton Pend. Pats.”

The more humble pencils at the bottom have the same imprint:

Filling in the gaps in the Swanberg story proves elusive.  We know that in the early 1920s, he invented what would become the “Shur-Rite” pencil, which enjoyed meteoric but fleeting success in 1921 and 1922 (see https://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2016/01/flash-in-pan.html).  Swanberg appeared to pick up right where the Shur-Rite story ended with his aluminum pencils shown at the beginning of this article, for which he applied for a design patent on June 11, 1923:

This advertisement, from the April 19, 1925 edition of the Waco News-Tribune (ad space must have been really cheap in Texas), shows four different models in the Swanberg lineup: the Tubit, the Number 7 (also in aluminum), and Numbers 5 and 11 ... and no pictures to assist with identification.  The number 5, though, was a checking pencils while the number 11 was “the most perfect and beautiful pencil ever offered.” 

The good folks over at Madeinchicagomuseum.com have put a pretty good dent into filling in the details of the Swanberg story (see https://www.madeinchicagomuseum.com/single-post/swanberg-mfg-co).  They even found my Shur-Rite articles and called them a “gallant attempt” to discover what happened to the company, and they posted a couple pictures of Julius Swanberg himself: