Enjoy Them While They Last

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I feel like I rented this one rather than buying it, because it doesn’t have much time left:

This is another one of those Parker Streamline Duofold pencils in experimental colors - a few of these have been trickling out in recent years.  In my collection it joins one other example which isn’t as bad, but which has voids in the plastic:

Nearly all of these have fatal flaws in their plastics.  My new one is nearly gone on the lower section, with the damaged plastic dangling around the mechanism.  The upper section also has several serious cracks, but there’s a Parker Duofold imprint plain as day to verify the authenticity of these things:

The nicest example – not to mention the one in the craziest plastic – belongs to Eric Magnuson and was featured here some time ago (see https://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2017/06/wildest-of-wild.html).  Eric has since picked up another one, which was interesting in a couple respects:

Third from bottom is the wild one from my previous article.  It’s that bottom example that is new to Eric.  Like the others, a portion of the lower barrel has disintegrated.

The upper barrel is largely intact, but you can see where it is delaminating between two bands just next to the words “Parker Duofold”:

David Nishimura theorizes that as Parker was experimenting with different colors, the company turned barrels out of celluloid before it was properly cured – after all, they just wanted to see what the finished product would look like, without regard for how well the plastic would hold up.  The theory makes sense. 

What’s fascinating about Eric’s new example is that the stacked alternating bands theme was later employed on the Parker Vacumatic a couple years later, but in much narrower bands. 

I’ve known about this development for years, because Parker took out a design patent for the wider band design – on a Duofold Streamline pen.  I included the patent in American Writing Instrument Patents Volume 2: 1911-1945, and even illustrated it alongside the later Vacumatic design patents on page 288.  Here’s design patent 87,792, issued to Russell C. Parker on an application filed March 2, 1932:

I’ve never seen a physical example.