Now I Can Quit Looking For It

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Something has bothered me about the “Alexander the Great” pencils I introduced here during the first year of the blog (http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2012/08/sylish.html):

Some years ago, I remembered having one example of this pencil, with one difference: it didn’t have “Alexander” written on the clip.  Unfortunately, at the time I didn’t put it in a place separate from the plain ol’ examples, and after going through all the ones still on display I’ve concluded that at some point I must have inadvertently culled it out of my collection, along with the other Alexander duplicates.

What has bugged me was that I couldn’t remember what name was imprinted on them.  Thanks to Chris Egolf, I can finally get a good nights’ sleep now, since he had these three in an online auction recently:

The name that I couldn’t recall was Gerlach-Barklow, the advertising specialty and art calendar company located in Joliet, Illinois.  I did a rundown of the brand here awhile back at https://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2014/12/gerlach-barklow.html.

And I noticed something about these I didn’t tell you earlier.  If you pull out the eraser, these have kind of a neat feature:

The metal retainers are adjustable, so as the erasers wears down you can push it up.