Wednesday, October 17, 2018

From the Chicago World's Fair

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.

If you don't want the book but you enjoy this article, please consider supporting the Blog project here.

In recent online auctions, one seller was disposing of quite a few mint, boxed examples of mechanical pencils distributed as souvenirs of the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair.  I pounced on the first lot, which included a leather souvenir pencil pouch:


Later he sent more lots of these to auction, which I missed – fortunately, my friend Eric Magnuson didn’t, and he was able to add a fourth example:


Under the clips of two of them are commemorative labels for the fair:


Those goofy tops with holes in them contain stanhopes: holes through which you can view tiny pictures mounted inside.  These feature three different scenes showing different buildings from the fairgrounds:





The caps are a little distracting, and since there’s no name on the clips these might be easy to miss.  They are “Straka” Eversharps, named for inventor John Straka (Volume 2, pages 109-115); normally, this is how they are found:


In addition to the over-the-top cool Stanhopes and connections to the Century of Progress, the colors used in this series are fascinating.  The burgundy is Eversharp’s “Tunis Pearl” found on the Equipoised line:


while the green moire was also used on other Eversharp Chicago World’s Fair souvenirs:


That electric green was found on another Straka Eversharp marked “Monitor,” featured here at the blog very early on (Volume 1, page 33):


Then there's this example, in the “Borneo Pearl” celluloid used on Eversharp’s line of Equipoised purse pencils (see Volume 3, page 243):



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