Gumdrop Pilgrimage

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Eric Magnuson makes a pilgrimage to pencil central every so often, since we live within twenty miles of each other and from time to time we have things to swap back and forth.  Whenever I see him, he usually has a new addition to his collection of experimental Parker colors, and his recent sojourn was no exception:

This is to my knowledge the only of one of these oddball colors that is prevalent enough to have picked up a collectors’ nickname: “gumdrop.”   At least, that’s the name that swirls around in conneciton with these, and I don’t know of any official designation for the color by Parker.

Eric acquired all three of the top pieces from Warren Granek after much weeping and gnashing of teeth over the price.  My contribution to this picture is the ringtop at the bottom, which was bequeathed to me by Lee Anderson.   As is the case with most of these experimental plastics, examples in gumdrop are exceedingly fragile and unstable – in fact, part of the lower barrel of my example disintigrated in my hands when Lee first showed it to me (“Don’t worry,” he said - “it was coming your way anyway”).

Note the “deluxe” bands with the slightly wider middle one, and there’s something else a bit unusual about this one: the tip is much shorter – not Vacumatic shorter mind you, but it doesn’t look like a Parker tip:

Eric had one other experimental Parker to show me.  I had seen this one before – Pearce Jarvis and Brian McQueen had partnered to purchase it in a recent auction in Janesville, Wisconsin of a hoard from the estate of a former Parker employee.

Joe and I both took a pass on this one - not that we doubted the legitimacy of it, since it’s fully marked with a Duofold imprint and has direct provenance back to the Parker factory.

The level of commitment required to pick this one up was more than a general pencil collector than I could manage, and even more than a Parker pencil specialist like Joe was able to muster – it took a specialist within a specialty like Eric, who collects Parker pencils in experimental plastics, to bring Brian and Pearce’s pencil into the fold.