The Long and Short of It

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.

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When this “Tempoint-styled” Eversharp came my way along with a bunch of other things, I was looking for an excuse to keep it:

I just love that coral color . . . even though I had another one . . .

The excuse I needed was at the top - what looks like a flared bit of plastic at the end is something I haven’t seen for some time, and never on a full sized model – it’s one of those detachable plastic price “wafers” Eversharp occasionally used instead of stickers or bands:

The numbers have worn off, but somehow the dark blue/purple wafer has managed to hang in there.  I wrote about these when the blog was first getting going (Volume 1, pages 93 and 135), but in both of those articles, the wafers were attached to earlier metal crown tops, not to these straight plastic caps.  I’ve only seen this one other time, on a military-clip example, second from the top on page 218.  The lettering is still intact on that one:

There was a second excuse for me to keep that coral pencil, which didn’t register at the time I was taking these pictures.  A few months later I was going over these with a fine toothed comb again, looking for any reason I could to keep both of these lapis examples after what looked like another duplicate came my way:

The celluloid on the lower example looks a little lighter and brighter, but that’s not what got my attention – it was the clips:

One has a noticably stubbier clip marked simply “Eversharp,” while the other clip is longer and has the word “Wahl” added.  There’s a reason for that.  In Wahl’s 1928 catalog, the company’s “New Style Pyroxalin Barrel Pencils” are shown with the stubbier Eversharp clips:

The 1929 catalog I’ve been able to find isn’t as good a quality, but there’s no question that for 1929, Wahl switched to the longer “Wahl Eversharp” clips:

So the shorter clips are earlier, dating to 1927 and 1928, while the longer clips are from 1929:

Knowing that little detail is what made it easy to spot what made this one so special in Raleigh:

On page 216 I wrote about how much more rare the celluloid (“pyraloxin,” in the King’s Eversharpese) black pencils are than their hard rubber predecessors – and I had assumed at the time that the celluloid models always had smooth barrels while the hard rubber ones were always machined with Eversharp’s “grecian border” pattern.  The longer clip on this one, though, had me zooming in for a closer look to see if it might be celluloid, even though the barrel is chased:

And yes, Virginia, celluloid examples do exist with chased barrels.