LLE, Perhaps?

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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Arriving at the DC Show is always an overwhelming experience.  You’re saying hello to so many friends, you’ve got the chaos of finding your table, unloading and setting up, and in my case – recovering from a broken elbow I’d suffered in June during a bicycling accident – I was doing everything one-handed.

Suffice to say when I had settled in enough to take a break and walk around a bit, I was so overwhelmed that I wandered into the smaller, quieter room.  There I found Rich Lott, who had this one on his table:

I’m surprised, given how frazzled I was and how subtle the differences are between this Sheaffer pencil and what I’m used to seeing, that I even noticed it was a black stick pusher-outer thingie.  Notice something odd I did, though . . . here it is, next to Sheaffer’s model JLE, with a gold center barrel, and a KLE, with a black barrel and gold top:

Note that the new addition has an earlier flat ball clip, not the later straight clips.  The JLE and KLE were cataloged by Sheaffer in 1940 (see Volume 4, pages 260 and 261).  In 1939, however, the lineup was a little different:  it listed the Sheaffer Fineline pencils "in working togs" with just a gold cap and exposed eraser (Model YLE) and with a gold center -- and a black cap (Model CLE).

Thanks to Matt McColm for pointing that out -- with the PCA's library down, the best way to find the Sheaffer 1939 catalog is at David Isaacson's website.  The direct link to his archive is here.