A Subtle Turn Towards the Deco

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I posted this story on Facebook a while ago, but it makes sense to post what I know about this one here, too:  Facebook is like “drinking from a firehose,” as my friend Jim Day says.  Information just floods at you and past you – two weeks later might as well be a decade if you’re trying to go back and find something.

Our story begins at the Baltimore Show, when Daniel Thayer presented me with a few pencils available for purchase.  The ringtop in this picture was one of them:

These are later production Eversharps in the company’s “oxidized Grecian border” pattern.  The barrels are silver filled over brass, with the engraving done after the plating to reveal the brass underneath.  As the exposed brass oxidizes, the engraved portions get darker; I didn’t feel too bad shining up the ringtop, since the silver filling was in pretty bad shape, too.

I only bought this one because I wasn’t sure whether I had this pattern in a ringtop, and I didn’t – score one.  I wasn’t too concerned about the fact that the ring was missing from the top, because I’ve got a sizeable boneyard of spare parts, and I was sure I had a replacement laying around somewhere.

I was wrong.

As I looked more closely at the cap, I noticed something I have never noticed before:

A “normal” Eversharp looks like the one on my full-sized example, at right, with that floral Victorian sort of look.  This ringtop has a crisp, deco cap band.  And there’s more:

The top of the caps on both the full sized and ringtop versions of oxidized Grecian border pencils have a distinct black ring on them, another feature which doesn’t normally appear on Eversharp caps. 

I probably spend more time around metal Eversharps than most people do . . . scratch that, more than most pen and pencil people do . . . scratch that, more than most pencil people do.  But I never recalled seeing this variation on an Eversharp cap before.  So I went back for a thorough examination of the rest of my collection, and all of my parts bins, looking to see whether this is something truly unusual or whether it is just something I never noticed before now.  After a couple hours, I had found only one other example:

This also appeared on a ringtop pencil, although it was on an ordinary silver plate pencil with a plain barrel.  Caps are easily interchangeable, so it’s entirely possible that it might have been switched over from another oxidized Grecian border pencil, but this one does match the barrel of the pencil well, and it is also later production (you can tell from the imprint, with the word “Wahl” in superscript with no “Co.” underneath it).  But– note there is no black ring around the top of the cap.

My next step was to see whether this variation was documented anywhere in Wahl’s catalogs, and – I’ll be damned – it was.  The Wahl 1928 catalog is often viewed as a high watermark in the metal pen/pencil era for Wahl, because in it you’ll find the greatest variety of products.  There it was:

Three variations of the oxidized Grecian border pattern in 1928: full sized, ringtop, and short model with military clip.  See it?

The full-sized and ringtop versions in the catalog clearly show this special deco cap; the military clip version, however, shows the normal floral scrollwork.  Does that mean my full-sized example has the wrong cap?  I don’t think so; remember, even though it has traditional scrollwork, it also has that black ring which only seems to appear on this pattern.

For right now, all I can say is that this cap is documented only on oxidized Grecian border pencils in silver filled configuration; if gold filled examples in this pattern are out there, I would be keen to hear about them!

There’s something else I noticed in the course of examining hundreds of Eversharp caps in detail that’s worth documenting here.   While scrollwork on Eversharp caps varies wildly in its detail, most share the same basic pattern of leaves surrounding little “eyes” (like you’ve seen above).  There’s another distinctly different pattern and, bearing in mind that caps are easy to switch from one pencil to another, I’ve noted these also seem to turn up on late-production (1928 or so and later) pencils:

Instead of leaves swirling around eyes, these look more like interlocking wedding bands:

These seem to appear more often than the deco caps, and in both silver filled, sterling and gold filled configurations (I found around a dozen).  It took a lot of time with a loupe to detect these subtle differences - if you are stuck in quarantine, feel free to grab a loupe and tell me what you find in your collection!