Call Me Yogi

This article has been edited and included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 6, now on sale at The Legendary Lead Company.  I have just a few hard copies left of the first printing, available here, and an ebook version in pdf format is available for download here.

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I get a lot of emails from people who want to sell me something.  Today’s pencil was offered to me for a price I couldn’t justify, as nice as it is – yes, I tend to value these things more than the average bear, but no, I’m not willing to spend vastly more than what I believe average bears would pay.

We parted friends as he set off to find an above average bear, and he agreed to let me use his pictures here at the blog (probably in the hopes I would bait such bears through an article here).  I never did – although his pictures were good enough that I could see what he had, the cell phone snapshots just didn’t do it justice.  Besides, I’m not running an advertising agency here!

Fast forward a couple years, and he’s back to offer the pencil to me again.  I was never sure whether he remembered who I was from our last exchange, but he had apparently exhausted the world’s bear population and determined that I was top bear.  It took a couple years but it was worth the wait:

It’s an American Perpetual in its original box, with paperwork and a tube of replacement leads.  I’ve written about these a couple times here at the blog (The Leadhead’s Pencil Blog Volume 2, page 206 and Volume 3, page 10):

The three examples I have with model numbers are all different . . . there’s a number 25C, a number 26, and this one is a 26-2:

The box is just fantastic, with great Jules Verne sorts of Victorian flourish on every bit of it:

I’ve had a few of these lead containers over the years, but since the lettering is dark grey on navy, they usually aren’t as legible as this:

These little points of lead were only used on the American Perpetual and they are hard to come by – that might be why in this box was a little slip of paper assuring buyers that more were available if they needed them:

The pencil is also as mint as they come:

The two patent dates for the pencil, 480,188 and 584, 993, are evident on the barrel:

In the last article I did about these, about the more green “Panopepton” advertising example, I had noted there was a six-digit number stamped on the top part that I couldn’t figure out.  The number on that one was 336,333:

I was never able to conclusively determine what that number meant, but I came up with a reasonable guess.  The hex color number corresponding to 336,333 was really close to the color of the barrel, so I thought it might be a paint code:

This new addition also has a six digit number on the extender, but this one is 483,979:

I went back to color-hex.com to see what color number 483,979, hoping it would be that pale pea-green, but alas:

I guess that was just a one-in-a-million coincidence, since it’s nowhere close to the right color this time.  Back to square one, and my only other guess is that American actually stamped serial numbers on the Perpetual, at least for a time.

There was paperwork neatly folded in the box, undisturbed for more than a century.  I spent some time carefully unfolding it and flattening it out, and it was different from paperwork I’ve seen for these before:

And on the reverse, wonderful instructions:

Normally, once I get paperwork like this flattened out, I’ll keep it in a plastic protective sleeve.  In this case though, it just didn’t seem right.  After these photos were taken, I carefully folded it back the way it was and put it back in the box.