One Itch Down

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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As long as I have a picture, I don’t need to have the pencil, I always tell myself.

Sometimes, I’m lying.  In The Catalogue, one of the few pictures in the book I didn’t take showed this pencil:

Well, not this pencil exactly.  It’s just taken me ten years to find my own example, and it turned up at the Ohio Show last November.  The imprint tells the story:

“Arthur A. Waterman Co. / Modern Pen Co. Successor / Not Connected With / The L.E. Waterman Co.”   The picture of one of these on page 161 of The Catalogue was from a kindly online seller who allowed me to use his – I was excited to finally handle and be able to photograph one in person.

Arthur A. Waterman’s history is a convoluted one, told here at the blog back in 2013 (the full article is no longer online, but it is in the print version of The Leadhead’s Pencil Blog Volume 2, at page 156).  The Modern Pen Company was formed by agreement with Arthur A. Waterman in 1905, as a sales agent to sell A.A. Waterman pens.  Litigation with the L.E. Waterman Company culminated with a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1914, affirming an appeals court decision requiring A.A. Waterman to use the “not connected with” disclaimer on its products.

In 1921, the Modern Pen Company dropped the Waterman name altogether, renamed itself Chicago Safety Pen Company, and its pencils were thereafter named the EVRDA (that’s a goofy acronym for “Everyday”). 

That puts today’s pencil between 1914 and 1921, and it’s going to be on the later side of that range; in 1914, the Ever Sharp pencil was only just beginning its upward trajectory, and pencils such as these copied the Eversharp look after it became widely available after 1917.

Did the Modern Pen Company make this pencil?  Absolutely not - they were made for it by a third party supplier, stamped with the ungainly Modern name and disclaimer.  There’s a tell here that points towards who made these: that rib on the barrel, just above the imprint.  It appears on the Bonnwear, the Ever-Rite and others along those lines:

These pencils led me into one of the deepest quagmires I’ve explored here.  The series began with “Wear it Well” in October, 2014 (Volume 3, page 33), then blossomed into an exploration of the Ever-Rite and the similarities of these pencils to the Sheaffer Sharp Point (Volume 3, page 71) . . . which, in turn, led to Wahl, Sheaffer and the Race for Boston (that one is still online here, at https://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2016/12/wahl-sheaffer-and-race-for-boston-part.html).  Pencils like these make my head hurt trying to find and explain all the connections between 1920s manufacturers.

And today’s A.A. Waterman presents yet another wrinkle: although from the outside this pencil looks just like those Bonnwear and Ever-Rite pencils, with those eraser tubes that pull out of the barrel, when I pulled the cap this A.A. Waterman, it’s just an ordinary cap over an eraser.  No Sheaffer-like mechanism.

So that’s one itch scratched.  Another still has me climbing the walls.