Speerbob Is Doubly Keen

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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Bob Speerbrecher is an ubiquitous online seller.  He’s got a great eye for pencils, and from time to time he’ll drop me a line to ask if I’m interested in something he’s found.  This was one of those times I said yes . . . thank you very much . . .

The one Bob sold to me is the silver one at the bottom of the picture.  These don’t come along very often – they are the “Keen Point Double Action”:

I’ve got a real affinity for these, because they have these interesting clips that don’t appear anywhere else in the pencil world:

These aren’t Charles Keeran’s “Keen Point” pencils, made in the late 1920s by Dur-O-Lite (and then by others, as detailed in A Century of Autopoint).  I explored these pre-Keeran Keen-Points here back in 2013 (the article is now only in the books, at The Leadhead’s Pencil Blog Volume 2, at page 93).  The Keen-Point name, as reported in the 1922 edition of Trade-Marks of the Jewelry and Kindred Trades, was held by The O.R. Johnson Co., of Providence, Rhode Island:

At some point since that last article, I stumbled across advertisements confirming that point in The Jewelers’ Circular, in 1921 and 1922:

Joe Nemecek and I talk a lot about our different collecting styles – he’s a “representative sample” collector who, once he has an outstanding example of the breed, is content.  I’m an “archival OCD” collector – once I observe two patterns, I’m inclined to try to find the other hundred that might be out laying in the weeds.  And if I find two in the same pattern in different materials?  Oh, that’s an itch I won’t scratch until I’ve either found or ruled out the possibility that the other patterns came in those materials.

But I have to say, when it comes to the hard-to-find Keen Point Double Actions, I’m finding the range that I’ve turned up to be satisfying . . .

Three different patterns, all done very artfully. . . one each in yellow gold fill, green gold fill and silver(ish). 

Thank God two of them weren’t in the same pattern.  Or the same material.