Wearever, Not Whatever

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I got to see Daniel Thayer at the Baltimore Show this year, and that’s an occasional reunion I always enjoy.  When I edited The Pennant a few years ago, I started a back-page feature that profiled some of the new collectors I was seeing at the pen shows – “New Faces at the Show” is what I called it, not very imaginatively.

We pen(cil) folk are a gregarious bunch, and there’s never any shame in walking up to someone at a show and saying “Hey.  I don’t know you.  What is your name and tell me about you.”  But it does take a special sort of volunteer to tell you everything you want to know, and let you take their picture, and then print it. Many of the folks I approached were cautious, and I was just as cautious about who I picked to appear in the magazine.

My judgment was good with Daniel, and we’ve remained on good terms since my days at The Pennant ended some four years ago now . . . geez, has it been four years?  Feels like it’s just been ten minutes or so.  Sigh . . . I digress . . .

Daniel had a few pencils on hand he was looking to move on, and this was one of them:

I didn’t roll my eyes that the clip read “Wearever,” although the brand doesn’t get a lot of respect in collecting circles.  David Kahn, Inc., maker of the Wearever brand (as well as Pioneer, Leeds and a host of others) was more innovative than the credit given to the company.  David Kahn himself held quite a few patents – true, his company was known for maing cheap pens and pencils, but the company was a real pioneer in how they made things more cheaply.

Take the clip on this one, for example.  If you knew immediately that was a Wearever clip, that’s because Kahn took steps to protect that look.  It was the subject of a design patent issued to Kahn on an application he filed on November 18, 1935, issued as Design Patent 98,255 on January 21, 1936:

I have archived the different variations of Wearevers that have come my way over the years, but I couldn’t recall ever seeing one in this color.  With that cap, I assumed it was a combination pen and pencil, which I don’t normally collect.  What the heck, I thought to myself, I might as well check out the nib on the off chance something better than your typical steel nib was installed in this one.

Something better was indeed hiding under that cap, but it wasn’t a nib . . .

This one is fitted with a slip cap over the other end of a double ended pencil.  So here’s a color I haven’t run across before, a slip cap when all the pens and combos I’ve seen have screw caps, and while I’ve seen double-ended Wearever pencils, I haven’t seen a short one like this – and never with a cap.  In all my years of collecting, this one was all new to me.