When the Point Was Sure

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When this one appeared in an online auction, I was sure there was a mistake in the listing.

“Sure-Point,” the title of the auction read.  Sometimes it seems like the guys that thought up names for these things had a pair of dice with words on them - “Ever” . . . “Perfect” . . . “Point” . . . “Sharp” . . . about every combination of pencil-like words possible was used, but this was one I hadn’t heard of.  Bidding on faith, I brought this home to find that it is, in fact, a “Sure-Point” . . .

And that had me scratching my head a bit.  Notice the lettering, in that squared-off, football scoreboard style?  Looks exactly like something else I’ve seen:

When Sheaffer first introduced the company’s new mechanical pencils in 1917, they were marketed as the “Sharp-Point” pencil (the entire saga of how Sheaffer got into the pencil business is told in “Wahl, Sheaffer and the Race for Boston,” which begins at https://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2016/12/wahl-sheaffer-and-race-for-boston-part.html).  Sheaffer’s earliest known Sharp-Points shared the same spikey, Winchester-inspired lettering seen on Eversharp pencils at the time, but Sheaffer soon changed the imprint to this squared-off font.  Note that with the exception of that first word, the entire imprint is identical, with “Pat Apl’d. For” on the second line.

But the two pencils look so . . . different . . .

I can’t get the cap off of the Sure-Point to see what’s going on inside, and I don’t want to force the only example I’ve found – but the caps don’t want to budge on my early Sharp-Point ringtop pencils, either.  So I spent some time combing through hundreds of metal pencils at the museum, looking for any other pencils that had a top like this:

It kind of looks like a Henber . . . kind of looks like those weird Acme pencils that don’t have the Perfect Point tops . . . but then again, it kind of looks like what Sheaffer did later, adopting a bell-shaped cap that would endure until the Balance era.

But there’s one other design element on that Sure-Point that provides a clue.   Did you see that both ends of the machining on the barrel terminate in a double band?

I went through my entire collection looking for anything else that was machined this way, and there were only three which have that feature.  Here are two of them:

Yep, you guessed it - these are the “Redypoint” pencil and that early Sheaffer Sharp-Point from “Wahl, Sheaffer and the Race for Boston” – the two pencils which confirmed, with all the other evidence presented in that article, that David J. LaFrance (of DeWitt-LaFrance and Superite fame) was the inventor of the Sheaffer Sharp-Point:

And those grooves were deliberately added independently of the rest of the design – note that on the Sharp-Point, the chasing actually overlaps those bands at the nose end:

I feel that same headache coming on that started during the months I was researching and writing "Wahl, Sheaffer and the Race for Boston."  In the article, I got as far as proving that whoever made that early Redypoint for the Samuel Ward Manufacturing Company also made the first Sheaffer Sharp Points, but I never found the evidence to prove whether it was the Boston Fountain Pen Company before Wahl purchased it, or David J. LaFrance on his own, or LaFrance working a fledgling pencil program for Sheaffer.

A couple Tylenol didn’t help.  I mentioned that the Redypoint and Sharp-Point were two of the three pencils I found in my collection which shared the Sure-Point’s double ribs.  Here’s the third:

Sure looks like a Sharp-Point, doesn’t it?  And it doesn’t just look like one, it works like one, too:

And there are those same double bands at either end:

The manufacturer’s imprint – or “producer’s imprint,” maybe, tells a different story entirely:

“GF / Youngstown, Ohio.”   These pencils were produced by the General Fireproofing Company, and I mulled about the similarities these pencils have to early Sheaffer Sharp-Point pencils here at the blog back in 2013 (The Leadhead’s Pencil Blog Volume 2, page 153).  Here’s the summary I provided of the company’s history:

“According to The History of Youngstown and The Mahoning Valley by Joseph Green Butler (1921), the company was established in Youngstown in January, 1902 to manufacture building products, particularly fireproof insulation and steel reinforcement for concrete. The financial panic of 1907 (an event on the scale of our recent “great recession”) slowed the building industry and threatened the survival of the fledgling company, so GF’s management diversified into office furniture and products.”

In the December, 1921 edition of Office Appliances, the magazine published a directory of manufacturers, listing General Fireproofing under Stationery Cabinets and Tables . . . but not under pens and pencils.

In fact, I have never found any documentation for GF’s production of pencils, and knowing how these fit chronologically into the Sheaffer story might explain a lot.  The company was active in stationery circles in January 1917, running an advertisement for sales representatives in Typewriter Topics that month:

There’s no mention of GF’s Youngstown manufacturing facilities – only the London and New York offices, the latter of which was at 399 Broadway.  Maybe it is just a coincidence, but GF’s New York office was only a block away from one of the other characters in our story:

Sheaffer’s New York office was at 270 Broadway until the company moved a bit farther up in April, 1921 . . . to 203 Broadway.

And maybe it’s another coincidence that in November, 1916, General Fireproofing invited the public to a demonstration of Modern Bookkeeping at their Boston office, located at 125 Federal Street:

That fact isn’t so random in the context of "Wahl, Sheaffer and the Race for Boston."  The Redypoint, as the article indicates, was made for prominent Boston stationer Samuel Ward Manufacturing Company . . . and Samuel Ward was located practically around the corner from 125 Federal Street, at 8 State Street.

At this point, I’m seeing a tremendous amount of smoke, but no fire yet.  Must be the fireproofing.