Helps to Know the Alphabet

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.

If you don't want the book but you enjoy this article, please consider supporting the Blog project here.

Sometimes I’m able to find things in online auctions very reasonably because I’ve seen enough of these things to recognize details that a lot of people don’t notice.

This time, I picked up something for a song because I know my alphabet.  “Antique signed ASW Art Deco floral Sterling Silver mechanical pencil 3.7" dainty” was the title of the auction for this pencil:

Parts of the title were right.  Yes, it’s antique and it is probably sterling silver.  More points for being correct in identifying it as a mechanical pencil, and it is in fact dainty:

There’s our pencil compared to an Addison from the 1830s for scale.  Note that both have a distinctive, onion-shaped top which is something you’ll typically find on pencils that are approaching two centuries old:

This is a tiny little thing, American, and very, very early.  I’ll even go along with the “Art Deco floral” description, even though the art deco movement was a century later:

But . . . “signed ASW?”

The auction pictures weren’t spectacular, but zooming in on those pictures I could see that it looked a lot more like “WSH,” and that had me really excited.   I could only think of one other “WSH,” and if that’s what it turned out to be it would be the earliest one I’ve ever seen . . .

I detailed the early history of William S. Hicks here about four years ago (the article is posted at https://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-early-history-of-william-s-hicks.html).  Hicks was born in 1817 or 1818, and from what I pieced together, during the 1830s he was still apprenticing, first with Jesse Browne starting in 1837, then with Edward Deacon in the 1840s.  The traditional founding date given for Hicks when he went off on his own is 1848.

So if this pencil is a Hicks, it’s a really, really early one, perhaps made while he was still apprenticing, perhaps made later using an obsolete design.  It just doesn’t seem to fit . . . so I took a closer look at that imprint:

That “s” just isn’t convincing . . . got me to thinking . . . what other maker used the initials “W” and an “H” who would have made a pencil like this in the 1830s?

W and H . . . W and H . . .

Well Hell.  I know who that is!

These are pencils photographed by David Nishimura, who allowed me to use the picture here in connection with an article I wrote about Woodwards and Hale, one of New York’s earliest firms which operated until 1839 (https://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-brothers-woodward.html).  David has an example with that very onion-shaped top, which also appeared in this advertisement, composed in 1832 and published in 1833:

I think that poorly stamped “S” is actually a “&”, for “W&H”:

Sigh.  Doesn’t look much like “&” either, does it?  Oh well . . . Woodwards & Hale makes much more sense than Hicks, so until a better explanation comes along, this little guy will reside in that little corner of the museum.

And I’m still waiting for a better explanation of something else about this new addition:

It’s a rear drive pencil – turning the finial advances the lead!

Epilogue: in the course of researching this article, I stumbled across another example of a Woodwards & Hale:

It’s a little bit rough and overpolishing hasn’t done it any favors, but it shares a very similar decorative engraving on the barrel to the “W?H”: