Not the Story I Was Hoping to Tell

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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There are times when I see something online and I get so excited that I know exactly what it is, I forget to check to see how it compares to the things in my collection.  Like this one:

At a cheap Buy it Now price under ten bucks, there was no question this one was going back to Ohio (cue the Pretenders: “but my city was gone . . .” and you’re welcome for the earworm that you won’t get rid of for a week).

There’s no markings at all on this pencil, but I know exactly what it is: a pencil made by the Western Pencil Company in Los Angeles, and probably made from leftover parts after the company folded, hence the lack of the typical imprint on the cap.

Sat down I did to write about this.  Went down to the museum I did to find that I already had one.

Read my own darned blog I did to see that I’ve already written about the one already in my collection.  The article, “The Handoff to Western," details my theory that these celluloid pencils, identical mechanically to the Dollarpoint and Artpoint metal pencils which preceded them, suggest that when all the assets of Dollarpoint were sold at auction in February, 1925, everything was sold to one buyer, which reopened as the Western Pencil Company.

Oh, a big pencil like these with a Dollarpoint imprint, or a metal pencil marked Western, would just clinch that one, wouldn’t it!  Alas though, this pencil is unmarked – and both have tips that are a color mismatch for the rest of the pencil!

But . . . wait a tick . . .

Twenty years to find six examples of the Western Pencil . . . calculate the odds of finding a part that’s a better color match, let alone making two well-matched examples with a spare!