Sooooo Close

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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As I was shooting the photographs for yesterday’s article, I remembered something.  Back in February, before all this calamity started, Eric Magnuson had asked me if I was still interested in a pencil that he was finally willing to part with.

I sent Eric the price we agreed on, and we both knew that we’d see each other in the near future anyway, so he’d just have it in tow next time we met.

And then, just like that, there was no seeing anybody in the near future. 

But dammit, this was serious now . . . virus or no, yesterday’s article made today’s pencil relevant news.  I got in touch with Eric, and he said he’d be passing by Newark in the next couple days and would drop it off on the porch in a haze of Lysol disinfectant.  I wasn’t home when he happened by, so he delivered my precious cargo to Janet.

Janet, needless to say, was thrilled to receive yet another pencil at the ranch.  She was just starting to think we were running a little low. 

When I got home, I was measurably more enthralled.  What Eric delivered was at once exactly what I was expecting, but not quite what I was expecting:

The barrel lacks any imprint or date code, but from the looks of things, this falls in line with other lower-line Parkers of the late 1930s and early 1940s, such as the Challenger and Parkette. 

I know these models weren’t quite the same on the pen side of things, but with Parker pencils at the time, as I’ve mentioned before, they were all pretty much the same inside.  Since they were made after the dawn of the “screw it” epoch at Parker, the only distinction between different Parker pencil models was which plastic was wrapped around a generic Cross mechanism.

(The three eras of Parker pencil production, the “ignore them,” “oh crap” and “screw it” epochs, are described in more detail at https://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2020/04/brian-beat-me-to-punch.html, and since there are those who object to that characterization, we’ll just leave that here and move on.)

And it was this plastic which jogged my memory -- that back before the world stopped, I’d bought a pencil from Eric that I needed to shoot:

As I finished shooting those pictures of my weird Eversharp Pacemaker from yesterday’s article, I wondered whether that was the same plastic used on Eric’s pencil – and it is close, very close . . .

Not identical, though.  At least it was close enough to remind me to retrieve my purchase!