Stars of the Show

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A while back I posted pictures of a large lot of pencils I had plucked from the garden of online shopping:

Offhand, I had mentioned that two items in this mess of mostly junk would pay for the whole party, at least as far as I was concerned.  After all, you might have spotted in this mess two unusual looking pencils:

Those gawky looking tops and long metal noses are dead giveaways that these are Riedells, among the most interesting and goofy pencils ever made:

The Riedell is listed in The Catalogue, and the picture on page 126 says it all about how weird these pencils were:

And then, as if on cue and arriving just in the nick of time to include in this article . . . these two examples also turned up:

A while back I posted a couple articles detailing the full history of the Riedell Corporation and its quirky accountant-turned-pencil-tycoon, Charles M. Riedell (The Leadhead’s Pencil Blog Volume 3, page 41-46).  Thanks to the Riedell family, I had a fairly good idea of the extent of the known universe of Riedell pencils after Lynn Riedell forwarded me pictures of the sales sample cases he had inherited:

Over the years I’ve managed to find examples of most of what is shown in these cases, including the full sized models in six colors and two trim levels (the teal and bronze marble was the first example I found, but there wasn’t one in the Riedell family archive).

The Riedell family has several examples with price bands - with these latest two additions, I've got three, designating that the base model with nickel plated trim was $2.50, gold filled trim was $3.50 and gold filled trim in fancy colors sold for a whopping $5.00:

Ringtops have proven more difficult to come by. I’ve only found three varieties:

As detailed in my previous articles, the Riedell was named for and marketed by Charles Riedell beginning in late 1928, but it was invented by Hugo Hasselquist, best known among pencil guys as the inventor of Wahl’s “military clip” used on metal pencils.

In A Century of Autopoint, I documented Hasselquist’s departure from Wahl to join Charles Keeran with his new business venture, and Hasselquist became the first vice president of the newly formed Autopoint Pencil Company in 1920 (page 16).   The first incarnation of Autopoint quickly ran into financial difficulty, and Hasselquist disappears from the slate of officers at Autopoint when the new leadership team was elected in April, 1921.  I haven’t been able to trace his movements after then; by June 5, 1922, when he filed the patent application for what would become the Riedell, it appears he was on his own living in Chicago - the patent was not assigned to anyone:

It would be more than seven years for Hasselquist’s patent to be granted, on July 9, 1929.  If I ever found a Riedell with that patent date on it, I’d believe they were produced for more than just a few months.  But I’ve never seen one with the date - all of the examples I found indicate that the patent was still pending:

There was one patent for the Riedell which had been issued by the time the first pencils were marketed in late 1928:  Hasselquist also secured a design patent for that distinctive faceted cap, which applied for around the same time he applied for the utility patent for the Riedell.  However, his design patent (number 66,797) was issued much more quickly – on St. Patrick’s Day, 1925.

Legitimately, Riedell pencils could have been stamped with this patent date when they were introduced in late 1928; why they weren’t is a mystery to me, since both the utility and design patents were held by Hasselquist.  That’s the thing about these research projects – I knew I wasn’t quite finished writing about these pencils in 2014, and although I’ve added a few more details in 2020, I know this story isn’t complete - yet.

I just keeping tugging on the loose strings thinking maybe one of these days the rest of the sweater will be unknitted.