My First Love

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In the spring of 1999 – gulp, 22 years ago – I was browsing around at the Don Scott Antique Show at the Fairgrounds in Columbus, Ohio.  It was a warm Saturday morning with clear skies, so there were vendors set up outside, in between the three or four buildings that housed the show at the time.

I remember browsing through the offerings of one of those outdoor vendors, displayed in cardboard boxes in varying stages of decay, filled to their brims with what appeared to be the contents of someone’s garage.  It was heaven pawing through all of that stuff.  As I did, a pencil caught my eye . . . my father had me keeping a sharp eye out for pencils that were marked “Autopoint” on the clip, so I pulled it out for a closer look.

“Majestic,” the clip read.  I’d thrown back lots of pencils like this when the clip didn’t say “Autopoint,” since Dad wouldn’t want them.   This time, something gave me pause . . . maybe it was the deep glow of those brown strips of celluloid, or those great geometric, deco shapes on the center band.  It just had a bit of class to it.  Maybe, I thought to myself, if it isn’t too expensive I’ll just buy this one for myself.

It was a buck.

There’s two types of people on this planet.   The normal ones would have spent a buck to take this one pencil home and be happy with a nice find they will use and enjoy for the rest of their life.  

Then there’s collectors, who wonder how many more of these things are out there.

With that Majestic in my pocket, I continued to wander around and I had a fateful meeting with Terry Mawhorter, of Ohio Pen Show fame, who used to set up at the Scott Antique Show when he lived up north in Zanesville.  I remember being enthralled to find someone whose entire display was dedicated to exactly what I was kinda sorta looking for.

I was excited to share my crappy, $1 Majestic pencil with Terry.  In his calm, measured voice, he said to me, “that’s nice . . . but let me show you something a little bit more special.”  And Terry showed me a full-sized Eversharp Doric pencil in Kashmir (green marble).

That was it . . . my first “real” pencil purchase.  I was hooked, and for my first couple of years attending pen shows (at first, just two . . . Columbus and Chicago), I was laser-focused on finding other Doric pencils.  It was, as the title of this article suggests, my first love.

I haven’t written about it much here at the blog, but that’s only because by the time I wrote The Catalogue in 2011, I already had already assembled nearly all of them in my collection and included them in the book.  I haven’t had much to add.

However, one whopper of an addition came my way in recent months, by way of my friend Michael Krut:

Black and pearl is an ubiquitous celluloid during the Golden Age – but in the Doric series, it is a unicorn which commands special attention.  When the Doric was introduced in 1931, it was documented in five colors: Jet (black), Morocco (red marble), Kashmir (green marble), Burma (grey marble), and Cathay (an electric, almost glow-in-the-dark green).  Black and pearl, common in earlier Wahl flattop and Equipoised pens as well as an industry-wide favorite, was never a catalogued color on the Doric.

Yet they turn up, very rarely.  Just often enough to whet collectors’ appetites, so they command substantial premiums.  And this set is just flawless . . . 

There’s collector’s lore about the black and pearl Dorics, but nothing documented . . . just stories that they were made for Wahl employees as gifts.  This is the only trim configuration in which they are found; in The Catalogue, I refer to it as “Doric I,” and it was the flagship trim level when the model was first introduced in 1931.  I’ve found them in four out of the six possible variations, and I don’t know if any exist in the fifth:

Which brings me to a long overdue taxonomy of the type I Doric, since it has the most interesting little variations within its ranks.  We’ll start with the obvious: there are in fact four variations represented here:  when the Doric was first introduced, artwork in advertisements confirms that the trim bands on the pencils were initially split between the upper and lower barrels.

Eversharp’s catalog from 1932 provides additional detail.  A very poor copy is included in the Pen Collectors of America’s library, and a black-and-white reprint is also still available.  At the 2019 DC Show, Rob Bader sold me a slew of old pen catalogs, and this was one of them.  Although it’s a bit worse for wear, it’s original and in full color:

The narrative at the right side of this page states there were four Doric models: full-size with side clip (DC), soldier clip models (DSC), clasp pencils (DK) and ringtops (DW).  Although the artwork appears to show an oversized pencil, larger than the DC, the model numbers provided are the same, so that suggests artistic license rather than a fifth, distinct model.

Note that both the full-sized DC pencils are clearly illustrated with split bands. I have found them in that configuration in the uncatalogued black and pearl, Cathay and Jet.  Note the oversized seals in the Cathay examples:

At some point, the entire trim ring was moved to the lower barrel to streamline production.  If the 1932 attribution is strictly accurate (and the artwork was completely updated), this happened sometime during 1932 or later; however, split bands added unnecessary complexity to the manufacturing process, so Wahl may have made the switch even before the 1932 catalog was published.

Note that while both of the Burma (gray) examples has a silver-colored center band, one has a gold-filled clip and matching gold filled seal, while the lower one has matching silver-colored trim on the cap, referred to in the catalog as “white Platinic gold.”  The cap might be a mismatch, but I’ve never seen a Burma with a gold-filled band and the catalog indicates it was offered only in the white Platinic gold.

Also note the cap on the Cathay example at the bottom, which lacks a gold seal and is fitted with a “second-generation” clip which is stapled into the barrel, unlike the earlier roller clips which were inserted into a slit in the barrel and secured inside by a screw.  This one appears to be a mismatch, although I don’t rule out the possibility that it was created from leftover parts in the same way the “X-Seal” pencils were. 

The Doric “soldier clip” model (DSC) was pictured on the preceding page of Wahl’s 1932 catalog:

Note that this illustration also shows a split band, so the DSC went through the same evolution as the DC model.  That is consistent with the examples I have found, some of which have split bands, while later examples have one-piece bands on the lower barrels:

One of the Cathay examples shown has a gold seal while the other does not, and neither of the Burma (gray) DSC pencils is what I would call normal.  The lower of the two was a split band model, but the cap lacks the upper part of the band (or any groove to accommodate it), and the gold clip is paired with a longer and later gold tip.  Since the tip is so much longer than what you’d normally see on a Type I Doric, I’d say this was likely part of the cobbling-together that happened at Wahl in the late 1930s to clear out leftover parts.  

The other Burma pencil, advertising “Sharp & Smith St. Louis,” doesn’t appear entirely cricket either, with that truncated, non-gold seal cap and plastic jewel mounted in the top.  The weirdness is also reflected in the price sticker on the back side:

According to the catalog, a soldier clip Burma Doric should be model number 40102DCS.  This one is denominated model 4005C.  

The “clasp” model Dorics are shown in the 1932 catalog with one-piece bands, and that is consistent with what I have found:

For the OCD types out there, that is a very satisfying picture, of each color (including black and pearl) in exactly the same configuration, matching the 1932 catalog.  But then the clasp family gets a little weird, too:

The top three lack gold seals . . . we’ll come back to that in a minute.  The bottom four also lack gold seals and are fitted with the longer roller clip seen on the full-sized DC models.  As for the one missing a nose?  It’s a one piece barrel, apparently put together with the intent of wedging a simple nose drive mechanism into the front end.  And those bottom two have that same “jewel” seen on the Burma DSC soldier clip pencil described earlier.  

Now to circle back to the Cathay example at the top in that last picture . . . the proportions are different than all the others, with a shorter cap.  The price sticker has the color coded correctly per the 1932 catalog: 40103 . . . and I can make out the D . . . but I can’t tell what comes next: 

I don’t think Eversharp knew what came next, either, because this oddball is in fact a gold seal pencil – the seal is just on the back side, over a cartouche for engraving:

Weird, yes, but I know exactly why it looks like that.  This brings us to the last and rarest model in the Doric series – the ringtop model DW:

The cap to my model 40103D...whatever started as a ringtop cap, with a slot cut in the opposite side so that a clip could be added.  

Twenty two years after meeting Terry, I’m still chasing down those last few variants.  Examples of the ringtop DW in Jet (black, perhaps obtainable) and black and pearl (which may or may not exist) would put me over the moon.  Finding a true oversized pencil pictured in the catalog and noticably larger than the DCs I have would add significantly to my knowledge on the subject.  The oldest wing in my collection - the Eversharp Doric wing - still isn’t finished.

And I probably need to tell you more about the Doric II, III and IV at some point!