Square Pegs Are the Best

This article has been included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 7, now available here.

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Sure, there’s a great deal of satisfaction in “completing” a series.  Picking up that last color you’ve been hunting for years, so you can pose them all together in a neat little row . . . ah . . .  Happy sitcom ending.  Roll credits.

If you like that sort of thing.

I haven’t made any bones about the fact that one of the things I like about collecting is satisfying the OCD part of my psyche.  Sure, I love nice little rows of pencils with white picket fences around them as much as the next guy . . . but I’ve got this masochist little streak in me, too, that gets an even bigger kick over some monster truck knocking down that pretty fence and leaving ruts in my yard.  Figuratively speaking, anyway.

Consider the WASP “Circuit Board” Clipper, a relatively finite subject, wrapped within a subbrand, wrapped within the greater Sheaffer universe.  We know what’s “supposed” to be out there from catalogs and such, and I do have my eyes out for the examples needed to “complete” the series.  

I last ran down the model in 2017 (see Volume 4, page 342).  To recap, here is the “Type I” of the series (moniker courtesy Matt McColm), with a flat metal top.  The earliest advertisement I had found at the time I wrote that last article was from 1938, but in the current issue of The Pennant, Roger Wooten provided an advertisement from October, 1937 (see "Sheaffer's Main Sub-Brands 1928-1946," The Pennant, Spring 2021).  Advertisements in 1939 show them in the same form:

Followed by Type II, with a more rounded metal top (my earlier article included a page from a 1941 Bennett Brothers catalog which shows the Type II alongside Type I models, but they may have been introduced earlier).  The Type III added blue to the lineup, and the metal tops were replaced with black plastic ones (I don’t think anybody knows exactly when that happened):

Oh, and incidentally, I’ve since found an example of the Syracuse Knife Company pocketknives in green.  Since I’m in the neighborhood, thought I’d mention it . . . 

This is easy going forward, right?  Fill in the missing colors, then freeze frame mid-air during a celebratory leap accompanied by a laugh track, and roll credits. Cut, print and tell that OCD gremlin in the back of your mind to take a hike.

Or . . . 

Say “what the f...?” but not in a bad, what-the-heck-are-you-doing-mowing-down-my-fence-with-that-monster-truck way, but in a wait-a-minute-let-me-get-another-beer-and-let’s-see-how-this-plays-out kind of way.

Let’s start with the obvious.  Obviously, this is the exact same clip found on the WASP “circuit board” Clipper pencils, and the cap most closely resembles the more domed, metal Type II, although the edges are sharper:

The barrel, however, is one solid piece of sterling silver, with a nose-drive mechanism press fit into the lower end.  And then, for the coup de grâce, a brocaded message:

“The Travelers / Belleair, Fla. / 1954"

Wait . . . what?  1954?

The only other clue is the initials J.M.C. mid-barrel, and I have no idea who that is.

Dang, I don’t even know whether to put this in the same drawer with my WASP Clipper circuit board pencils, but I have no idea where else to put it.