The Back Story

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

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Last August, I was in the garage behind my office when I should have been at the DC Pen Show.  The door was up and I was sitting at a folding table, editing the proofs for The Leadhead’s Pencil Blog, Volume 6 while I watched the world drive by on Cherry Valley Road and listened to locusts.  I love summer afternoons in Ohio.

I took a break to check my email, just to be sure nothing important had come up, and there was an email from Roger Leenerts.  Roger said he had a couple of pencils and he wanted to know if I was interested in them:

He left his phone number, so I gave him a call.  He said he was scheduled to take these to a taping of Antiques Roadshow, but he wasn’t game for an unrehearsed, surprising reveal on television.  So, he started poking around a bit on the internet to see who might know a thing or two about old mechanical pencils.

Guess who he found.

His original thought was to get an opinion of how much they might be worth, but once he stumbled onto the weird little universe I’ve created, he found himself sucked into reading article after article, until he decided I probably valued these things more than he did and certainly more than any host of Antiques Roadshow would.

He said that he inherited the two pencils from a distant relative, and that according to his family lore a pair of twin sisters somewhere back in his family tree had received these matching pencils as graduation gifts when they graduated from high school in the mid-teens.  The relations were distant enough that he did not know their names, and the pencils lack commemorative inscriptions to add further provenance to the story.

I liked the story, but I liked the pencils even better:

Both are marked with a “B” with “G.T.” nested in the top loop and “Co.” in the lower one, the hallmark for the George T. Byers Co.  Better still, those snake clips were imprinted on the back:

“Pat. Jan. 6, 1914 / G.T. Byers Co., N.Y.”  That imprint both excites me and makes my blood boil at the same time.  George T. Byers tried to pull a fast one, since he liked the clips Frank T. Pearce was using over in Providence; he found the supplier that made those snake blanks, ordered a bunch, and then tried to file a design patent so Pearce couldn’t use them anymore.

The story was told in greater detail here in “The Snake that Wasn’t Wrapped Around the Pencil” (Volume 3, page 260).  

But wait . . . there’s more.

The Byers story came up again here to open Volume 4 (page 1) with an Eversharp that had been pimped to include fishscales or snake scales, as well as a similar snake clip:

Same patent date on the clip, but “G.T.Byers” is abbreviated, as it usually is on these clips, to “G.T.B.”

That’s why I couldn’t wait for the twins’ pencils to arrive, to shoot the two Byers pencils alongside my pimped out Eversharp

But wait . . . there’s just a little bit more than that.

Meanwhile, Myk Daigle teased something over on Facebook and fortunately, he was looking to trade it to me for something I had – he had no idea how much I wanted what he was dangling out there for the world to see:

This one is similar to the Byers and the F.T. Pearce leadholders, with a crown that turns one way to release the lead and the other to clamp down around it.   When the mechanism is released, the Salz imprint is revealed:

You’ve seen one like this here - with a slightly more menacing clip:

That Salz dragon clip appeared here in Volume 2, at page 273:

And now the serpentine family picture has filled out nicely:

From top, these are an F.T. Pearce Co., the Byers-modified Eversharp, the two Byers pencils, the two Salz pencils, and a sterling silver stockbroker’s pencil made by A.T. Cross.