A Victorian Hoard (Part One)

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

If you don't want the book but you enjoy the article, please consider supporting the Blog project here.

An Online seller offered a whole pile of stuff in one go last fall.  Nothing more that a few pictures was provided to describe the bunch, and none of the pictures were very helpful.  

I was figuring and refiguring what some of these things might be, calculating worst case scenarios in case they weren’t marked, or what scrap values might be if there was damage not visible in the pictures.  In the end I had a few hundred dollars’ worth of skin in the game, and my calculations must have been pretty accurate – they came home for just a few dollars shy of my maximum bid.

It proved to be a risk well worth taking.  Nearly everything was intact and working.  There were some unmarked magic pencils and an unmarked combo – nothing I needed for my collection, but stuff that sells great at pen shows to offset some of my investment:

A few interesting odds and ends - a carpenters pencil, a nested quill pen, and another combo, unmarked as to manufacturer but with plenty of personality:

The pencil at top is marked “Paris” and has a bust of Napoleon brazed onto the side:

There’s nothing to see on the quill that you can’t see from here, but there’s plenty more to look at on the combo.  

English, it looks like.  “Presented to the Rev.d Father Hughes by his affectionate pupils of the 4th Class Lim.r 27th March 1877,” it reads.  Maybe I’ll keep that one.

Then come a few things that mostly don’t fit into my collection, but are definitely worth having:

They may look like pencils, but opening them up reveals a variety of toothpicks and earspoons . . . ick, but back in the day, guess you’d make the best of a gross situation by cleaning things out with style:

The top example in sterling has an interesting twist I haven’t seen before:  the slider itself is double ended.  

That third one down, with the pearl slabs, is staying here in my collection.  It bears Ephraim S. Johnson’s  same “pearl patent” date of December 5, 1871 that is found on his Victorian pencils:

That fifth one down is staying here for awhile, too.  Since it’s marked Mabie Todd & Co., I can’t bear to part with it since most of David Moak’s collection from his book resides here . . . and the 14k bit doesn’t hurt either:

As for that bottom one?  It only has one marking and it isn’t a maker’s mark, so I probably won’t keep it.  However, whoever buys it has to pinky-swear they won’t melt it down:

And then there were a couple pens – one is a no-name eyedropper in black hard rubber and a generic 14k nib, but the other is a nice safety pen with a sterling overlay:

I nearly fell out of my chair when I took a closer look at the nib:

Simplo, with a snowflake - this is a Mont Blanc “baby safety” pen!  It has a repairable issue, but even after paying for the repairs, that pays for the whole party!

And . . . I haven’t even gotten to the items that I’m keeping for my collection!