Cleaning Out the Garage

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History is what develops when you gather a bunch of random facts and put them in order.  

I’m fortunate that the random facts I gather are mostly in digital form.  If all of this stuff was in paper form, I would have a hoarder’s garage filled to the rafters.  Older stuff towards the back would be lost forever – buried hopelessly beyond the point of retrieval without a frontloader.

This warehouse of accumulated digital information has traveled with me in a file folder titled “Leadhead’s Research Scraps,” copied over from at least the last three laptop computers I’ve owned.  In it are all the little tidbits I have run across when I’ve been looking for something else, including a lot of things I’ve been meaning to write about someday, but just haven’t gotten around to yet.  I throw things into that folder like the leftover screws I keep after I put a piece of furniture together . . . I might need that someday, I think to myself.

It wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t have constant and nagging vague recollections of what might be in that file folder.  Every time I browse through it, sure that I have a piece of information I need, I’m reminded of all the other tidbits that are in there and it leaves me with this feeling whenever I see something that I’ve got some more information about it to fill in.

Writing these articles are the only way I can rid myself of that feeling, one little bit at a time.  It’s like cleaning out a little bit of my garage every time I make use of something that’s in there.

This pencil . . . oh, it rubbed my brain the wrong way when I first saw it, because I just knew I’d seen it before . . .  

This is how it came to me, and it took quite a bit of zooming into the fuzzy photos in the online auction to make out the name on the clip: 

A little time on the buffing wheel got that rust out of the way, revealing that it was what it appeared to be: “Fin-Sharp.”

The name was one with which I have long been acquainted.  In The Catalogue on page 50, I note that Marx Finstone established the Eclipse Pen Company in 1903, and I suggest that Finstone, ever the wordsmith, came up with the Fin-Sharp name for use on the company’s earliest pencils.  Here’s the photograph of them from page 50:

I was a bit embarrassed as I read that – because it looks like I might have gotten that backwards . . . the metal “Never Dull” pencils to the right in this picture look like they might predate the flashier Fin-Sharp pencils.  

But wait a tick . . . the new addition doesn’t look like any of the other Fin-Sharp pencils I’ve turned up over the years:

And I’ve seen that pencil somewhere, complete with that goofy top that looks like it might have come from something else.  Had I not been so firmly convinced that I had, I wouldn’t have heaved open the door to “Leadhead’s Research Scraps” and pawed through image after image for half an hour.  You can imagine the internal dialogue as the pictures flashed by: “Nope. Nope.  Not it.  Oooh, that’s cool . . . I wonder if that has something to do with . . . now dammit Jon, stay on task.  Nope Nope. Nope...”

AAAAHHH....

The file save date on this images was July, 2016 – that means it was moved over from the old laptop, so Lord knows how many years I’ve had it.  The file name identifies this as being from the 1922 Montgomery Ward catalog, and since I am pretty meticulous about naming things right when I throw them into my digital garage, I’m confident that’s right.  See it?

There’s that same pencil, but without the deluxe-ish bands and with a nickel-plated rather than gold-filled clip.  Mine might have had nickel plating - by the time I got all the rust off, all that’s left is brass.  

No, I’m not about to theorize that the Fin-Sharp was a Montgomery Ward brand; the mail order company offered brand names as well as house brands, and note that at the top of this image is an Eversharp.

But note that “Fine Point” pencil just above it, rendered in that distinctive Rex engraving, later passed on to Eclipse along with the “Never Dull” name . . . and the only “Fine Point” pencils I’m aware of (that’s spelled the right way, not in Mabie Todd’s “Fyne Poynt” iteration) were the ones offered by the General Manufacturing Company, makers of the Snapfil pens, before General Manufacturing came out with the hard rubber, lever operated “Kaligraf” line.

Oh, the questions this page raises!  These pencils are surrounded by pens marked both “Eclipse” and “Safety,” and that was a deeeeep rabbit hole that sucked me in some time ago (See Volume 3, page 33).

If Eclipse was offering “Never Dull” pencils in 1922, they weren’t advertised in the Montgomery Ward catalog.  Maybe they weren’t called the Never Dull at the time, or maybe they just weren’t supplying them to Montgomery Ward that year.  We know there were Eclipse Never Dull pencils in circulation by January 12, 1924, when The American Stationer answered the question “Kindly tell us who is the maker of “Eclipse Never Dull” pencils?”

The answer was “Eclipse Fountain Pen Company,” and you can almost hear in lieu of a period a palpable “Duh” loud and clear.  

But think about the question: the writer asked who was the “maker,” not who was just selling these pencils.  Maybe the answer given was flippant, but perhaps it was strictly accurate, and Eclipse was actually manufacturing the pencils that were formerly made by the Rex Manufacturing Company.

Or maybe it was the other way around, and Eclipse was making these all along under a license from Rex to use McNary’s new design; I’m relatively confident the “patent applied for” on Rex Never Dull pencils was McNary’s patent of February 19, 1924, and that patent (number 1,484,180) was applied for on October 11, 1921.  The timeline fits either way.

Perhaps it’s academic to wonder which came first – Eclipse’s Fin-Sharp or Never Dull.  Suffice to say that both were offered side by side . . . and both were offered prior to 1923.

That, I know, because of something I’ll tell you about tomorrow.