Thursday, May 6, 2021

One Little Observation

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


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This one caught my eye, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on the reason why at the time:


I was so enamored with this bell-top Diamond Point that I put in a bid even before I went down to the museum to see if I already had one like this – nope, nothing in solid green, and I observed something else:


All of my other solid-color Diamond Point pencils have a single wide band at the top, rather than two narrow bands.  In addition, unlike the marbled celluloid examples like the jade one at right, solid barrel pencils have a bell top made from some contrasting color:


When it comes to marbled celluloids, bell top Diamond Points cam in a wide range of colors . . . a much wider, much wilder range of colors:


Note that the two on the left, like the solid color pencils, have a single band at the top end.  The first one on the left, in fact, you might remember from The Catalogue of American Mechanical Pencils – it was one of the 12 pencils that made the front cover, third from right:


Diamond Point used several plastics that were unique to the company.  Note the bronze and gray marble, and a marble with black veins that has more depth than most other similar celluloids found on other brands:


There’s two distinct patterns in that color on the series:  the other is more of a cracked eggshell – a flat cream color with black veins:


That black cracked eggshell isn’t so unusual, but  Diamond Points have a unique twist: there’s also a blue cracked eggshell and a red cracked eggshell:


Unique?  Certainly distinct enough to raise eyebrows should colors like these show up somewhere else . . . 

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