Wild Like Only One Other

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I’ve said it before and I’m saying it again now: I jump at every chance I get to circle back around to the Gordon, with those “fanged” clips.  In “Return of the Crowdpleaser,” I rounded up all of the Gordons at the museum for updated family photos in the last Volume (see Volume 6, page 61).

There have been a couple developments in the short time since.  Speaking of short:

These little pipsqueaks, with their funny little telephone dialer-like tops paired with those disproportionately large Gordon clips, make me smile whenever they turn up.  

In this case, the color really took my breath away – black with grey swirls, like whispy clouds on a winter night by a full moon:

That makes six of these little beasties I’ve found, and that was where this short little article would have ended:

But then another one surfaced . . . in another wild color:

It looks like an ordinary cracked eggshell near the clip:

But from the side, you can clearly see how blue this is:

I still had not made the connection, as I obliviously set up an updated shot of my full length Gordons:

Huh . . . cracked eggshell in black, blue and red.  Where else does that occur?  

Aside from the goofy dialer tops on the short models and the patented Gordon “fanged” clips, there isn’t much to differentiate Gordons from the nose drive Diamond Points.  In fact, as bell-top styling gave way to the Balance and all things round, Diamond Point redesigned the series to look very similar to the Gordon:

The kill shot would be a picture showing the caps swapped on these two pencils . . . but alas . . .

They aren’t compatible.  The Diamond point cap is a male-threaded cap that screws into the barrel, while the Gordons all have a metal bushing, with the cap female threaded.  

The eggshell plastics on Diamond Points and Gordons are pretty close, but not identical.  Finding a Diamond Point in black with wisps of gray might nudge my vague suspicion that Diamond Point played some part in making the Gordon closer to the finish line.

But then again, maybe the two companies just bought some really wild plastics from the same supplier.