Extra Dice

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

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The cigar advertising on this one was a bonus, and that alone would have been enough to hook me:

I’ve written about pencils like these before (see Volume 2, page 53).  These multi-pointed pencils were the brainchild of Albert J. Keck, who patented several variations on them, most notably number 650,078 issued on May 22, 1900 and number 1,060,099 issued April 29, 1913.  Here’s the earlier of the two:

This is the first example I’ve added to the collection since my last article.  The detail in the auction pictures wasn’t sufficient to tell me what name would be found on the barrel - "Rapid Fire":

As mentioned in my last article, there are several variations of these pencils with different names on them – there’s the version “patented and manufactured” by the Louis F. Dow Company of St. Paul, Minnesota and Winnepeg, Canada, called the “Many-Point”:

What reminded me to write about these was the dice game metaphor from yesterday’s article – how it seems nearly every conceivable combination of words such as ever, sharp, rite, ready, point, and real exists as a brand name for a mechanical pencil.  The guys who made these multi-pointed pencils, however, must have been playing with extra dice:

My new Rapid Fire pencil has the abbreviated title; the full title was the “Rapid-Fire Eversharp.”  Then there was the Ever-Ready Point Pencil Company, which offered the “Extra-Sharp” Pencil.

Who had “Extra-Sharp Ever-Ready Point Pencil?”  Yahtzee!