In the Interests of Transparency

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I’ve written about pencils like these, before . . . back in Volume 3, page 8:

The pair came out of Don Jacoby’s collection, and they nicely fill out a growing set in the Rite-Rite wing at the museum:

That bottom example, in the “Rite-Rite Travel Kit” box, was the inspiration for that previous article.  Out of the box, there are four (and perhaps five) colors represented here:

Perhaps the colors have faded over the years, and maybe this is just normal manufacturing variations of the same thing – but one of the pinkish orangish ones looks more pink, and the other more orange:

All but one of these have the Rite-Rite name on the upper ferrule:

The sole exception is the clear example, with the shorter tip.  The Rite-Rite name is missing – the “Patd. Chicago USA” is still present, so I’m confident this is part of the same series:

I should have been more “transparent” in that last article about something I said: I identified these as Rite-Rite “X-Ray” pencils.  That wasn’t right . . . with such a cool name as that, I owed it to you to show you where I saw that.

I wanted to, really I did . . . but I lost it.  

Believe it or not, that’s highly unusual around here.  You can call the largest collection of American mechanical pencils a lot of things:  “overwhelming,” one observer called it when he saw it the first time.  “You’d better outlive me so I don’t have to deal with this,” Janet says. 

But you can’t call it disorganized.  Ask me where something is at the museum, and I’ll take you right to it every time.  It’s my only superpower: I can find my way around my own damned collection.  When I can’t find something down there, I have a visceral moment of panic . . . if I can’t find one thing, how many other things are missing in action?  

In this case, the answer was that it wasn’t in the museum.  When that last article posted in 2014, I had made the commitment to “going paperless” at my law firm – if you look at my desk at any given moment it would appear laughable if I tell you what an overwhelming success that transition has been, but it  has been life-changing.  For the better, I mean.

Around that time, I thought to myself: if I can convert tens of thousands of pages of information into digital form, maybe I can also convert other things too, like this 1938 Rite-Rite catalog:

The results, given the technology I was using, were not quite what I had in mind.  The scanner that was burning through file cabinets full of old files wasn’t a flatbed, so if I was going to run these old pages through it I’d need to remove the staples and hope everything went through smoothly, without pages getting scrunched or wadded up - and I wasn’t going to do that.  I tried making a photocopy and then scanning that, but I was losing too much detail.  After fiddling around with it for awhile, duty called and I set the catalog aside to get back to work.

Six years later, as I was doing a bit of pandemic spring cleaning at the office, I opened up a box of random things hastily packed up from my old office during the move to my current location in 2015.  Inside I found both the long lost Rite-Rite catalog as well as that Eagle catalog I wrote about here a few weeks ago (yeah, that one didn’t go so well, either).

I’ve since picked up a CZUR book scanner that does a good job archiving things like this without disassembling them.  I am pleased to report, long after the fact, my source for calling these the Rite-Rite “X-Ray” pencils; Model 33, in fact:

Listed in six colors of transparent “Tenite”: Amber, Orange Red, Light Blue, Light Green, Rose and Crystal.  Light green I haven’t seen; “orange red” and “rose” may look an awful lot alike after more than 80 years.  Maybe I have one of each – maybe one with a more orangeish or roseish will surface.