Like I Needed More Lead

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My Legendary Lead Company has more sticks of lead in inventory than I will distribute in my lifetime.  Why, you might rightly wonder, would I bid on a lot of pencil leads like these?

The auction pictures weren’t that great, but I recognized those blue tubes and I had to have them:

They are “Monogram” leads, “Sold only at the Rexall Stores,” which don’t turn up very often:

In addition to the short leads in grade H, there were longer leads in B, HB and H:

Green and blue leads were in that bunch too, and colored leads in the off brands like this are hard to come by.  I’m a bit irked that the guy shipped all of these rattling around together in a ziploc bag, because the paint chips in the bag suggest these were chipped up in transit:

And – gulp – there were a few tubes of purple indelible leads in there, too:

Finding a few unusual grades from an obscure brand would ordinarily have me taking the nicest tube in each grade and adding it to my collection, then putting the rest of the Legendary Lead Company’s website.  Not this time: I’m keeping them all.

I found this lead display a few years ago, and I couldn’t pass it up.  Odd, obscure brands are my specialty:

The display as outfitted included several tubes of lead, too, in grades of soft black, medium black, and hard black.  There were slots for red, green, blue, and copying (purple), but none were occupied:

At the time, I thought that perhaps those colors might not exist, because a sticker on the front of the display indicated those might not have been available – all but the red, anyway:

It would be a fools’ errand to try to fully stock one of these old lead displays, but this chance find combined with what was in the display when I found it comes close:

Examples of all grades in black in long and short tubes, and a good enough (although a bit beat up) examples in all of the colored leads . . .

. . . except red.  Dammit.