Troublesome Brazilians

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Someone sadistic person at Eversharp must have enjoyed tormenting people with OCD tendencies.  Consider, for example Eversharp’s “Brazilian Green.”  There’s one lurking in this group of Eversharp purse and clasp pencils, trying to look like it is working and playing well with others (as pictured in Volume 4, page 142):

Brazilian green is fourth from the right, in that green with bronze swirled into it.   Wherever that color appears, it doesn’t quite follow the same rules as all of the other colors.  A few years ago I shot a pair of deco band pencils to illustrate that point:

Both would qualify as “deco,” but every other color in the series has a greek key band.  The center band on the Brazilian green ones is narrower, with offset parallelograms - “rhomboid” bands, collectors call them:

The extra bands were also added to the short, military version of these pencils in the series, as shown in The Catalog on page 61 . . . and to my knowledge, this color wasn’t offered as a ringtop or full length, non-Deco band version:

When it came to the purse pencil line, Eversharp divided the line into “girlier” colors, with a single rhomboid band like the “Tempoint-styled” Brazilian Green models, and “manlier” colors, which had two plain bands.  The Brazilian green, however, fell on the “manlier” side and, for this series, got two plain bands rather than its usual rhomboid one.

A recent online auction brought this one to my doorstep, marking a grim milestone:

That slightly longer top end means this isn’t one of Eversharp’s “purse pencils.”  It’s a “clasp pencil,” according to the 1932 catalog – a more manly version of a smaller pencil:

Consistent with that non-purse designation, the clasp models are found in the manlier colors only, with their usual twin bands:

From this picture, it looks like all I’m missing is a clasp pencil in Brazilian Green, then the set would be complete, right?  That’s the grimness of the milestone – I’ve actually completed the set, according to Eversharp’s 1932 catalog:

These were cataloged in five out of the six “manly” colors . . . all but Brazilian Green, which was offered only as a daintier purse pencil, but with manly trim.  

I don’t know what is worse – thinking Brazilian Green clasp pencils exist and Eversharp’s catalog is off, or thinking my clasp pencil set is complete and Eversharp was . . . well, just plain mean.

Eversharp’s catalog is off, in one respect.  Pictured next to the clasp pencils are the “ring” models; while I’ve never seen one in the purse pencil size, they exist on the manlier line – in fact, they look even larger than clasp models:

They are exactly the same size as their clasp cousins in real life, and they are cataloged in the same five manly colors.  These are even harder to find than clasp models, and I’ve only been able to add two of the five colors to the collection.

With my luck, the next one I find will probably be in Brazilian Green.