All the King's Horsemen, Part One

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James Kelley, the self-described "Specialty King," was making good money and he wasn’t about to let smug Washington bureaucrats tell him how he was going to do business.  In his mind, if the Federal Trade Commission was going to try to stop him, he would find other ways to continue earning his living.  There’s a fine line between plausible deniability and obeying the letter of the law, and Kelley walked that fine line about as gracefully as a drunk being pulled over and ordered to walk straight and true. 

Let’s revisit this pencil, marked “Master” on the clip:

Above the word “Master,” there’s an M within a circle:

I wrote about this pencil in Volume 1, page 333, and I dutifully noted the connection between “Master” and the Bankers’ Pen Company - in an endnote on page 435, I indicated that matching pens were imprinted “The Master Pen / Banker’s Pen Company / New York.”

That endnote was partly right, but the pens I referred to were not “matching pens.”  As yesterday’s article establishes, those pens were made by the earlier “Bankers’ Pen Company” which folded before 1922 – much earlier than this pencil was made in the late 1920s or early 1930s.  In addition, these cheaper pens and pencils with a circle M mark, like most third-tier writing instruments, didn’t have imprints.  

Taking the evidence as a whole, it is obvious to me that this pencil is a James Kelley production.  If he was restrained from appropriating the name of other manufacturers, he must have reasoned, nothing in the order would prevent him from appropriating the name of a model used by a defunct manufacturer. Letter of the law . . . plausible deniability.

That conclusion is further supported by other details.  While the Federal Trade Commission’s injunction preventing Kelley from marketing pens or pencils marked “Waterson” was issued in April, 1930, that injunction didn’t happen overnight.  Inquiries and investigations by the FTC (and perhaps from L.E. Waterman) would have started months earlier, which explains this:

During the latter part of 1929, several newspapers out west ran this advertisement for “Genuine Waterson Self-Filling Fountain Pens” (this one is from the Great Falls (Montana) Tribune on July 2, 1929).  The advertisement states that orders are filled by mail order, but customers are invited to see Waterson pens in a window display:

At the “Nassau Pen and Pencil Corporation,” 311 Central Avenue, Great Falls, Montana.  The Nassau is another third-tier brand with which even beginning collectors are well familiar, and a connection between Nassau and Kelley’s Waterson explains something I’ve always wondered about.  Nassau pencils come in Welsh-style bell top models, just like the Banker and Waterson:

But in all but one case among those I’ve found, above the word Nassau is an M within a circle, rather than the letter N:

Transitional models and those with cutout bands that appear to have been supplied by David Kahn share that same anomaly:

Later models, however, universally sport an N in a circle above the word Nassau:

Something else is amiss with the Nassau Pen and Pencil Corporation: no, its offices were not in Great Falls, Montana – at least, not exclusively.  The earliest mention I found for the company was this advertisement in the Wilmington, Delaware Evening Journal on April 17, 1929, which provided an address of 814 Market Street, Wilmington, Delaware:

An advertisement in the Bridgewater, New Jersey Courier News on September 13, 1929 provides no address, but it looks suspiciously like one of James Kelley’s promotions:

On December 4, 1929, this advertisement in the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania Evening News identified a “Nassau Fountain Pen Company, New York City”:

The advertisement published by Inglehart’s Drug Store in the Oshkosh Northwestern on March 6, 1930 reprinted the company’s warranty papers, providing an address of 116 Nassau Street, New York:

Another advertisement in The Morning Call in Allentown, Pennsylvania on September 25, 1931 is revealing: no address is provided for the “Famous Nassau Pens,” but the text describes the large, clunky flattop pen as “the latest 1931 Balanced Master or Bankers’ size.”  Master, Banker, and another assault on Walter Sheaffer’s Balance, all rolled into one:

Since Nassau was running a mail-order operation, either the company was moving around rapidly or was opening storefronts across the country, literally as a front for where the operations were really located.  The Federal Trade Commission finally caught up with the Nassau Pen and Pencil Corporation on April 22, 1938, issuing an injunction to prevent Nassau from using the term “Life Time Guarantee” in an order nearly cut and pasted from the order against James Kelley.  The FTC apparently never figured out who was really behind the company, since orders typically named the principals involved.  I’m sure to a moral certainty, had the FTC done a little more digging, they would have found James Kelley behind it all.