Lovejoy's Legacy

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As pandemic worries were starting to ease up, Janet and I made a Saturday day trip down to Waynesville, Ohio - the “Antiques Capital of the Midwest” as it was known back in the day.  

It just isn’t the same as it was in the late 1970s, when every home and storefront on Main Street was amazing to explore. As the 1980s gave way to the 1990s and things like Longaberger baskets became hot commodities, new, made-to-be-collectible items began to displace true antiques, showcased in newly constructed buildings shrouded in a haze of pumpkin spice poupourri.  Dad used to grumble when he’d open a shop door that if it smelled good inside, there probably wouldn’t be anything worth looking at.  He had a point.

Then came the rise of eBay – a harsh yardstick for what our investment-grade nicknacks were truly worth as they were liquidated for real pennies on our imaginary dollars in online auctions.  The collapse of the antiques and collectibles market – at least from an investment perspective – inevitably followed.

Waynesville still proudly clings to its title with a death grip, although the Springfield Chamber of Commerce an hour to the north now also claims it, with its Interstate antiques megamalls and Extravaganza weekends at the fairgrounds.  I haven’t been back to Waynesville in years, and as Janet and I strolled up Main Street I noticed many of the places I remembered visiting as a kid have been converted back into private homes.  As Waynesville’s tourist prospects rose in the 1970s, residents along Main Street were forced out to make way for more shops; these days settlers are urged to move back in to fill up vacancies.

I didn’t spend much . . . a framed print for my daughter’s new apartment and lunch with a side of craft beer at the new pub in town.  We wandered into one of the shops after lunch – it smelled good, and I was done in minutes.  Janet was still milling around inside while I stepped out onto the porch – and on my phone, I opened up the Antiques Capital’s nemesis to see if there were any pencils there.

While I didn’t buy a single pencil during an entire day of shopping in Waynesville, I committed to buying one there on that porch in the final seconds of the first auction that popped up:

At first blush, this looks like W.S. Hicks pencils I’ve shown here at the blog quite a few times . . . but the close up pictures indicated this was something altogether different.  Most of these are nose-drive pencils, but the closeup pictures revealed that line near the nose is just a decorative groove rather than a joint – right beneath the words “Tiffany & Co.” and “Sterling.” There’s no Hicks, Edward Todd or Louis Tamis Hallmark:

The pencil is engraved with a very recent date for this style of pencil: September 7, 1957.

Then there’s that top – I wondered . . . could this be a Tiffany repeating pencil?

When the pencil arrived, I confirmed that yes Virginia, it is a repeater.  Even more interesting is what kind of repeater it is, as evidenced by something the auction pictures didn’t show clearly.  The jaws which grip the lead extend slightly outside the barrel.  

I was mulling this one over with Larry Liebman on the phone when it dawned on me where I had seen this before – it’s so far out of its element that I didn’t recognize it at first.  With the lead removed, the jaws contract enough that the entire mechanism slips right out.  Alongside an Eversharp Envoy, it’s clear that this is Charles Lovejoy’s patented design:

Lovejoy applied for his patent on January 22, 1944, and it was issued on September 12, 1944 as number, 2,358,091.  It was assigned to his employer at the time, the Moore Pen Company:

Originally, Lovejoy’s mechanism was put into use of Moore’s “Mastercraft” line (Volume 1, page 180), but it was later integrated into Moore’s Fingertip line (so named because Fingertip fountain pens had an inset that looked like a fingernail).  The Fingertip was Moore’s last gasp as ballpoints wreaked havoc on the fountain pen market, and according to the sources I’ve read, Moore failed in 1956.  

The following year, Eversharp’s writing instrument division was sold to Parker on December 19, 1957 (Volume 4, page 81), and Parker didn’t continue any of the pencils Eversharp had made previously.  Dur-O-Lite, however, picked up the line and continued to make Lovejoy-patent pencils into the 1960s.

That’s why this picture makes sense:

From top, there’s the new-to-me Tiffany, an Eversharp “Lovejoy Skyline” as I call them, a Moore Fingertip, and a Dur-O-Lite Ejector.

The Lovejoy patent Tiffany adds wrinkles to an already complicated story.  There’s no patent date, even though the Lovejoy patent didn’t expire until 1961.  Tiffany didn’t make any of its writing instruments; without a hallmark, I’d have to say the only remaining suspect which might have made the barrel in 1957 would have been Louis Tamis.

But who supplied the mechanism?  I’ve theorized in the past that by the time Eversharp sold what was left of its writing instruments division to Parker – just three months after the date engraved on this Lovejoy patent Tiffany – Eversharp’s entire pencil program had already been sold off.  Since the Dur-O-Lite shares both the same Lovejoy mechanism and the same clip found on the Eversharp Symphony, I’ve always believed Dur-O-Lite was Eversharp’s heir (Volume 5, page 223).

This is the first Lovejoy patent Tiffany I’ve seen, and I don’t think there were very many of them.  It was engraved in late 1957, but the mechanisms might have been sourced by Tiffany earlier . . . given the rapid succession of demises of Moore and Eversharp, it could have come from either of them.

But then there’s the possibility that Tiffany bought mechanisms from the lowly Dur-O-Lite Pencil Company, which makes me chuckle.  Lipstick on a pig, so to speak.