The Toledo Art Project

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I paid less than I should have for this one, because when they aren’t properly described, few people know what they are:

The paint isn’t the result of some student growing bored in art class - it’s factory.  Sheaffer did something similar, although I believe the Sheaffer version is better documented.  This one is no Sheaffer – it’s a Conklin.  The name is still visible under the band of black paint near the top:

The evolution of Conklin’s metal pencils is discussed in detail in The Catalogue of American Mechanical Pencils, on pages 31 and 32.  Most bear a patent date of July 6, 1920, a reference to Harry P. Fairchild’s patent number 1,345,436, but only the earliest Conklin pencils have the six-spoked lead chamber shown in Fairchild’s drawings (visible when the top is uscrewed).  The company quickly went with a later design with a three-spoked lead chamber, which is shown in C.N. Johnson’s later patents, applied for in 1921 and issued September 16, 1924 (number 1,508,795) and May 20, 1924 (number 1,494,424.

I know without even removing the cap that these are not “Fairchild” Conklins, since the rounded caps on those are significantly shorter.  But there’s something else to notice about this cap: it is noticeably more squared off than what you will find on most Conklin metal pencils.

That difference allows for more precise dating of this example.  Many of Conklin’s catalogs are preserved in the Pen Collectors of America’s library, and catalogs through 1923 show the more rounded tops.  Here’s the ringtop pencil page in the 1923 catalog:

For 1924, as the company moved away from rounded pens in favor of flattops, Conklin reshaped the cap into what you see here:

By the late 1920s, the writing instrument industry in America had largely discontinued metal and hard rubber in favor of brightly colored celluloids.  While celluloid had been in use for many years, its popularity took off largely as a result of the success of the LeBoeuf Pen Company’s introduction of the material in the mid-1920s.  For that reason, these flatter-topped Conklin metal pencils were produced only during a very narrow window in time, making them much more difficult to find.  I have three ringtops in my collection, including this new addition:

One of the three, the first one I found, has the imprint at the wrong end.  Since the barrel is a straight tube, I attribute this to a factory error (see Volume 1, page 25).  At the time, I suspected these were a metal version of the Durograph - that is incorrect, but I was right that it is later production, since the all-hard rubber Durograph also makes its debut in the 1924 catalog).

I don’t see hand-painted Conklin pencils in any of the company’s catalogs in the library, but there is a gap between the 1926 and 1930 catalogs it contains.  The paint on this one is nearly perfect, a rarity since hand-painted pencils are usually found with only traces of the paint remaining after a century or so of use:

This example matches one other example in my collection, which suggests this might have been leftover stock, dressed up and sold in the 1930s in those days when all manufacturers were selling anything they could:

The blue ringtop was included in “A Step and a Half Up From a Buck” in Volume 4, page 33, but I didn’t index it very well and it took me forever to find where I wrote about it – it is at the end of the article, described as a having the gold filled trim of Conklin’s “Two Fifty” pencils but the plain flat blue barrel used on the “Dollar Pencil” line.  I also included the reference to these pencils in Conklin’s 1930 catalog:

Both metal and pyroxylin (celluloid or plastic) sets, but no blue plastic mentioned and no metal with yellow.  Of course, since the only reference to these is in the 1930 catalog, perhaps these were made earlier or later than 1930 - or perhaps off-catalog.