While I'm On the Subject . . .

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Yeah, I know . . . once I start talking about the Rex Manufacturing Company, I keep talking about the Rex Manufacturing Company.  

In the last volume, I wrote about the history of The Century Pen Company (Volume 6, beginning on page 163 - the three-part series was also picked up by The Pennant magazine).  Something from that story bugged me: I had never found a Century pencil that I could conclusively attribute to Rex, and I thought they had to be out there somewhere.

Century Pen Company, according to the corporation’s own records, never actually made anything; the company only assembled pens from parts made by other manufacturers.  Early in the company’s history, the Parker Pen Company supplied all of the company’s parts, since George Parker and William F. Palmer were stakeholders in Century.  However, Parker had no officers or seats on the board of directors after 1916 (Volume 6, pages 170-173), leaving Century free to source parts from anywhere.  During the 1920s, Century turned to C.E. Barrett & Co. in Chicago; by the 1930s, Barrett was one of Century’s biggest creditors and, by 1938, Barrett’s patience ran out (as did the patience of Century’s other creditors) and the company was forced to close and dissolve.

Barrett sourced pencils (at least the mechanisms - the barrel was just a simple tube threaded at either end) from The Rex Manufacturing Company; however, I had not seen a Rex-made pencil branded for Century . . . until, of course, very shortly after that series of articles published.

Maybe the articles I wrote enticed the seller to list it. Almost certainly the recent attention Century has received drove up the price.  The trim is a bit worse for wear, but I’m not complaining:

The top was dented, but fortunately it is a generic Rex cap with the “Four Horsemen” patents listed (for a rundown on all of them, see Volume 2, page 103).  I had a spare around, and while it also could use replating, at least it is free of dents:

And, it fills in a gap in my small sampling of Century pencils: