Lost, Found . . . and Lost Again

 Everything that had become old and stale became new again in recent months. After years of finding nothing that interested me in many of the antique spots I used to frequent, I developed a new obsession that had me dipping my toes back into places in which I had long sense given up hope of finding anything.

No, I’m not giving up on pencils. Call this an additional obsession rather than a new one. In June, I became fascinated with the Gregory Fount-O-Ink Company’s products, and by last month I’d picked all of the low-hanging fruit in the online auctions. 

As the Fount-O-Ink rabbit hole bottomed out online, I branched out sideways. Morriset stands, Sengbusch, Carter, Regal . . . in for a penny, in for a pound. But as with pencils, or pens, or anything one chooses to collect, picking up new examples gets more difficult after the easy ones are all on the shelf at home. I began to wonder how many times I had looked right through these things “in the wild.” Three weeks ago, it was time to satisfy my curiosity at an off-Extravaganza Springfield Antique Show. 

By “off-Extravaganza” I mean one of the ordinary shows that runs every month through the year. Janet and I quit going to the usual ones because it seemed to always be the same dealers with the same stuff, month after month. Unless we are really bored, the only Springfield shows we usually attend are the “Extravaganza” events in May and September which are easily ten times as big, held mostly outdoors. Since we have other commitments this month for Extravaganza weekend, we didn’t have anything else going on, and I had this little itch that told me I didn’t know what I didn’t know at the time, off we went.

The Springfield show was . . . a bust. I spent more money on a pair of corn dogs for our lunch than on anything else. No pens, no pencils, and no inkstands. We had made the rounds so quickly that we decided to stop by the Heart of Ohio Antique Mall an exit or two away from the fairgrounds. There, I had more luck than expected:

Front row, from left: a milk glass Zephyr Swivodex, a Morriset and a Carter “Stylewriter.” In the back row are a pair of Fount-O-Ink sets, and the one on the left with the airplane really made my day. I had seen pictures of it in the company’s catalogs - “for the air-minded” is how they were described - but had never seen one in person. And the little propellers even turn!

The airplane set was the last desk set I found in the mall, and with just a couple rows left to peruse I nearly called it a day . . . and yet, I would have beat myself up in the weeks since wondering what I had missed. I ended up beating myself up anyway, but not for that. In the last row I found a fully stocked counter display filled with a brand of ballpoint pens I have only seen once and I couldn’t wait to write about here again. The staff retrieved it from its locked case and I followed her to the front to cash out.

It had been so long since our last visit to the Heart of Ohio that I did not know they had also shifted to the “cash is king” model. Credit card service is offered, but the fees are added to the cost. Nope, I’m too cheap for that and besides, I brought cash in case I found anything at the show . . . but not quite enough. Were there any discounts, I asked, and yes - the two most expensive items, the airplane desk set and my pen display, gave me just enough room that I was able to pay cash for the whole pile.

I was nervous as she started packing things up. I had spent too much time hunting for that airplane, and I didn’t want it stuffed in a bag even if it was wrapped in paper. I requested a box lid instead, and she was happy to accommodate me. We drove home, I unpacked the desk sets and posted that picture to Facebook, and we went to bed.

I woke up in the middle of the night. I didn’t remember unpacking that pen display. The next morning, I checked the back of the truck to see if I had just forgotten to bring it inside. 

Nope. And it cost me nearly a hundred bucks.

Fortunately, I had an itemized receipt I was able to retrieve from the recycle bin, and it had the item described in detail, the date and time of my purchase, and even the cashier who helped me. I called the Heart of Ohio Mall to ask: it was a longshot, but did they have the item?

Believe it or not, they found it. I asked if I could pay them by credit card to have it shipped to me, since I was the dummy who didn’t notice what I was missing. He declined, saying that it was their fault rather than mine. He took my address and said it would be on its way.

Even after such a nice call, my experience at my day job interfered with my ability to get my hopes up. Lawyers have a distorted view of the world, someone told me many years ago, and I believe it is true. People don’t typically come to see me because someone has done something nice for them, and as the years at my day job go by it becomes harder and harder to fathom that there are people in the world who do.

That’s probably part of why I enjoy my pen and pencil friends as much as I do. We do nice things for each other all the time.

Just like this guy from the Heart of Ohio Antique Mall did for me. 

My Kontour ballpoint pen display, much like my dwindling faith in humanity, was once lost and has been found again. I had written an article about the Kontour pencil many years ago . . . it was the only one I had ever seen in all of these years since, and no sooner had I unwrapped the pen display than I was in the museum to pull the pencil out to take what I was sure would be a greatly needed updated picture.

And . . . it isn’t where it is supposed to be – not on the fabled wall o’ pencils. No, I don’t think I demoted it from the wall, but I checked the printer’s cabinets which have housed more overflow as things became more crowded. Not there either. I have two small boxes of items worthy of keeping but not yet written about, but since I’ve already written about the Kontour I was sure it wouldn’t be in those, and it wasn’t.

It will turn up - like my faith in humanity, it will eventually come back and I’ll laugh about it. 

That did not, however, stop me from delving further into the Kontour story. Much has changed since I wrote that last article, and the rest of the story is just begging to be told now . . . er . . . tomorrow.

Post Fifteen Hundred . . . Ish

A few weeks before I restarted the blog, I received an email from Ron Knapp, a collector of Pentel and slide-rule pencils. Ron had stumbled across my article titled “Post Number 1,000" (January 13, 2017: Volume 4, page 351). In that article, I had searched for an appropriate subject for the milestone, and what floated to the surface was the discovery of an archive of Ruxton Multi-Vider pencils, paraphernalia, and (gulp) prototypes.

At the time I wrote the article, all that was known about the Ruxton was its shadowy connection with its English inventor A. Gahagan and Wall Street tycoon W. V. C. Ruxton (who was named in the patent but was more likely the financier). The small hoard I had acquired connected the Ruxton with an unlikely personality: Leonard G. Yoder, whose company, Yoder Instruments, was headquartered in sleepy East Palestine, Ohio. The connection was supported by Ruxton letterhead, modified to add “Leonard G. Yoder, Prop.” at the top and the East Palestine factory and office, after the company’s prior quarters in New York’s Greybar Building had been vacated:

The provenance of the Ruxton items I displayed in that article was as good as it gets. Leonard Yoder was survived by two daughters: Anna lived in Rockville, Tennessee, and the online seller from whom I purchased this lot confirmed that she had acquired it from some people who cleaned out a house in Rockville. Leonard’s other daughter, Katherine, still lived in East Palestine at the time: I interviewed her, and she confirmed that her sister Anna had all that remained of Leonard’s involvement with the Ruxton Multi-Vider.

I noted in my previous article that the online seller was a little cagey about the details concerning how and from whom she acquired this lot, and I suspected she was reluctant to share information because she did not want me cutting out the middleman (either if or because there was more stuff in that house to be had). Whether that was true or not, Ron Knapp confirmed my suspicions: yes, there was more, and he was the one who had acquired it.

Ron sent me several images of the things he had acquired; the back story is that a person hired to demolish a barn in London, Tennessee had found these items and had the sense to get them into the hands of a local antiques dealer who Ron knows rather than throw it all away. I mentioned it would be nice to follow up “Post Number 1,000" with a “Post Number 1,500,” circling back around to the Ruxton brand for the occasion. After all, as the blog restarted it was inching closer to that millenium and a half mark.

It wasn’t that I forgot . . . it was just that I forgot to keep track of how many articles had been posted, and by the time I took a breath to think about writing this article, that 1,500th post had already run. This entry is post number 1,518.

What Ron acquired was ephemera rather than the pencils themselves. The first image he shared with me was this shot of some Multi-Vider labels: 

These were printed using the very printer’s block I had displayed in my previous article

Then there was routine correspondence, all dating to 1935. Many of these letters were follow up notes regarding repairs that Yoder had not yet completed or orders for more pencils. This one, from Harris Grand of the New York Department of Public Works, was dated March 15, 1935:

What is significant about this one is that it is still accompanied by the envelope in which it arrived, showing that Leonard Yoder was the man in charge in 1935, and he was still located in the Graybar Building:

There’s one other letter in here that provides some interesting leads . . . and a possible interesting connection. It is from Leonard Yoder to R.E. Phelps at Tennant Sons & Co. and is dated June 14, 1935. Yoder’s letter, however, is written on letterhead for Southland Chemicals, Incorporated of Nashville, Tennessee:

The letter makes no reference to Yoder’s title or status with Southland Chemicals, and Southland doesn’t appear to have been involved in producing any of the materials that would go into the manufacture of Ruxton pencils; the firm was established in late 1934, and only a month prior to this letter, Southland’s director of sales, H.O. Williams, was killed in an automobile crash on March 13, 1935. Southland was apparently dissolved in a legal action brought by the company’s creditors in 1938.

The simplest answer is that whoever typed this letter picked up the wrong letterhead, since Yoder was involved with Ruxton, Yoder Instruments, and Southland. 

Tennant Sons & Co., to whom the letter was addressed, was formed as an importing/exporting sales company in the metal trade, which makes sense in this context. Yoder also mentions that production “is pretty well set” after talking with “Bedford and Valverde,” with the latter being called on to “look after things during the day, such as buying brass, having plating done, etc.”

I didn’t find any evidence of a firm called “Bedford and Valverde,” and Yoder may have been referring only to two individuals by those names, but there is one other name that comes up: Yoder says that Valverde is not doing “actual production” since “Charlie has jumped into the harness and is really doing a job.” 

Yoder reveals on page two of the letter that Charlie’s last name is Klagges – that grabbed my attention, because it is not a common name and it has only come up in my world in reference to one brand: the Klagges-Essig repeating pencil:

I threw out everything I had been able to learn about the Klagges-Essig in “One Decade Down” (June 2, 2021: Volume 7, page 163). These pencils are scarce beyond scarce.

The pencils strongly resemble cap-actuated repeating pencils made by Esterbrook, and a patent for such a repeating pencil was applied for by one Henry C. Klagges of Collingswood, New Jersey on November 18, 1937 and granted as patent 2,216,780 on October 8, 1940:

I have not found any more examples of the Klagges-Essig since that article was published, but I did get to see one in burgundy pearl at the Raleigh Pen Show in June. My friend Dexter Mills stopped by my table (again) to tease me with this red pearl example (again) which I was unable to convince him to part with (again). At least I was able to take home a picture of it:

I am convinced that “Charlie” Klagges as referred to in Leroy Yoder’s 1935 letter is one and the same person as Henry C. Klagges, although none of his patents spell out his middle name. The Klagges name appears six times in American Writing Instrument Patents Vol. 2: 1911-1945: the earliest was Elsie Klagges of Glendale, New York, who applied to patent a screw drive pencil on February 21, 1928. 

The other five were issued to Henry C. Klagges; all of them (the Klagges-Essig repeating pencil patent and four fountain pen improvements) were assigned to the Esterbrook Steel Pen Manufacturing Company, and the earliest of the five was his repeating pencil patent, applied for as stated earlier in 1937. So what was Henry “Charlie” Klagges doing in 1935? Apparently he was doing general manufacturing work - Yoder inquires on page 2, “What does Charlie say about the possibility of making up more Multi-Viders from the slides we have on hand?”  

There is one last detail crammed into this letter that bears mention: Yoder comments that while he had not yet persuaded the Tennessee Eastman Corporation to do molding for him, he had made arrangements to acquire a supply of Tennessee Eastman’s special thermoplastic, which was developed in 1929 and was trademarked as “Tenite” in 1932. Unfortunately, Tenite warps and degrades over time; if Ruxton Multi-Viders were ever made of the stuff, they did not work for very long. 

Yoder’s handwritten note at the end of this letter asks about “the extra set of model patterns.” That might explain these, which were shown in my previous article on the Ruxton:

These were in a box marked “MV samples” and as I noted in the article, these test barrels appear unsuitable for use as Multi-Vider barrels.

Ron Knapp’s papers, combined with what we already knew about the Ruxton, fill in some important details in the story. Now we know that the Ruxton did not go the way of the dodo in the wake of the stock market crash of 1929, as previously thought. We don’t know when Leonard Yoder and his Yoder Instruments Company became involved, but we know that he was in charge by 1935, and Ruxton Multi-Vider did not move from the Graybar Building in New York until after 1935. We know that Leonard Yoder apparently had some components left in 1935 and that he was looking for ways to have new barrels molded to assemble them.

Did Yoder succeed? All of the advertisements I know of for the Ruxton Multi-Vider were published in 1929, and there’s a handful of stationer’s notices for “Multi-Vider” pencils – without the Ruxton name – in 1930 and 1931 (with one lone reference in December, 1932). Perhaps they were marketed under another name, although Yoder himself was still calling them the “Multi-Vider” in his 1935 letter. 

Hope springs eternal - when I wrote that last article about the Ruxton, I hoped that one day someone may stumble across it and have more to share of the story. Lightning has now struck once, and I’m looking forward to it striking again.

Marveling At Last In Person

In that moment when I first walk into the hotel at one of these pen shows, there’s a core set of emotions and feelings swirling around in my head. I’m looking forward to seeing my friends. I’m wondering what artifacts I will discover. I wonder what new things I will learn.

However, there’s something more to it when I arrive at the Baltimore show in March each year. There’s an air of springtime optimism - even in years when the weather has been crap, the drive isn’t oppressive like the trek to Philadelphia is in January, because we know it’s winter’s last gasp. Baltimore is a busy show, almost as busy as Chicago or DC, but it is not as frantic on arrival: nothing much happens on Thursday, so there is time to work into the craziness gradually.

The bar and restaurant staff at the BWI Marriott are very friendly, so after Janet and I arrive early Thursday afternoon, we’ll sit and enjoy a few drinks while our friends trickle in. It’s a great time to catch up, and we’ll engage in relaxed show and tell sessions, with small cases of recent finds in hand.

The year before last, I was showing and telling something I had recently acquired over lazy Thursday afternoon beers and appetizers . . . but on my freaking cell phone. It had come to me in an online auction which closed (I thought) with plenty of time to spare before I left for Baltimore. I was greatly chagrined that it had not yet arrived, because I wanted answers about it and I couldn’t even properly ask the questions until my paws were upon it. All I knew was that (1) it was weird as all get-out and (2) there were some tantalizing clues in the crappy auction photos.

Of course it was waiting for me on the porch when I got home. My apologies to all of my friends who puzzled with me over this one at the time:

It almost looks like a stockbroker’s pencil with an enormous lead, but it doesn’t match the profile of any stockbroker pencil I’ve ever seen, particularly when the crown is given a tug:

This is where the auction photos were misleading, because it showed that piece as I presented it here. In operation, however, that ring is a slider, and friction advances the pencil as the top is withdrawn from the barrel.

The slider ring is stamped “Pat. Apl’d For,” but I’m confident no patent was ever issued. The idea of a slider ring advancing a writing instrument had been around since the 1840s, and this one was obviously made much later than that. A pencil that is advanced into position by friction as it is drawn from a case wasn’t anything new either. See “The Hicks Variation” (August 24, 2017: Volume 5, page 96), which compares Edward Todd’s 1892 patent pencils to W.S. Hicks’ 1897 pencils, which operated in a very similar fashion. If this was a Edward Todd or Hicks, it would likely be marked as such – and it isn’t.

The pencil nested in back has nothing to do with the fat “lead” at the other end, which isn’t lead at all . . . it is a metal plug secured in place by a spring, so it can be pushed in a little bit. Just above it there was more information only partly visible in the auction pictures, now fully revealed with the item in hand:

Patent number 824,391 and the name “Presso.” Search as I might, I found nothing regarding a pencil marketed as the “Presso,” but a complete patent number did yield a bit more of the story:

Patrick A. Toomey of Chicago, Illinois applied for this patent on April 8, 1905 and it was granted on June 26, 1906 . . . not for a pencil, but for a “Toilet-Powder Receptacle.” Toomey shows his invention both as a standalone receptacle to keep in the bathroom at home, and as a tubular receptacle for toilet powdering on the go, either tucked as shown into a lady’s pocketbook or kept on a watch chain for men. Pressing on that metal piece creates enough of a gap to dispense a bit of the stuff.

Yeah, there’s an “eww” factor involved in thinking about Victorian hygeine; the word “toilet,” however, referred to the room as much as it did the receptacle at the time. The phrase “powder your nose,” often a euphemism for the real reason one might adjourn to such a room, is what I believe was intended.

At least I hope so, I thought as I washed my hands.  

As for who made it, I don’t think it was either Edward Todd or Hicks. As mentioned earlier, both of those makers typically marked their stuff, and the turquoise top reminds me more of lower-quality manufacturers such as the American Lead Pencil Company and the makers of the BeeGee. However, this is just a little nicer and more interesting than I would expect from either of those manufacturers.

There’s also the long distance separating New York from Chicago. Of course some New York manufacturer might have obtained rights to a Chicagoan’s patent and made things pursuant to those rights, but at the dawn of the last century manufacturing was still more localized than it is today. I would think someone in the Midwest might have been a more likely source.

Maybe in six months, while Janet and I are sipping a beer in the lobby in Baltimore on our arrival, some random reader will approach me and start a conversation with “I read that piece your did on that ‘Presso’ pencil, and I’ve got something to show you . . .”

Bring a beer. I’ll reciprocate.

Occam's Junk Box

 I still credit Roger Wooten with adding “Occam’s Razor” to my vocabulary – it sounds so much more smart than saying “the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.”

I made an offhand remark the other day that I was convinced the cap on the pencil at the top of this next image is original, even though you can see the Rex Manufacturing Company’s “Four Horsemen” patents peeking around from the left side of this image and the pencil itself has none of those patented features:

The Rex Manufacturing Company is well known to have supplied the John Holland Pen Company with pencils during the early to mid-1920s. Here are a few examples:

These examples all originated from one source: Paul Erano and David Isaacson had partnered on a large collection that included a great many John Holland items, and while the collector’s identity was a secret for some time, it has since been confirmed to have belonged to the late Bob Johnson, the organizer of the DC Supershow. Paul wound up with boxes upon boxes of stuff, and over the course of several shows I bought up a large number of John Holland items. 

Bob’s collection had been unceremoniously boxed up in no apparent order and housed for many years in an attic over his garage, without any climate control. Exposure to the South Carolina heat and humidity was not kind to his collection. 

Still, a sticker is a sticker, and the information is there:

Most of these pencils have all four of the Rex patent dates on the caps – the “Four Horsemen” patents as I’ve called them over the years (for the full rundown, see Volume 2, page 103).

(Incidentally, I still haven’t found the large size pencils in Holland’s robin-egg blue - the only one I’ve seen was Jack Leone’s, which I photographed several years ago.)

Occam’s first slice neatly cuts this down to the bone, doesn’t it? We have well-documented Rex patent pencils made for John Holland with the same caps found on our mystery example; ergo, the simplest explanation is that a Holland cap from one of these just happened to find its way onto something else.

Sort of. 

Remember that Occam’s Razor only gives deference to the simplest explanation; it doesn’t specify what makes one explanation more or less simple than another. There is another, equally simple explanation rooted in a corollary I’ve made up to the rule: “junk box provenance” can at times provide the most simple explanation. 

“Junk box provenance” is a term I have used over the years to describe cases when the circumstances, manner, and condition in which items are found can tell us something about the items themselves. As an example, consider whether it is reasonable to conclude that the price stickers on those Rex-made John Holland pencils are original and correct. The answer is that it is far less likely that someone would take the time to carefully add price stickers to them, only to throw them into a box and stuff them up in a hot, humid attic.

In the case of Bob Johnson’s collection, we have junk crates rather than just a box, and Bob was collecting back in the 1970s when he still lived in the Cincinnati area – right where John Holland was located. Tales have been told about when the John Holland factory was cleared out and thousands of new old stock items were dispersed.

Here is a large cache of apparently new old stock John Holland items, which wound up in the attic of a collector who was very active in the Cincinnati area around the time. Occam agrees with me – these must be part of what was cleared out of the Holland factory when it closed for good, and these are the price bands that were on them when they came into Bob Johnson’s possession.

All of this leads up to where I’m going with this article. After a few shows of pawing through Bob Johnson’s stuff, Paul Erano told me that he would be bringing the last of the pencil stuff with him to the 2023 Ohio Show for me to “look at” (that is a euphemism meaning “I will at that time tell you how many dollars you will give me and I know that you will do so”).

Negotiations were as brief as usual, and I brought back a quart-sized Ziploc bag full of goodies back to my table. I didn’t have time to go through them until after the show, when I found a few last, great John Holland items. There was one of the later Holland pencils with the large white Holland tulip above the clip, made just around the time the wheels were coming off the company, while John Holland was still doing some nice things:

There were also a number of these later Hollands from the late 1930s. Yes, this was after the quality had sharply declined, but they are still desirable for an Ohio collector such as myself.

Besides, the wider band and streamlined top are a little unusual, and that double ender? I’ve never seen one. There were also a total of twelve similar pencils with no names on the clips – I thought the number of them was significant and suggests a box or store display containing an even dozen had been dumped into the box before going into storage:

Only one of the twelve was marked at all - just a simple John Holland Co. imprint on the barrel:

You get the point: these things are hard to find, and they are not anything a serious collector would be likely to take the time to curate, collect, and organize . . . only to stuff them in a box and condemn them to decades in an attic. At some point Bob Johnson came into a large number of John Holland new old stock, likely from the factory when it was cleaned out.

Now that the stage is set, here are the last two John Holland items that were included in that last lot:

In addition to the thicker pencil this article started with, there is a thinner example which is also missing its nose. It has the familiar John Holland logo stamped on the cap:

This is a Rex patent pencil - the earliest incarnation, as originally patented by George McNary on February 19, 1924. Here it is shown alongside an identical pencil marked “Franklin,” another Rex brand:

Occam’s junk box is making some sense here: two unusual John Holland items, both missing their noses, in a box which also included a bunch of new old stock John Holland stuff. Sure, it’s possible this is all a coincidence, and Bob or someone else put a Rex cap on the wrong pencil at some point over the last hundred years ago. However, I think what is just as likely is that a pile of Holland stuff was sitting at the old shop as it was being cleaned out and these, for whatever reason, were among the odds and ends hauled off.

If this is a legitimate piece, it might tell us a little more about what happened to the Rex Manufacturing Company. We know that in 1929 Rex was engaged in litigation with the Parker Pen Company over Parker’s patent for the washer clip. We know that after 1929, Rex’s customers were sourcing pencils from other manufacturers – so Diamond Medal pencils at Sears were coming from Parker and Gold Bond pencils over at Montgomery Ward were made by Wahl and Waterman.

One possibility is that Rex lost the dispute and the company was ruined, like what happened to the Kraker Pen Company after Sheaffer won its infringement case over Sheaffer’s lever-filled pens. Another possibility is that Rex limped along for a time after the case was over, surviving by making components or complete pencils which did not violate Parker’s patent.

It would make perfect sense, if Rex was keeping a low profile during its heyday and quietly supplying huge mail order operations with their pencils, Rex would do its best to stay invisible after 1929. What would also make sense is for Rex to use up any leftover parts any way they could, even if those parts had Rex’s disgraced patents already stamped on them. 

Did Rex make pencils with tops like these, so often found unmarked?

At this point, Occam would agree after reviewing all of this: that explanation is as simple as the alternative, so it is no more or less likely than not.

Worth a Second Look

In yesterday’s installment, I introduced a fountain pen marked “Worth” with a nib marked “Keystone.” It was the first of several dominoes to fall connecting different producers.

That tied nicely into a discussion about who made pens and pencils marked “Keystone,” but with an underlying assumption that the nib is original to the pen. I agree that sometimes people put too much weight on what nib is in a particular pen, since nibs can be and often were switched out by repairmen over the last century.

In this case, I fully believe the nib is original. First, this Worth pen appears to have been made by the Eagle Pencil Company, given its similarity to other known Eagle pens:

Second, the word “Keystone” was a registered trademark owned by the Blaisdell Pencil Company. Blaisdell, by the time the trademark was applied for, was controlled by the Berolzheimer family, which also owned the Eagle Pencil Company.

All roads leading from Worth and Blaisdell point to Eagle. As I mentioned earlier, when I bought that Worth pen I didn’t even check to see if there was a nib in it – it was cheap, and the fact that I suspected it was Eagle-made without even removing the cap was all that I needed to add some fascinating context to one of our most celebrated pen history. A Keystone/Blaisdell/Eagle connection adds even more fuel to that fire. 

The Worth Featherweight Pen Company is best known today for being the loser in Walter Sheaffer’s landmark patent infringement case over Sheaffer’s design patents for the Sheaffer Balance. Daniel Kirchheimer wrote an excellent article on the litigation titled “Featherweight vs. Heavyweight” (posted here). The case is notable for the information in trial transcripts detailing the development and history of the Sheaffer Balance. 

Here at the blog, the Worth Featherweight Pen Company last made an appearance in “Worth Something” (July 24, 2021: Volume 7, page 282). In that piece, the evidence was presented that Nathaniel Worth, who tried to secretly sell his shares in New Diamond Point Pen Company to Marx Finstone’s Eclipse Pen Company, was the man behind the Worth Featherweight Pen Company. Both were represented by the same attorney, Charles Greenwald.

“One could argue that it’s a coincidence that there were two guys named Worth [Nathaniel and his brother], and a pen company called the ‘Worth Featherweight Pen Company,’” I wrote. “Slimmer still is the possibility that all were in New York City, and that Nathaniel Worth had been recently relieved of his duties at another pen company shortly before this one emerges.

“But could it still be a coincidence now that we know the same New York lawyer was representing both Nathaniel Worth and the Worth Featherweight Pen Company, in two complex cases, both of which would likely consume nearly all of his time? No, I believe this eliminates all reasonable doubt.” 

OK, so now we have Diamond Point, Eclipse, Keystone, Eagle, Blaisdell, and Worth in the mix. Hang in there . . . it sorts itself out.

I took a more significant dive into Sheaffer’s litigation to protect its design patents for the Balance in A Field Guide to Sheaffer’s Pencils (2023). “Worth was an ideal defendant for Sheaffer to attack,” I wrote on page 40, “since it was a small concern with limited resources with which to defend itself. Worth’s conduct was also intentional and flagrant: the company even marketed its pens as the ‘Safer Fountain Pen,’ and one of Sheaffer’s undercover operatives reported that Worth’s president admitted the name was chosen because the name sounded like ‘Sheaffer.’ Predictably, Sheaffer outgunned this tiny adversary, resulting in a decision upholding the validity of Sheaffer’s design patents.”

Once that judgment was secured, Sheaffer set his sights on the Eagle Pencil Company, whose products had been introduced in evidence during the Worth litigation for the proposition that Eagle had been making streamlined writing instruments like the Balance since Walter Sheaffer was in diapers. In this instance, though, Eagle was one of the more blatant of the copycats, offering metal pencils and pens painted in a faux black and pearl, shaped exactly the same as the Balance. A couple examples turned up in Susan Wirth’s belongings, in this tray of “Susie’s Eagles” with which John Martenson parted:

The Balance-like offerings in this tray filled out what I already had in the collection nicely:

The Court was quick to mete out justice against Eagle: the Court issued a preliminary injunction against Eagle as well, in a published decision filed on December 3, 1931 (W.A. Sheaffer Pen Co. v. Eagle Pencil Co., 55 F.2d 420 (S.D.N.Y. 1931)). As a result, Eagle was forced to modify the shape of some of its products and add a disclaimer to the company’s 1931-1932 catalog:

Now let’s take a step back for a second and take a breath. Yes, it makes sense that Sheaffer would first target a weaker opponent to get a favorable precedent set that his Balance patents were valid. Yes, it also makes sense that Eagle would be in Sheaffer’s sights, since Eagle was one of the more blatant copycats.

With the additional insight that Eagle was supplying the Worth Featherweight Pen Company with at least some of the company’s products, it makes even more sense. After all, if Eagle was supplying one competitor with Balance-shaped products, taking down Eagle would knock out both a direct competitor as well as a supplier.

Which got me to thinking . . . in the Field Guide I brought up another competitor who was restrained by the Courts: the Pick Pen Company of Cincinnati, against whom Sheaffer won a preliminary injunction on December 2, 1931 – the day before the injunction was issued against Eagle.

I wrote up the history of the Pick Pen Company in great detail in Volume 7 (see “Nobody’s Luck Is That Band” on May 5, 2021: Volume 7, page 88). Now that we know that Worth might have been targeted by Sheaffer because Worth was a customer of the Eagle Pencil Company, I wonder: does that suggest Eagle actually made this Pick pen?

Maybe . . . it does share the general lines of Eagle products, and Pick didn’t do much with streamlining. It is an interesting hypothesis. With my head about to explode with adding yet another company into this story, I’ll wait to circle back on that point until I have more evidence.

Now to bring this long, complicated story full circle. This all started with a discussion of James Kelley’s Keystone Banker. In those earlier articles I included this image of three combination pens and pencils, all fitted with Gordon’s “fanged” clips:

These clips are marked “Banker,” “Safer,” and “Gordon.” Gordon is easy to explain: the fanged clips were patented by William Gordon of Union, New Jersey. There were three patented versions of the clip (all three patents were discussed in “Always a Crowd Pleaser” on March 17, 2015: Volume 3, page 263). I’ve never seen the earliest version of Gordon’s clip in the flesh, and I’ve only found one example of the third. All of the other examples I have found are the second incarnation, the patent application for which was filed April 3, 1930 and granted as patent number 1,834,151 on December 1, 1931. 

As for the Banker, these combos were produced (not manufactured) by our friend James Kelley. But what of the “Safer?” Was that meant to comfort the public into believing a writing instrument with built-in spikes wouldn’t harm your shirt pocket? Perhaps . . . but I doubt it.

In Daniel Kirchheimer’s “Featherweight v. Heavyweight” article, he discussed how Walter Sheaffer’s undercover detectives had learned that the Worth Featherweight Pen Company sold pens under the name “Safer” – not because they were less dangerous, but because “Safer” sounded a lot like “Sheaffer.” Daniel included this image of a Worth box, which was introduced at evidence during the trial:

I’m not sure how all of this fits together, and the only thing of which I am certain is that James Kelley and Nathaniel Worth both sourced these combination writing instruments with Gordon patent clips from the same supplier. Was that supplier Eagle? Maybe. Were Nathaniel Worth and James Kelley involved in some way other than buying stock from the same supplier? Maybe.

Good journalists, I was taught forty years ago, do not tell you what to think – they tell you what to think about. 

The Key to the Keystone

I strive to make clear the difference between what I know and what I have deduced from what I know. In “The Banker and the Specialty King” I offered proof that James Kelley, the slick self-described “Specialty King,” marketed pens and pencils under the names “Banker,” “New Banker,” and “Keystone Banker.”

I never said that James Kelley was the only one to use these trade names. To the contrary, with a character like James Kelley it is more likely than not that others used the same or similar names, given Kelley’s penchance for “lifting” names when nobody was looking. After all, any claims Kelley himself had to use the name were so shaky that anyone horning in on that territory would have just as much right to do so.

The follow up articles to “The Banker and the Specialty King” were published the following two days in “All the King’s Horsemen, Part One” (July 26, 2021: Volume 7, page 290) and Part Two (July 27, 2021: Volume 7, page 293). Those two articles dragged other lower-quality brands into James Kelley’s orbit, including “Master” (another name lifted from the original Banker Pen Company, which marketed a “Master Pen”), Nassau, Packard, and Keystone. There may be others – in fact, given James Kelley’s antics, there probably were.

My attribution of the “Keystone” name to James Kelley was only in relation to pencils along these lines:

Then there are these, which are marked “Banker” but which were referred to in Kelley’s advertising as the “gothic” or “Keystone Banker.”

No, I did not say that James Kelley was the only person on this big blue marble to call his pens and pencils the “Keystone.” In fact, I noted one puzzling detail in that previous article: the word “Keystone” was registered as a trademark with respect to pens and pencils, but not by James Kelley:

The Blaisdell Pencil Company, by its president A.C. Berolzheimer, had applied for registration of the Keystone mark on October 27, 1921, and it was granted registration as number 153,408 on March 21, 1922. In the registration, Berolzheimer claimed the mark was first used in commerce around January 1, 1911.

Both the mark’s first use and its trademark registration  occurred before James Kelley entered the picture in 1925 or so, so I don’t believe any of Kelley’s activities hastened Blaisdell’s application to register the mark. The ten-year delay in filing the application was more likely the result of the evolving and complicated relationship between Blaisdell and the Eagle Pencil Company, the latter of which was founded and run by the Berolzheimer family.

Blaisdell and Eagle had spatted back and forth over patent infringement claims beginning in the 1890s; in the early teens, Blaisdell was still a separate entity, but as the Keystone trademark shows, the Berolzheimer family controlled Blaisdell by 1921. Blaisdell formally became a subsidiary of the Eagle Pencil Company in the 1930s.

All of this means that by the time James Kelley started selling “Keystone” pens and pencils in the mid-1920s, the Keystone name was already reserved essentially to the Eagle Pencil Company. Did Eagle make James Kelley’s Keystone-marked products? I don’t think so; if anything, they look more like something David Kahn, Inc. might have made (Kahn is better known for its flagship brand, Wearever).

But there’s another bit of evidence on this point that recently surfaced . . . unintentionally.

This fountain pen turned up at one of the shows I attended this year; it is marked “Worth” on the clip:

When I say it provides an “unintentional” bit of evidence, that’s because I bought it for reasons having nothing to do with today’s subject. I bought it because I suspected that it proved the Eagle Pencil Company might have supplied Worth with at least some of its pens, due to its uncanny similarity to other Eagle metal fountain pens:

More on that tomorrow. Suffice to say that when I bought it, it was so cheap that I did not even bother to see if it had a nib in it. But when I did . . . 

While it clearly isn’t “gold filled” to the brim, the Keystone part hit me squarely between the eyes. Blaisdell’s trademark registration for the Keystone name had established that Eagle had at least some rights by representation to the name, but I was unsure whether that was found only on wood pencils or something else – say fountain pens – that might be a bit outside of my normal area of expertise. 

Am I backtracking on my earlier attribution of the use of “Keystone” to James Kelley? No – in fact, James Kelley was exactly the sort of slippery character who had few reservations about appropriating someone else’s name, even without the legal right to do so. I think both Blaisdell (Eagle) and James Kelley were both using the mark, one with and one without the legal authority to do so.

My friend Stan Klemenowicz and I discussed my earlier Keystone article, and he questioned whether an example in his collection, which strongly resembles something branded for Morrison, might suggest that the Keystone was a Morrison brand rather than a James Kelley production.  He posted an article at his blog, “stan’s pens” titled “Kahnstone, Kelleystone, or Keystone?” (posted here) to address other examples, including a few examples that appear to have been made in France.

I don’t disagree that at least some of the examples Stan shared in his article were likely not James Kelley productions – or Eagle’s either, for that matter. One of the most fascinating parts about collecting these things is the connections they establish between manufacturers, producers, and suppliers, and surprising connections turn up all the time. Consider this one:

Stan pointed the online auction for this example after he published his article, and once I saw it I felt the need to buy it. The missing pen might have been useful in providing a more definitive analysis of who was responsible for this one, but the paper on both the pencil and the matching warranty sheet was all I needed for the point I’m making today:

The makers of this “Famous Keystone” had some serious cajones reminding buyers to “Beware of Imitations,” since this looks like nothing made by either Blaisdell or Eagle, the rightful owners of the name. The top, though, is a familiar sight:

When these turn up, they are typically unmarked  – as is this one, other than the fortuitous price band. I’ve only found a few examples marked with a producer’s name:

The two complete examples are marked “E-Z Rite,” one on the cap and the other on the clip:

The third, however, provides another possible, surprising connection:

John Holland? Now wait a minute, my sharp-eyed peanut gallery might say . . . that might be a cap from a Rex Manufacturing Company pencil (you can just make out the “four horsemen” patent dates to the right of the name). Rex is well-known to have supplied pencils to John Holland, so isn’t that just a convenient replacement? Bear with me on that . . . there is sufficient “junk box provenance” with this example to suggest that this cap accompanied this pencil from whomever might have manufactured it and yes, I think that “whomever” might have been Rex.

More on that later, because this web is already sufficiently tangled. The question of the day is this: who made the Keystone? The answer is simple: anybody who thought they could get away with it without being prosecuted by Blaisdell, Eagle, or the newly-minted Federal Trade Commission.

That last sentence, combining the words “Eagle” and “prosecuted,” leads nicely into what I was going to tell you about the Worth Featherweight Pen Company. That story tomorrow.