Twice I’ve tried to get things started here again.
In 2022, I thought I would organize my Sheaffer Balance pencils, and I thought I was writing a follow-up article to “The Sheaffer Spotter’s Bible” (June 9, 2021: Volume 7, page 180).
I thought wrong.
That initial article was a blue mile longer than any reasonable blog article should be . . . however, I mused, it might be an excellent starting point for a chapter in a book dedicated to Sheaffer’s pencils . . . and thus began the grand diversion which resulted in A Field Guide to Sheaffer’s Pencils, released in March, 2023.
We laughed, we cried . . . it was better than Cats.
A few months after the Sheaffer book came out, I became restless to resume blogging again, so I wrote a nice article about the odd placement of trim bands on the earliest Eversharp Skylines. What better way to get back to my roots, I thought, than by restarting the blog with a few Eversharp updates?
I thought wrong again.
Back in 2017, I had posted “The World’s Largest Eversharp Collection - Organized at Last” (July 6, 2017: Volume 5, page 32). Although I wrote the article for purely selfish reasons, it wasn’t to show off: I wrote that article so when I was surfing online auctions or trawling vendor tables at pen shows, I would at least have some sense of what was already residing in the museum.
By 2024, that article had become useless for that purpose; dozens of other Eversharps had found their way to me and I was right back where I started, inadvertently acquiring duplicate examples because that 2017 article didn’t reflect that I had already found one.
Or two.
Or three. Yeah, I now have three examples of one model that did not appear in that 2017 article. Making matters worse, I had so many new Eversharp additions that I couldn’t remember which one it was that I kept buying. It was only a matter of time before I bought a fourth.
Maybe, I thought, it is time I listen to all those who had asked me over the years when I was going to write “The Eversharp Book.”
I thought right.
Yes, Virginia . . . there was enough to fill a monster of a book. Eversharp: Cornerstone of an Industry is a deep, deep dive into the subject that wasn’t finished until late 2024. It was the most complicated project I had ever undertaken, consuming my every free moment for more than a year. When it was finished, I thought, I had penned the last, definitive word on the brand.
I really need to quit thinking. I was one for three going into that internal dialogue, and that bit of flawed logic made it one for four. If this were baseball, I’d be sent back to the minors.
The Eversharp book has backfired in the same way my 2017 article did: it laid out everything I had found by that point, which only brought into sharper focus what was missing. In the months since, I have added many more examples that are not included in the book.
The same has also happened with my Sheaffer collection, and also with the Autopoints, supplementing what I have learned since I published A Century of Autopoint in 2019. All of this is in addition to the hundreds of examples of other brands that I have picked up along the way . . .
All these have arrived since March, and this photo was taken before that enormously productive Chicago show in May. I am now drowning in items yet to be photographed and an enormous folder of unpublished images, each of which represents a bit of knowledge I have acquired.
Knowledge is useless unless it is shared.
But where to start? This time, I’ve wised up . . . I’m not going to start with an article that might morph into another book-length monograph, and I have the perfect story for you. It all started before the Baltimore Show . . . not this one, but the one in March, 2022 . . .
