The 2023 Triangle Pen Show (aka the Raleigh Pen Show) was the first at its current venue – a “more Southern” sort of hotel, in Terry Mawhorter’s words – with a staff that was extraordinary by pen show standards. It was the first time I have asked a hotel restaurant employee what time the bar opened – 3 o’clock, he said, but then he offered to get me something from the bar.
It was 11:00 a.m. More Southern, indeed.
Other than the unusually gracious hospitality, one other thing made the show this year unusual. At the end of the weekend, as I packed up and headed home, I had added only two pencils to my collection. This was one of them:
It came to me within ten minutes of my arrival from Dexter (“Dex”) Mills, who was set up just a few yards from my display. I had rolled my hand truck overloaded with stuff into the ballroom, and I hadn’t even started to unpack before Dex flagged me down to show me something.
There’s three things I know when Dex says he has something to show me: first, Dex has a really good eye for pencils. Second, as a Loyal Knight he avidly reads the blog, both online and in the copies of my books he’s picked up. When Dex shows me something, he already knows it is a missing piece of some puzzle over which I have been puzzling.
Third, Dex is a collector first and foremost – if he bought a pencil, it was something he has acquired because he wants to keep it.
At the preceding Ohio Show in November 2022, as I was taking my final swings at acquiring missing examples of Sheaffer pencils to include in A Field Guide to Sheaffer’s Pencils. Dex came to my table during preshow trading to excitedly show me a brown Sheaffer utility pencil fitted with the rare “clicker type” repeating mechanism, which he had just picked up for a song.
Before my Sheaffer book was published, few people even knew that these existed, since from all outward appearances they are identical to the much more common twist pencils with a fixed eraser. I had them in all colors, including a rare cutaway demonstrator . . . but I didn’t have a brown one. The draft text for that photo caption said that I’d never seen one, but there wasn’t any reason why one didn’t exist.
Now I knew one did . . . but Dex wasn’t about to part with it. “I’m just as happy with a picture as I am owning one” is my mantra, but I’m usually saying that to myself rather than to others, because I’m almost always lying. I made an obscene offer to Dex but I didn’t take a picture at the time, because I thought he might relent later in the show. He didn’t, so I scrambled around in the online auctions after the Ohio Show until I finally found another one. I had to pay an even more obscene price.
It was still worth it to me to have this image to include in A Field Guide to Sheaffer’s Pencils, on page 133:
Back to Raleigh Show, where I braced myself for Dex to show me something spectacular that I wouldn’t be able to pry away from him. This time I was in luck: yes, it was spectacular and yes, it was available because he had found two of them.
And yes, it answered a question I have had since I wrote The Catalogue of American Mechanical Pencils in 2011. The mystery surrounds pencils marked “S.W.P. Co.,” but obviously made by the Pick Pen Company of Cincinnati, Ohio.
In The Catalogue, I’d thrown out my one and only theory at the time – that “SWP” stood for Simpson Weidlich Pick, combining the names of three prominent Cincinnati companies.
I didn’t have much more information by the time I wrote a comprehensive(ish) history of the Pick Pen Company for Volume 7 (“Lore Galore” on May 4, 2021 and “Nobody’s Luck is that Bad” on May 5, 2021: Volume 7, pages 85-94). I found no connection between Pick and Weidlich or Simpson to explain the other two letters. My theory didn’t make any sense, and I abandoned the notion. Someday, I thought, the truth will surface.
With what Dex found, I believe the truth has finally surfaced.
“Southwest Publishing Company,” the fragile cellophane wrapper reads. I gently started to remove the pencil for closer examination, but Dex stopped me. “It’s never been out of there, and you can see what it is through the wrapper,” he said.
I could indeed:
"S.W.P. Co.” it reads on the barrel, at the top of which a flat round disk, typical for a Pick product, caps the rounded top end. If “SWP Co.” stood for a run of pencils made by Pick for the Southwestern Publishing Company, Dex’s pencil sorts out and resolves this mystery as neatly as one can ever expect.
I suppose it is still possible but wildly improbable that “SWP” means something else entirely that remains to be discovered – assuming one believes in wildly improbable coincidences. I don’t, and I’m prepared to accept the explanation this wildly improbable survivor provides that wraps this question up neatly with a bow. Thank you, Dex, for finally scratching that decades-old itch in one of those dark recesses of my brain.
After I bought this first of the only two pencils I bought at that show, Dex opened up his folder of recent finds, and there was something else in there that I thought I couldn’t live without. Again, I made an obscene offer . . . again, he said he’d think about it, and I knew he wouldn’t.
Alas . . . until he has someone like my Janet sitting next to him to overhear such an offer and hiss “sell it” to him through gritted teeth, I’ll have to be content with a picture.
A picture which, of course, I again forgot to take.
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