The Four-Trick Pony

 I dropped a teaser the other day when I included a picture of that tray from Jon Martenson (ex Susan Wirth) that included two examples of The Keeran Pencil:

The Keerans are on the right; second from left is a Autopoint 1925 Model with the early “spoon clip” (by 1927, the clips on these terminated in a round ball). That one is no slouch, but it wasn’t the reason I took this picture.

The other pencils in this tray come from the Swanberg Manufacturing Company, in their hard rubber, Keeeran Pencil-derived incarnation. A rough outline of Swanberg (named for Julius Swanberg, inventor of the Shur-Rite pencil) was laid out her in “Cult Collection” (April 4, 2018: Volume 5, page 214). When I started collecting, I thought Swanberg was a one-trick pony, since the most common examples from the brand are those thin aluminum pencils, branded either with the Swanberg or “Tubit” name.

More on these later. These next pencils, I later learned, were the second trick from this particular pony . . .

. . . or so I thought. Most examples along these lines are made of hard rubber. Some earlier examples, including those featured in A Century of Autopoint on page 78, were made of celluloids carried over from the Keeran Pencil, but apparently Swanberg wasn’t as effective in procuring these materials as Charles Keeran had been –  most of these straight-top models are made from hard rubber. Here’s the image of some of them, which was also included in Volume 7:

Most, that is . . .

That center example is made from an interesting celluloid, not derived from one of LeBoeuf’s exclusive materials but something quite different. 

Note also that the bottom example is branded as a “Swanberg Special,” a crown top example of which was featured here in that last article, as well.

Even the relatively mundane example in black adds an extra backflip to Swanberg’s usual routine: gold filled trim on these utility models is out of the ordinary, and this one sports a shop imprint near the top: “150" might denote a model number, but it also might have referred to a suggested retail price of $1.50:

All three of these are minor variations on Swanberg’s second trick. But there is something interesting about this tray: those random bits and pieces are not so random when examined closely. All are Keeran or Swanberg parts, and if Swanbergs and Keerans are scarce as hen’s teeth, spare parts for them are unicorn feathers.

Over the years I’ve coined the phrase “junk box provenance” to describe those cases in which the circumstances in which something is found suggest there is something more than initially meets the eye going on. In this case we have a tray full of items which have a clear but obscure connection: Charles Keeran, Autopoint, and Swanberg. They were found all in one place, and while they were in the possession of Susan Wirth – a towering figure in the pen community – I believe they were kept together as they came into her possession.

Susan Wirth was many things, but organized was not one of them. She appreciated pencils, but her primary interest was pens; assembling a grouping like this would have required years of dedicated and focused hunting. Besides, Susan had acquired large portions of Autopoint’s factory archive, which would reasonably be expected to have acquired whatever remained of Swanberg and The Keeran Pencil. I have no doubt she would have recognized the value of keeping these things together, but I believe she acquired them in one go, close to the source.

And what a go it must have been! There was another tray I haven’t shown you yet that was in Jon’s possession:

As John Cleese would say, “and now for something completely different.” These aren’t some pitcher who only throws fastballs eeking out an additional couple miles per hour . . . this is Bugs Bunny suddenly “perplexing ‘em with a slowball” and striking out the Gashouse Gorillas, all at once with one pitch.

For starters, consider the aluminum examples which look at first like someone might have just stuck colored caps on them:

Wait a tick . . . those caps are the right shape for Swanberg’s plastic models, but those colors? I’d never seen them before. But wait again . . . there’s more . . . each is loaded with a lead matching the color of the cap, and what leads they are!

These are .075" “Checking” (as they were called by Eversharp) or “thick” (as Autopoint referred to them) leads, something I haven’t seen on any Swanberg before. This would not be a simple modification to existing tooling: with screw drive pencils, the entire mechanism would have to be retooled from scratch.

There are other interesting things about these aluminum checking pencils. Note the clips:

These were sourced from Van Valkenberg, which sold generic unmarked accommodation clips and referred to these as the “Holyoke B” model in Van Valkenberg’s 1931 catalog, preserved in the Pen Collectors of America’s online referenced library. 

Among the three otherwise pedestrian aluminum pencils, there’s another variation worth noting, the top example in this next image:

That top example also features a Holyoke B clip which granted, could have been added at any time. Not so easily explained are the steel tip, which has been substituted in place of the usual brass, and two additional knurled bands:

Now for a closer look at those last three in this tray:

The top example isn’t too far off the beaten path, although I haven’t seen this model in mottled hard rubber before:

The bottom one, however, is another matter entirely . . . a fat pencil in a striking, subtle olive-swirled plastic. It is the only example I know of in this size and in this material, and the bottom two sport specially marked accommodation clips I haven’t seen on any Swanberg before:

These were also sourced from Van Valkenberg - these were the company’s flagship “Security” clips as shown in the 1931 catalog:

Given the unusual twists and turns in this tray, it appears these were Swanberg’s last gasps . . . although the word “prototype” is overused, the absence of surviving examples of any of these “in the wild” suggests either very limited production or experimental pieces, perhaps acquired by Autopoint and later passed on to Susan Wirth before finally being passed on to me . . . with no notes to explain why or when they were made. 

Therefore, the search for additional documentation continues . . .  and so does the hunt for this particular pony’s fifth trick!