I wrote the following article in February, 2024. After it was finished, I took a step back and thought to myself, “this is a really interesting detail about the Eversharp Skyline.”
Off to the races went my brain . . . “oh hey, and I have a lot of other interesting details about the Skyline,” I continued . . . “and then there’s all those other interesting details about all those other Wahl and Eversharp models.”
And so the internal monologue grew deafening, accompanied by the ever more deafening chorus of reader requests, gently but persistently asking me when I was going to write the Eversharp book.
So I did.
The revelations that emanated from this article were included in Eversharp: Cornerstone of an Industry, on page 324. The back story, however, was outside the scope of a scholarly monograph. As I was dusting things off and getting ready to restart things around here, I ran across the draft of the article.
The internal monologue began again. “But you already included most of this in the book,” I said. “But not all of your readers here have the book,” I replied. “Shut up and have fun,” my third inner voice piped up.
It’s getting crowded in there, so I’m shutting down the conversation. Here is what I wrote. . .
- Jesse Wins a Beer -
“I’ll buy a beer at the next show for the first person to see what’s ‘wrong’ here…” I teased in the Fountain Pens group on Facebook.
A lively guessing game ensued, and every wrong guess merited a “no beer for you.” Those who said “they aren’t fountain pens” earned a “DEFINITELY no beer for you.” I should have told those in the latter category that they needed to buy me one.
After a few missed swings from the peanut gallery, Jesse Tanenblatt commented that the trim bands on these three examples are not where they are “supposed” to be.
I look forward to tipping a glass with Jesse next time I see him, likely in Baltimore. Here are the three oddballs shown alongside their regular counterparts:
Jesse is a very observant sort of guy, but I like to think I might have planted a subconscious seed with an article titled “All for the Paper” (June 16, 2021: Volume 7, page 201). The short green example was featured at the end of that article; since then, one of the others surfaced at the 2021 Raleigh Show (I don’t remember who had it), and Nik Pang had the other at the 2022 Philly show.
I had included the earliest advertisements I had found for Eversharp’s new Skyline in that 2021 article, which were published in October, 1940 and showed only fountain pens, sometimes referred to as the Skyline, sometimes as the “Gold Seal Pen” and still other times, simply as the new Eversharp with a “Magic Feed.” An advertisement published in January, 1941 finally shows a pencil, and while the artwork is fuzzy, it appears to show the trim band right where one would expect to see it, on the border between the striped upper and solid lower sections of the barrel.
Then came that advertisement in The Bloomington Pantagraph on February 13, 1941:
There is this same trim band placement, and the three examples that have surfaced prove this was no artistic license – a very small number were in fact manufactured in this configuration. In my own classification system for Skyline configurations, I refer to Skylines with striped upper barrels as the “Skyline Standard I”, with “Standard II” denoting a wider center band. Now that I’ve found three of these examples with the odd trim band placement, I’m inclined to refer to them as the “Standard Ia.”
I’ve been making this up as I go along for years, so I might as well keep making things up now.
We know these Standard Ia pencils were made very early in the Skyline’s production run, although that February 1941 advertisement was published a few months after the Skylines first appeared. The Skyline Standard Ia is in my opinion more true to the Skyline form. Cap bands on the matching pens weren’t right on the lip, so moving the band up a bit on the pencils makes these a better match for the pens they were meant to accompany. That raises the question: if these look better, why were they discontinued?
That question might be answered by another detail you might have noticed in that first image. . . J. Andrew Sonnemaker and Hugh Cordingley were quick to point it out, and I suppose runner-up beers are in order for each of them.
While the example from my last article has the typical “double check” cartouche at the top of the clip, J. Andrew and Hugh pointed out that two I have found since then do not. Huh, I said to myself as I read Andrew and Hugh’s comments. I’ll admit that didn’t notice that until they mentioned it, and the question opens an entirely new can of worms (or beer).
Since the Skyline Standard Ia configuration appears in such an early advertisement, the first possibility to rule out is that perhaps the double check cartouche was added after the Skyline was introduced. Stationer’s newspaper advertisements frequently use fanciful artwork, and that is at least partially the case with that February 1941 advertisement. Note also that the cartouche as illustrated isn’t exactly what one would expect to see. It isn’t rectangular: the bottom is rounded, so it looks more like a shield.
Was this added to existing artwork that lacked a double check mark, drawn before Eversharp had finally settled on how it would look? Maybe, but I think that gives stationers too much credit.
Retailers typically were not as quick as manufacturers to update the artwork they had on hand; perhaps that February 1941 advertisement used artwork Eversharp had supplied to retailers months earlier. If artwork showing that alternate trim band placement was outdated, it wasn’t outdated by much: it was still only a few months old at the time this ad was published.
Other evidence indicates (1) the shield-shaped cartouche was fanciful artwork, and (2) the regular cartouche was used on Skylines from the outset. That evidence comes from Jack Leone, who invited me down to his place some eight years or so ago to take pictures of some things for this blog. We ended up spending the day shooting his entire collection, and he had some things I wasn’t expecting to see, including some original drawings by Henry Dreyfuss, the designer of the Skyline. Here’s a concept drawing Dreyfuss made of a Skyline set dated January 15, 1940:
Note that the clips illustrated are entirely unmarked, and the pencil is shown with a “Streamliner” clip rather than the matching buttressed clips Eversharp eventually used.
Jack also had a couple fascinating Dreyfuss drawings showing the double check cartouche. The first, captioned drawing number 59, is dated June 6, 1940:
Eversharp apparently had concerns about how this would look when reduced to the width of the clips. Drawing 59-A, dated July 17, 1940, beefs up the tails of the checkmarks to make them more visible, and it shows the design reduced to the actual size:
The earliest Skyline advertisements, published in October 1940, show what appears to be this cartouche. A trademark registration for this design would be helpful, since it would provide a date on which Eversharp first used this mark in commerce. Unfortunately, if the company did so, I didn’t find it in the course of researching American Writing Instrument Trademarks 1870-1953 (although I found two earlier incarnations of the mark as reported in the book).
However, I think the date shown on the Dreyfuss drawings, coupled with the October 1940 advertisements, are good enough to state that Dreyfuss’ double check cartouche was available and apparently in production on Skylines from the outset. No, I don’t think my two pencils lack the mark because they were sooper dooper early. There must be some other reason.
I think that reason is that Eversharp intentionally omitted the mark because the company did not want these pencils to be covered by the guarantee it denoted.
The upper and lower parts of these pencil barrels were glued together, and when they separate there’s no repairing them – broken once is broken forever. The Skyline Standard Ia may be rare because most of the ones that were made broke, either when swaging the band above the joint or in use.
Moving the band to cover that joint provided an extra bit of reinforcement at the weakest part of a Skyline pencil barrel. I believe that in the case of the Standard Ia, structural integrity quickly trumped aesthetics. They looked nicer, but in the end it was more important that they be durable enough to warrant with a double-check guarantee than to be pretty.
Yes, I believe the Standard Ia is the earliest incarnation of Eversharp Skyline pencils with striped upper barrels. No, I don’t think lacking the double check is how “first year” Skyline Standard pencils (or pens, for that matter) are identified, because the vast majority of such “first year” Skylines have that seal. Yes – I think Eversharp was hesitant to warrant what they suspected would be a model more prone to failure.
There I go, thinking again.
“Shut up and drink your beer,” I replied to myself.
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