Wrong in the Right Way

The only difference between fiction and nonfiction is accuracy. Statements in print that are later proven wrong can demote an entire work from a scholarly text to a pretty picture book.

“This is what I have observed, here is how it compares with what I know, and here is what that evidence leads me to believe,” is how I approach new conclusions. In those terms, new evidence does not prove anything I said wrong, since all I’ve provided is a snapshot of what I thought I knew at the time. If anything, I’ve invited further study and the greater understanding it yields.

That being said, print publication is cruel. Once a book is printed, all the author can hope for is that it encapsulated as accurately and as completely as possible all of the knowledge that was rattling around upstairs as of the moment it was committed to print. If everybody waited until they know everything there is to know or that will ever be knowable to write a book, there would be no books. 

Eversharp: Cornerstone of an Industry thoroughly exhausted me. I poured into it everything I have learned about the brand over the last 25 years, and I believe it will remain a valuable reference long after I am gone with all the information it contains. However, I know nothing is complete, and I knew that I’d be circling around with updates and corrections.

Just not too many, I hoped. And not too soon.

This is my longwinded way of telling you that at the end of Eversharp: Cornerstone of an Industry, I posed a question that was unnecessary, because I had the answer right in front of me. That answer adds a little bit of context to the Eversharp story that, had I remembered it at the time, I might have added it into the book.

I am proud, however, to report that I was wrong in the right way.

On average, my books are “done” two or three months before the printed books are available. During that time I’ll make last minute tweaks, but it becomes more and more difficult as the production process moves forward until it’s time to call – literally – “pencils down.”

The Eversharp book had been picking up steam for months through 2024, with contributors offering me artifacts to photograph or acquire for the book. The law of inertia applies: new finds were continuing to arrive even as the printers were asking for proofs.

By the 2024 DC Show in August, the book was essentially complete, subject only to a final round of editing with the assistance of that most loyal knight Richard Keith. At the show, I picked up a few additional things to include in the book – no worries, since I do my own layout – reshooting and substituting images was still a simple matter.

Mostly.

Right before that show, an online auction yielded a solid gold early Heath-clip Ever Sharp, which I had referred to but had not shown in Chapter Three. By the time I had it in hand for photography, the layout was so tight that there was nowhere I could squeeze it in. I added one last page to the book: page 434, titled “Stop Press,” includes several images of that important find, and I was able to work a reference to page 434 into one of the captions in Chapter Three.

This article is not about that pencil. That “stop press” page, however, opened the door for what I’m going to tell you next.

At the DC Show, I reconnected with Myk Daigle – a fervent supporter of my research and the books I write. Myk had a couple parts on hand, and he gave them to me. “Maybe you can use these in your book,” he said.

I tucked them away to look at when I got home. If I can match these up with the metal Eversharp model to which they belong, I thought, I can swap these caps over and reshoot the images in which those models appear.

There was a problem.

I turned to pages 64 through 67 in the book, which provide a four-page table detailing every cataloged pattern of metal Eversharp pencil, together with the years in which each was cataloged and their model numbers.

Wahl’s catalogs did include a Model 22; it was the barleycorn pattern listed only in 1921, but it was only offered in gold-filled – nothing in silver plated or sterling.  Model 034 similarly made no sense, because Wahl did not use any model numbers with a leading zero and besides, Wahl’s model conventions provided that ringtop model designations ended with the suffix “SW,” for “short with ring.”

These were the first square-peg model designations that did not fit neatly into the round holes I had already documented in the book. I had to acknowledge it, so I used the last couple inches at the bottom of the “Stop Press” page 434.

Here’s the part where I got it wrong in the right way.

I said only what I knew. I explained how Model 22 and 034 did not fit into what I had compiled with respect to Wahl’s model designations, and the book ends with this statement: “Perhaps these were for Heath’s clutch pencils or Heath-made pencils marked for the Carey Pen Company, both of which used these same caps (see pages 42-44). Perhaps also there is something more to learn about these, still out there and waiting to be discovered.”

Observation, evidence, and a guess based on that evidence. Ending with an unanswered question like that is a valuable acknowledgment that any book exists in a continuum, as a statement of what was known at the time in a universe that will inevitably expand. Some day, I hoped, someone would come forward with the answer.

I didn’t know it would be me.

And I didn’t know I already had it.

While I was writing the Sheaffer and Eversharp books, I continued to add other things to my collection - but to keep my work table clear and stay focused, I was diligent about photographing new additions and putting them away to keep them out of sight and out of my easily distracted peripheral vision.

One of the things I had turned up along the way, back in February 2023, was a group of pens and pencils made by the DeWitt-LaFrance Company in Cambridge, Massachusetts – best known as the makers of the “Superite” brand of pens and pencils. The lot had surfaced in an online auction:

Yes, I do pick up fountain pens when the occasion calls for it – and when it comes to a cult brand of which I am a rabid devotee – the occasion calls for it. I had not seen a Superite fountain pen with a price band:

I shot these images in March, 2023, just as the Sheaffer book was being released and nearly a year before work began on the Eversharp book. If or when the blog restarts, I thought to myself, I’ll write something about these.

This was not what I had planned to write.

After the dust settled with the Eversharp book, and page 434 along with all its other pages were irrevocably committed to print, I dusted off that file folder of pictures, and I noticed that the top two pencils in that group shot had price bands that strongly resembled those found on early Ever Sharp pencils. I wondered . . . 

The example second from top is marked Model 10-B, printed in the same font as Myk’s Model 034 ringtop cap.

Which leads me to the coup de grace:

There it is: the Model 22 cap that Myk Daigle gave to me came from a Superite. Oh, I was so close . . . I had suggested Myk’s caps might be from a Heath-made pencil, and while that guess was wrong, it is fascinating that Superite pencils have caps that are identical to those on an Eversharp.

George W. Heath & Co. made the earliest Ever Sharp pencils, using modified and repurposed barrels from their clutch pencils (and which were also rebranded for the Carey Pen Company). When Wahl took over production of Keeran’s Ever Sharp in October 1915, it was because Keeran was frustrated that Heath could not keep up with his orders. Given Heath’s apparent refusal to allow Wahl to use his patent pending clip (as evidenced by Keeran’s hastily designed spade clip and John Wahl’s tombstone clip), Heath apparently did not take kindly to the transition.

It would be unreasonable to think that Heath would dig in its heels on the use of Heath’s clip, but would nevertheless willingly cooperate in supplying caps or the tooling used to make them . . . Wahl likely copied them, since the basic crown-shaped design was not the subject of any design patent or trademark and was in the public domain.

That would leave George W.  Heath & Co. with idle tooling and perhaps a supply of parts in late 1915 . . . and DeWitt-LaFrance burst onto the scene out of nowhere in 1918. I now believe that Heath either supplied caps or sold tooling to the fledgling DeWitt-LaFrance Company so that Superite pencils would sport caps so similar to those on an Eversharp that a couple of them erroneously wound up in a book about Eversharps.

There’s more evidence to support this theory: as I noted in “Wahl, Sheaffer, and the Race for Boston” (beginning on December 26, 2016: Volume 4, page 300), by 1921 the Wahl Company had noted it had hundreds of competitors who had copied the outward appearance of the venerable Eversharp. The Wahl Company only sued one of them: DeWitt-LaFrance (Volume 4, page 325).

I had previously thought Wahl singled out the makers of the Superite for litigation because DeWitt-LaFrance was one of the more successful companies offering writing instruments that looked like an Eversharp. Given what I have learned, I now theorize that the purpose of the litigation was to knock out a competitor that was producing parts that looked exactly like Eversharps - the very parts Wahl had copied in the first place.

Let’s add one last potential morsel to this theory. Here’s the nib from that fountain pen in the group:

Note the “H.” 

I asked David Nishimura whether that could designate “Heath,” but he does not recall any evidence that George W. Heath & Co. made its own nibs, and suggests it might stand for “Hicks” or something else.

And it starts again. Observation. Evidence. And a guess.