A Breather

 The last few weeks here at the blog have been intense. Time and time again I have started what I thought would be a simple article, and time and time again it became more intricate than I dreamed it would be. For today, I’m taking a step back to offer a few simple updates to update my 2023 book, A Field Guide to Sheaffer’s Pencils. 

This installment is the first of many updates, beginning with a few odds and ends concerning Sheaffer’s metal pencils, offered between 1917 and 1930. Here’s a good start:

I don’t remember who sold me this Sheaffer Sharp Point, as those earliest Sheaffer pencils were named when they were introduced in 1917, but it came to me at the DC Show in 2023 – just after the book was published. The box is as good as these get, with clear lettering and the writing hand still very legible:

The “knobby” cap and “bowler” clip, both of which are nicknames I use, are a combination of features in production during late 1918 and early 1919; since this barrel is marked patent applied for rather than bearing Sheaffer’s November 5, 1918 patent date, I’d believe it was produced in the second half of 1918, before the patent date was added and flared caps and Sheaffer-marked clips were introduced. Pencils like these are shown on page 6 in the book, but no, I didn’t have this pattern:

Model designations were very simple during the Sharp Point era: BD meant sterling silver (B), pattern “Puritan” (D). Of course, that is much easier to decipher when you have a price band containing all of that information:

Moving on -- “Sheaffer metal pencils were offered in five configurations,” I announced with authority on page 26, accompanied by this image:

Sigh. And now there are six. I think Daniel Kirchheimer either sold it to me or pointed it out on someone’s table aa a show and told me I needed to buy it.

This pipsqueak is in the smallest size, and it has both a clip and a ringtop. Even if you thought the ringtop cap might be a replacement, I haven’t previously seen any evidence of the existence of a side clip model this short.

Next is one with a very subtle feature that I didn’t notice until David Nishimura pointed it out to me:

Although the pencil is an ordinary silver-nickel model, what sets is apart is the stippling on the lower half of the barrel:

Sheaffer’s 1928 and 1929 catalogs show a similar treatment applied to oversized utility pencils. With this “satin finish grip,” it was Model SAA, or the AAA if equipped for .076" checking leads. The catalogs are silent, however, with respect to standard diameter pencils receiving such treatment.

I photographed this next group last March, but I don’t think they all arrived in one go - I think I was just catching up on taking pictures of things that had accumulated around the museum:

Starting at the top is that long ringtop with a handwritten tag. Longer than usual, yes . . . 

. . . but was this the “1921 diamond pattern”? At first blush, that seems about right.

That's what Wahl called this pattern on metal Eversharps, but that isn't what Sheaffer called it. I ran down all of Sheaffer's cataloged pattern names and production dates on page 27 in the book, and this one appeared in 1923, not 1921. While “diamond” seems logical, Sheaffer referred to it only as Pattern L: “hand turned chasing.”

That handwritten “PFC p76" reference resonates with those of us who know our pen collecting history.  Pen Fancier’s Magazine was one of our earliest periodicals, produced by pen collecting pioneer Cliff Lawrence. In addition to the regular magazines, Cliff produced a few PFC Pen Guide books. I have a few different editions, and I was looking forward to seeing this exact pencil in one of those old books. Alas, it must have been a different edition, because it doesn’t appear anywhere in these.

Moving on to the next one, a short gold-filled ringtop, I noticed something weird about it. I have a few similar ones, but the chasing is different.

The bottom two are easy to identify – they are also shown on page 27 in my book. Sheaffer cataloged them as Pattern H - “Craig style chasing.”

That top example, though, isn’t the same thing. It is much earlier, cataloged in 1920 and 1921 simply as Pattern G. The full length version with clip is shown on page 28, but I did not have a ringtop to show when the book went to press.

The next one up for discussion in this group is that badly deteriorated, hand-painted pencil. Ordinarily I might have passed on it due to its poor condition, but in my experience nearly all of the hand-painted Sheaffer pencils were the short models. I’ve only seen one other longer ringtop with this treatment – it’s in the book, on page 32:

The last two in this group are easily dispatched, and I’m not sure why I even included them in that picture. The silver nickel example upgraded the one I had with a broken clip, and the plain gold filled one was just really, really clean:

This last one – at least for now – came to me via Daniel Kirchheimer, who brought it to the Baltimore Show last year. He says it was found among what was left of a Sheaffer repairman’s business:

The finish is called Guilloché enamelling, and it is much more prevalent in Europe than it is in the United States. It is created by layering and then firing enamel and glass over chased metal. 

My first impression was that this might be a marriage of Sheaffer parts with a European barrel, since I’ve never seen a Sheaffer pencil with this sort of treatment. Sheaffer didn’t use the underlying pattern, at least to my knowledge:

I don’t think it’s a marriage, and neither does Daniel. No, this exact pattern was not cataloged, but it is close enough to Sheaffers “diamond” or “hand turned chasing” discussed earlier that nothing more than a flick of a few switches on the same machines might have produced it. Also, there’s so much that would be involved in transplanting a Sheaffer pencil’s guts into something else, and while this Guilloché shows evidence of wear, it doesn’t have the sort of damage one would expect from that sort of procedure. Besides, “junk box provenance” suggests that nobody would go through all of that effort only to leave it behind.

The cap has Sheaffer’s 1918 patent date but lacks the “Lifetime” name, which was added to the pencil caps in 1924. As I showed on page 32 of the book, Sheaffer’s hand-painted pencils also lack the Lifetime name, but they were cataloged in 1928 - I theorized in the book that hand painting old stock might have been a way to clear out obsolete models. Perhaps around the same time, Sheaffer dabbled in Guilloché as another way to do the same thing.