I’ve often joked that A Field Guide to Sheaffer’s Pencils is a book about the Sheaffer Balance, flanked on either side by the little bit that came before it and the little bit that came after. I’m only exaggerating a little bit: Chapter Three, concerning the Balance, is a quarter of the entire book.
Of course I’ve got several updates to offer about the Balance, and by no means will they fit comfortably in just one post. We’ll get a good start today.
This first one came my way just as I was closing out the book, and there wasn’t time or space to include it:
The Sheaffer Balance is a series that requires thought on several levels at the same time whenever you find one. At first, nothing looks out of the ordinary about this one, because all of its elements are so familiar. What is unusual here, though, is how they come together on this example. The pencil is a Tuckaway and is probably from around 1942, after the earlier metal Tuckaways were redesigned to match Sheaffer’s new Triumph line. Similar pencils are shown on page 88 in the book . . . almost . . .
At top is one of the 1942 Tuckaways shown on page 88. When production returned to normal after the War, the Tuckaway’s lower section was made longer, the bands were narrower and a stubby clip was added (the one shown is a Valiant Tuckaway from 1945 or 1946, as shown on page 152).
What’s wrong in that picture is the over-the-top military clip. You might think there’s a simple explanation for that: obviously, you might think, someone replaced a clipless Tuckaway cap with one from a full-length Balance model of the same era.
You thought wrong.
Full length Balance pencils with those military-style clips had narrow bands - occasionally you’ll find one with an uncataloged “jeweler’s band,” but those measure at widest a quarter inch or so - I haven’t seen an over-the-top jewelers’ band pencil in carmine red, and I’ve never seen that clip on a pen or pencil with the extra-wide, wartime Triumph band. Triumph models had regular “radius” clips. Even if this cap was swapped over from something else, I have no idea what that something else would have been.
Speaking of Tuckaways, a minor note to add with respect to page 152, Figure 6-26 in the Field Guide. I only showed four colors, but I am pleased to report that the 1947 Valiant Tuckaway, as with the other Tuckaway models, are found in all five colors.
In this next image, these striated celluloid models include subtle details not shown in the book, because I didn’t know they existed:
At top, this striated Balance ringtop surfaced in an ordinary online auction and it is so easy to miss that I was pleased that it slipped under the radar and cost me so little. Ringtop Balance pencils in marbled plastics are more “normal,” although the double banded ones are quite a bit tougher to find.
This was the first time I had seen a striated celluloid Balance in ringtop configuration. In marbled plastics, it might be dismissed as a marriage of parts, since it is easy on the earlier marbled ones to replace a separate end piece with a ringtop. Once the striated celluloid era began, however, the caps were made from a single, uninterrupted piece.
The pen and pencil set at bottom in that earlier image took a long, winding journey to my doorstep that was more interesting than a few clicks on my cell phone to place an online bid.
I had first seen this set at the Don Scott Antique Show – the frenzied first show of the season – in November, 2022, just as I was finalizing what I was going to include in the book. There’s this one dealer whose tables are covered with shallow box lids full of random little stuff, and I’m always finding a handful or two of odds and ends. I pondered whether I should get it to include in the book.
Alas, as Rob Bader says, the dealer wanted a fair price, and I was looking for an unfair price. Besides, I thought, I’ve been spending a lot of money buying things to photograph for the book, and the only thing that is odd about it is there’s no Sheaffer’s imprints on the clips . . . that isn’t so unusual, right?
Wrong. After Janet and I left the show, I went through the images I had included in Chapter Three - this image, now memorialized on page 71 in the Field Guide, illustrates that when a Sheaffer Balance is found with an unmarked flat ball clip, it was accompanied with a special, wider ribbed “jeweler’s” band, not a simple thin gold filled band.
Dang it . . . that’s nearly all the time, not all the time. David Isaacson recognizes these as a scarce but recognized variant, something that he refers to as a “fusion pen,” since the fountain pen combines the plain trim band and unremarkable Sheaffer number three nib (features usually reserve for Sheaffer’s lower tier offerings) but also has a white dot on the pen cap and an unmarked flat ball clip (features generally reserved for Sheaffer’s higher quality pens).
Dang it again . . . I wish I had at least mentioned that in the book. No worries, I thought, I’ll pick it up at next month’s show. I returned to the Don Scott show in December and tracked down that same dealer, turning his display upside down looking for this set, but it wasn’t there. I asked the guy about it – no matter how many consecutive months I drop money on him, he never remembers who I am – and he casually waved me off. “Oh yeah, I already sold those,” he said.
Double dang it, with a side of grrr. He had answered me too quick; there was no way he had any idea what he had on his own tables, I thought. He just wants me to go away, and go away I did.
Of course that didn’t prevent me from stopping by and browsing his stuff month after month, usually buying a few things each time. At the March 2024 show nearly a year and a half later, I made my usual stop by his booth and . . . there it was. I didn’t even tell the dealer how happy I was to see it . . . I just stood there like a human ATM and robotically handed him the fair price noted on the tag. It was a long-awaited day, memorable mostly for how anticlimactic it was, leading up to a picture that should have been in the Field Guide.
The new set is at top, followed by a “normal” Balance pencil with the narrow band and Sheaffer’s clip as expected, and a normal-ish example with plain clip and jeweler’s band.
Sigh. The dumb things we remember . . . like the fact that this next set was in an online auction that closed as I sat in the lobby at the tire store, waiting for them to charge me a lot of money to reshoe my horse while I was looking for ways to spend even more money on my phone over a tiny styrofoam cup filled with black liquid. I think they called it “coffee,” but I don’t think that word means what they think it means.
Suffice to say I paid dearly on both fronts, and David Isaacson has dibs on the pen in the event I ever choose to split up the set. The wallet this set came in is marked Sheaffer’s on the inside and the outside - it was made by Farrington, a well known maker of wallets, money clips, and other stuff along these lines.
Apparently the wallet is collectible in its own right; I started down a rabbit hole of research into that subject, then quickly came to my senses. This is about a spectacular pen and pencil set, not the container I said as I slapped myself silly. These off-catalog, special cap bands are a special niche for Balance collectors, and the vast majority of the time they occur in the earlier marbled celluloids. It is only in vary rare instances that they are found in striated celluloid, as shown on page 78 of the Field Guide.
The short example in Sheaffer’s “Rose Glow” shown in this image from the book is mine, and the other two pictured were on loan from Gabriel Galecia Goldsmith – I mention that only because Gabriel has expressed such pride in the fact that two of his pencils made the book that it’s worth acknowledging him for his help again.
There’s also a niche within a niche here. Within the world of these special bands, and without any apparent rhyme or reason, sometimes the spaces between these split bands are painted over with black paint, and other times they aren’t. This set combines both.
Yes, the trim is worn . . . but as I like to say, if you don’t like that, go out and try to find a better one.
I have one more addition to report to you now - with more updates later, after I get them photographed. This one also came from an auction, but not of the usual online sort: my friend Pearce Jarvis has started a writing instrument auction house in Canada called North American Pen Auctions, and he’s been attracting really interesting lots, including this nifty little set:
These are the smallest pens and pencils in the Balance series (excluding the golf pencils), referred to as the “Petite Balance” in Sheaffer’s 1930 catalog, its one and only appearance. They are shown in the Field Guide with narrow gold filled bands on page 59, and in bandless configuration on page 61. Here is the image from Figure 3-65, showing the bandless ones:
Actually, this was the fourth version of that image I shot for the Field Guide. The original included only five of these, but as I bought up variations that I didn’t have to photograph I kept adding to the group. Any more examples, and I figured I might need a fold-out centerfold so readers could really take all of it in. After the book went to press I found something else that might have tipped the scales in favor of such a dumb idea . . .
While I figured something like a bandless Petite Balance in jade might be out there – after all, there was no reason to think it wouldn’t be – I had no idea that there might be an “Autograph” version of the Petite Balance with all 14k trim. It seems like overkill for what was marketed as a budget product, more novelty than practical . . . but here we are.
That makes four configurations of the Petite Balance: a bandless ringtop, bandless with clip, narrow band with clip, and Autograph with 14k trim . . .
Wait a tick . . . I think I found a bandless marine green with clip, maybe at that last Chicago show, in my pile of things waiting to be photographed . . . I’ll have to dig a little and reshoot that last image.\
Again.
And so it goes with the Balance - if you think you own or have even seen every obscure variant that might be out there, you are fooling yourself.
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