A New Flavor

A few days ago, I mentioned that Paul Erano had sold me that last bag of John Holland pencils and parts. Now I’ll tell you why I was so eager to buy it. At the Raleigh Show a few months earlier, I bought a few other John Holland items from Paul, including this one:

That barrel looks like marbled celluloid at first, but I think it’s hard rubber that has been painted or stained to look that way - note at the nose end, the marbling stops where the material is stepped down:

As with many of the other items that came from Bob Johnson’s collection, this one has a nice price sticker indicating the original price was $3.50.

The barrel is stamped “John Holland” right above the clip, which has Holland’s tulip logo impressed into it:

Paul and I examined it together, and we agreed this one is a little off of the beaten path for a John Holland. I didn’t want to pay much for just part of a pencil, but Paul reassured me: he had a whole box filled with John Holland parts, and he would bring them to me in DC so I could finish putting this one together.

He forgot to bring them along to DC, but at the Ohio Show in November all those parts went from box to bag to Jon. There were a lot of great stuff in there . . . unfortunately, the pieces I needed to finish putting this one together were not among them. That left me trolling through my parts bins at home trying to find what I needed to complete it.  

I started with my stash of Rex Manufacturing Company parts, thinking perhaps it might be one of these with a different style cap and clip:

Nope, those parts don’t work at all. Rex patent pencils have noses that screw onto the end of a threaded barrel rather than slip over the end of an unthreaded one. I settled for taking the preceding pictures and filing it away. The answer will come to me at some point, I hoped.

It did – only because I finally got around to rearranging things at the museum. The addition of two printers’ cabinets gave me the chance to finally get all of my John Holland stuff spread out but in one place . . . it had previously been scattered – er . . . carefully grouped – in three areas, with the Victorian stuff in one place, the Rex patent pencils with the other Rex stuff, and the “everything else” part crowded onto the wall o’ pencils. As things went into the drawer, I noticed that I did have an intact John Holland pencil along these lines.

There’s that same cap and clip, and I know the pencil I got from Paul had a two-stage smooth tip – assuming, of course, that all John Holland pencils like this looked the same, but I think that’s a fair assumption. I started pulling things off the shelves in other areas of the museum, looking for things to compare.

Here’s the John Holland next to a maroon Grieshaber pencil at center, and a LeBoeuf “Unbreakable” parts pencil I picked up for peanuts at the Don Scott show because it is . . . well, it’s broken. Note that both of these have a very similar two-stage tip, and there is a reason for that: both the Grieshaber and the LeBoeuf were built around mechanisms supplied by Cross and used on the Cross Alwrite line of oversized pencils.

I was really hoping that LeBoeuf would be able to breathe its last making my John Holland whole, but when I attempted to transplant the nose I ran into a problem.

The tip unscrewed easily and fits like a glove on the threaded end of the John Holland, but I wasn’t able to wrestle the gold filled section from the LeBoeuf barrel. I was able to get it budge just a little, enough to see that the diameter of the stepped down section on the barrel is narrower than my John Holland. Even should I resort to barbaric means of parts removal, it wouldn’t fit my Holland.

I really didn’t want to scavenge a perfectly good Grieshaber, but I wondered if that might be the same nose . . . 

Nope.  Grieshaber sections screw into the barrel. No worries for now; most of my John Holland will reside comfortably in the museum, awaiting the day that the front half of the right pencil comes along . . . 

. . . or Paul finds another bag of parts.