Nearly a Waste of Time

You can nearly smell my frustration in the following image, which were taken in late 2023:

These are both marked “Collegian,” and I found the pencil at the Ohio show that year. It is marked only on the clip:

At that same show I stumbled across the pen, which has a stylized letter C on the clip. I felt the occasion called for bringing the pen home because it has a nice imprint, one that I just knew I had seen somewhere before . . . 

I could swear that I had a pencil that had the same imprint on the barrel somewhere, but search as I might in all the usual places, it was nowhere to be found. That, my friends, is more terrifying to me than you might suspect. By necessity, the museum is very tightly and meticulously organized; if something is put in the wrong place, who knows when I’ll see it again.

Throw that on top of my CDO tendencies (that’s OCD with the letters in the right order, for those who don’t know) and a simple case of something being misplaced blossoms quickly into something approaching a panic attack. When I say “search as I might,” I am talking about a couple of hours checking every place it should be, then every place it shouldn’t be . . . then doing it again. I even considered tipping a couple scotches in the hopes that Tipsy Jon might remember something that sober, neurotic Jon could not.

I was pretty sure the Collegian I thought I had was also in jade, and besides yearning to compare the two examples, I really wanted to know what the cap was supposed to look like. That’s also a little bit CDO, but there is a legitimate archival purpose: I’d rather have an example missing a cap than to replace it with something that fits but isn’t “correct.” 

The angst passed after I belted out a few cries of “serenity now!” (a la Costanza), and daily life resumed. I resigned myself that my other Collegian was lost for the foreseeable future, so I set about my normal process of comparing what I had to other things in the collection to figure out who made the Collegian. What I noticed were striking similarities to pencils made by Eclipse. The clip was not Eclipse’s distinctive 1923 patent clip: 

But that nose, with that little rib at the front end, was a dead ringer for other items in the Eclipse wing at the museum, and the clips used on Eclipse’s “Marxton” subbrand (named for Marx Finstone, Eclipse’s founder) is a dead ringer:

And with those images, I put down my camera and forgot about the whole affair . . . until the other day.

My “deal” at home is that my pencils remain confined to a single room, and I’ve mostly stayed within that Maginot Line with just a few minor encroachments. My pencil lead counter displays creeped into an adjoining room (because, after all, they aren’t technically pencils), and over the years I’ve stored some random ink bottles, desk sets and other miscellany on a bookshelf just outside the door.

Over the last couple months, I’ve started picking up dipless desk pen sets, without giving much thought to where I was going to put them. With no space in the museum, I decided to clear off that bookcase and make a nice display area (because, after all, dipless desk sets aren’t technically pencils, either). 

On one of the lower shelves, lower than I normally look and out of sight of those who patrol the Maginot Line, I had discretely tucked away a few pen and pencil sets that were nice, but which no longer fit in the area I kept other such sets. 

It was like Christmas morning, finding all of these sets I haven’t seen for a while, all of which have been pictured here over the years. There was that Parker 51 demonstrator set I had less aggressively been searching for, a few nice Eclipse sets, and this . . . 

If you heard a loud sigh of relief emanating from Ohio, that was two years of pent-up relief. There was the pencil I remembered, with the imprint I had remembered, and accompanied by a pen and warranty card. Better still, it answered my question:

The cap is a perfect fit for the one that had gone missing, and it looks just like what you would find on a comparable Eclipse pencil. Question one: solved. Question two now reared its head as I examined that warranty card:

The Collegian Pen Company was located at 333-339 Hudson Street in New York. Perhaps what I don’t know might actually be knowable, I thought: if I can track down that address, I should be able to remove any doubt who was behind the “Collegian” brand.

I did my usual search of period newspapers and unfortunately, nothing turned up other than the occasional stationer’s references that Collegian pens and pencils were for sale. Between 1925 and 1929, some advertisements included rudimentary drawings of flattop pens like those I've shown, and I did find one 1932 advertisement showing a streamlined pen that should have been close enough to a Sheaffer Balance to raise Walter Sheaffer’s ire. Nothing, however, provided any insights as to who produced or made the Collegian.

It was time for the Hail Mary: a good ol’ fashioned Google search combining “Collegian” with “333-339 Hudson Street” ought to draw out the answer, I thought.

It did.

Someone definitively answered that question.

It was me.

In my defense, it was more than ten years ago and there have been more than 1,500 articles posted here at the blog, but all that pointless muddling around had another “serenity now!” welling up inside me.

In “Captain Obvious” (January 14, 2015: Volume 4, page 109), I recounted how Marc Shiman, a student of New York pen companies and all-around good egg, had immediately recognized that address as being shared with the New Diamond Point Pen Company. In the article, I found my own independent verification of that detail and even shared this image of a nearly identical Diamond Point set:

If I was Captain Obvious ten years ago, now I am the Flat-Foreheaded Captain Obvious . . . mostly.

But there’s more, because my muddling around wasn’t so pointless after all. Remember how I started this article by noting the similarities between my Collegian and Eclipse products? That got me thinking . . . was there any connection between Diamond Point and Eclipse?

There was. And this time, I remembered what that connection was. I also remembered that I had written about it.

“A Death Most Untimely” (July 23, 2021: Volume 7, page 280) tells the story of Marx Finstone’s harebrained scheme to merge Diamond Point with Eclipse, which he put into motion shortly before Finstone’s untimely death in 1927.

It is easy to characterize Finstone’s plan as mere ruthless capitalism, gobbling up a competitor in the Wild West that was business in the 1920s. However, my unwitting comparison of the Collegian to Eclipse products suggests a new dimension to the scuffle that ensued. If Diamond Point and Eclipse were both sourcing identical components from some third-party supplier, maybe Marx wasn’t simply trying to eliminate a competitor for its market share . . . perhaps he was eliminating another customer for the same parts Eclipse was using – to give himself more leverage in negotiating more favorable pricing from his supplier.   

Of course, that contains an element of conjecture, since Finstone wasn’t alive to testify in the court case that provided what we know about the dispute. However, that explanation paints Finstone as more of a shrewd businessman than a megalomaniac, and I think that explanation makes more sense.