Occam's Junk Box

 I still credit Roger Wooten with adding “Occam’s Razor” to my vocabulary – it sounds so much more smart than saying “the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.”

I made an offhand remark the other day that I was convinced the cap on the pencil at the top of this next image is original, even though you can see the Rex Manufacturing Company’s “Four Horsemen” patents peeking around from the left side of this image and the pencil itself has none of those patented features:

The Rex Manufacturing Company is well known to have supplied the John Holland Pen Company with pencils during the early to mid-1920s. Here are a few examples:

These examples all originated from one source: Paul Erano and David Isaacson had partnered on a large collection that included a great many John Holland items, and while the collector’s identity was a secret for some time, it has since been confirmed to have belonged to the late Bob Johnson, the organizer of the DC Supershow. Paul wound up with boxes upon boxes of stuff, and over the course of several shows I bought up a large number of John Holland items. 

Bob’s collection had been unceremoniously boxed up in no apparent order and housed for many years in an attic over his garage, without any climate control. Exposure to the South Carolina heat and humidity was not kind to his collection. 

Still, a sticker is a sticker, and the information is there:

Most of these pencils have all four of the Rex patent dates on the caps – the “Four Horsemen” patents as I’ve called them over the years (for the full rundown, see Volume 2, page 103).

(Incidentally, I still haven’t found the large size pencils in Holland’s robin-egg blue - the only one I’ve seen was Jack Leone’s, which I photographed several years ago.)

Occam’s first slice neatly cuts this down to the bone, doesn’t it? We have well-documented Rex patent pencils made for John Holland with the same caps found on our mystery example; ergo, the simplest explanation is that a Holland cap from one of these just happened to find its way onto something else.

Sort of. 

Remember that Occam’s Razor only gives deference to the simplest explanation; it doesn’t specify what makes one explanation more or less simple than another. There is another, equally simple explanation rooted in a corollary I’ve made up to the rule: “junk box provenance” can at times provide the most simple explanation. 

“Junk box provenance” is a term I have used over the years to describe cases when the circumstances, manner, and condition in which items are found can tell us something about the items themselves. As an example, consider whether it is reasonable to conclude that the price stickers on those Rex-made John Holland pencils are original and correct. The answer is that it is far less likely that someone would take the time to carefully add price stickers to them, only to throw them into a box and stuff them up in a hot, humid attic.

In the case of Bob Johnson’s collection, we have junk crates rather than just a box, and Bob was collecting back in the 1970s when he still lived in the Cincinnati area – right where John Holland was located. Tales have been told about when the John Holland factory was cleared out and thousands of new old stock items were dispersed.

Here is a large cache of apparently new old stock John Holland items, which wound up in the attic of a collector who was very active in the Cincinnati area around the time. Occam agrees with me – these must be part of what was cleared out of the Holland factory when it closed for good, and these are the price bands that were on them when they came into Bob Johnson’s possession.

All of this leads up to where I’m going with this article. After a few shows of pawing through Bob Johnson’s stuff, Paul Erano told me that he would be bringing the last of the pencil stuff with him to the 2023 Ohio Show for me to “look at” (that is a euphemism meaning “I will at that time tell you how many dollars you will give me and I know that you will do so”).

Negotiations were as brief as usual, and I brought back a quart-sized Ziploc bag full of goodies back to my table. I didn’t have time to go through them until after the show, when I found a few last, great John Holland items. There was one of the later Holland pencils with the large white Holland tulip above the clip, made just around the time the wheels were coming off the company, while John Holland was still doing some nice things:

There were also a number of these later Hollands from the late 1930s. Yes, this was after the quality had sharply declined, but they are still desirable for an Ohio collector such as myself.

Besides, the wider band and streamlined top are a little unusual, and that double ender? I’ve never seen one. There were also a total of twelve similar pencils with no names on the clips – I thought the number of them was significant and suggests a box or store display containing an even dozen had been dumped into the box before going into storage:

Only one of the twelve was marked at all - just a simple John Holland Co. imprint on the barrel:

You get the point: these things are hard to find, and they are not anything a serious collector would be likely to take the time to curate, collect, and organize . . . only to stuff them in a box and condemn them to decades in an attic. At some point Bob Johnson came into a large number of John Holland new old stock, likely from the factory when it was cleaned out.

Now that the stage is set, here are the last two John Holland items that were included in that last lot:

In addition to the thicker pencil this article started with, there is a thinner example which is also missing its nose. It has the familiar John Holland logo stamped on the cap:

This is a Rex patent pencil - the earliest incarnation, as originally patented by George McNary on February 19, 1924. Here it is shown alongside an identical pencil marked “Franklin,” another Rex brand:

Occam’s junk box is making some sense here: two unusual John Holland items, both missing their noses, in a box which also included a bunch of new old stock John Holland stuff. Sure, it’s possible this is all a coincidence, and Bob or someone else put a Rex cap on the wrong pencil at some point over the last hundred years ago. However, I think what is just as likely is that a pile of Holland stuff was sitting at the old shop as it was being cleaned out and these, for whatever reason, were among the odds and ends hauled off.

If this is a legitimate piece, it might tell us a little more about what happened to the Rex Manufacturing Company. We know that in 1929 Rex was engaged in litigation with the Parker Pen Company over Parker’s patent for the washer clip. We know that after 1929, Rex’s customers were sourcing pencils from other manufacturers – so Diamond Medal pencils at Sears were coming from Parker and Gold Bond pencils over at Montgomery Ward were made by Wahl and Waterman.

One possibility is that Rex lost the dispute and the company was ruined, like what happened to the Kraker Pen Company after Sheaffer won its infringement case over Sheaffer’s lever-filled pens. Another possibility is that Rex limped along for a time after the case was over, surviving by making components or complete pencils which did not violate Parker’s patent.

It would make perfect sense, if Rex was keeping a low profile during its heyday and quietly supplying huge mail order operations with their pencils, Rex would do its best to stay invisible after 1929. What would also make sense is for Rex to use up any leftover parts any way they could, even if those parts had Rex’s disgraced patents already stamped on them. 

Did Rex make pencils with tops like these, so often found unmarked?

At this point, Occam would agree after reviewing all of this: that explanation is as simple as the alternative, so it is no more or less likely than not.