Still Starving

I haven’t searched the online auctions as carefully as I have in the past lately: between my new fascination with dip pen wells and a massive influx of new pencils piled up in the musuem, waiting to be photographed and documented, I haven’t had as much of an appetite to bring a bunch more home.

I said I didn’t have as much of an appetite. I didn’t say I was dead.

It had been a couple weeks since I had logged into eBay, but when I did the infinite well sprang anew. One of the first things I saw was this lot:

The pencils are all unmarked, and other than their distinctive 1920s look there was no way to know who made them . . . unless, of course, you read this blog. 

I knew exactly what they were, because I’ve written about them. These were made by the Western Pencil Company, which was set up to succeed the Dollarpoint Pencil Company, which had failed in early 1925. Western Pencil Company was alive, at least in name only, until its remaining assets were sold at auction in 1938. I last visited the brand in “Diamonds Amongst the Rough” (April 30, 1921: Volume 7, page 73), an article in which I noted how starved I am for more information about these:

The primary reason for that last article was the two-tone example that had recently turned up, in jade with those red marbled end pieces. Some, like the top three shown here, have a deeply ribbed tip with a longer metal section, mimicking the appearance of the earlier metal Dollarpoint and Artpoint lines. Later examples have a much shorter metal tip and a smooth, celluloid nose. The bottom two have no markings, other than an advertiser’s imprint on the red one.

One of the things I wondered at the time was rather there were all-red marbled examples out like the blue one at top, and whether the solid red examples like that bottom one were all advertisers (I have seen a couple others since, and all have had advertising imprints . . . for the same company, in fact: Columbia Varnish Company. I was unable to establish any connection between Columbia and the Western Company, by the way.

All I really wanted out of this new bunch was just one of the red marbled examples, but I wanted it badly enough that I didn’t mind bringing home seventeen others along with it. Heck, I rationalized, there might be other things I can learn from them. My competition, I thought, might be people who just appreciate good-looking flattop pencils from the 1920s, but I figured they wouldn’t want to pay much. 

The more fierce battle would come from people who knew what they are, probably from reading this blog, and I had visions of one of them coming up to my table at the next show to do a “nana nana boo boo” dance. That had me bidding the stupid money, because I had to know whatever there is to know from these. Two other bidders tried in the last few minutes, but it wasn’t enough. One of them, I knew from the masked handle, was someone I know. I’ve since shared the wealth with him. The other I have not yet heard from.

My victory lap when they arrived was on our kitchen table, where I first did a close examination to see if any had imprints or any other markings, no matter how faint, and none of them do - not even the red marbled ones, which look to be on the earlier end of production when all were marked.

Then it was time to see whether the two-tone example residing in my collection was something that could be easily mixed and matched from parts of different pencils. I’ve wondered whether it was factory. After a bit of mixing and matching, I was more confused than before:

The green ends fit on the red marbled, but not the other way around . . . the nose won’t fit over the wider pushrod.  So I tried some other combinations:

The red and jade examples swap nicely, but that red marbled nose won’t fit on the orange one, either. It was time to abandon the kitchen table for the museum, where better lighting and a macro lens might explain what is going on here. I took apart my two-tone example and compared it to a solid jade one, and there was the answer:

At top, the two tone example has a plain pushrod to advance the lead, just like the earlier Dollarpoint and Artpoint pencils. It pushes the lead forward, but it doesn’t pull it back – the lead is held in place by friction. The jade example at bottom is a little later, and it has a wider, hollow rod that holds a piece of lead. It advances and retracts because the tip is bored out enough to allow the lead to pull back in.

That had me checking under the hoods of all of the examples I have found, and I notice a pattern . . . mostly . . .

Those with the longer metal tips all have simple pushrods, and out of these all but these new red marbled ones have Western Pencil Company imprints. Fifth from top is a black and pearl example, which has a shorter tip and a barrel imprint - but no barrel imprint. The bottom three lack any barrel imprints, and all three are equipped with that wider, propel-repel feature. 

That means, and I confirmed it, that I could make two-tone pencils by mixing and matching red marbled with that black and pearl example, since it is equipped with a propel-only action:

With black and pearl examples in hand equipped with either the propel only or propel-repel feature, I was back at the kitchen table checking what was inside all of the other jade and orange examples that had come in. All had the propel-repel feature except for one jade example, but . . .wait a tick . . . there was something stuck in the nose of that one. When I pushed out the obstruction . . . 

The propel-repel feature was created in the simplest way possible: a hollow rod was forced over the solid push rod that had been in use, which holds a piece of lead at the other end. I checked the other examples, and none of these pieces are soldered in place - they all simply pull off . . . say, if you wanted to “make” a two-tone red marbled and jade example like the one I found earlier. Or maybe this:

No, all of this is just irresponsible. I’ll leave my two-tone red marbled and jade example as it came to me, because I think it might be factory: as rare as these Western Pencils there are, junk box provenance suggests it is unlikely that some random prior owner combined parts of two pencils, and it would make sense as the end of Western Pencil approached in 1938 someone may have salvaged remaining parts by pulling the propel-repel rod off at the factory. In the future, documentation may surface to confirm that the two-tone thing was actually a thing.

Otherwise, I’m not going to start mixing things up by swapping parts in the absence of evidence they were ever intended to be combined in such a fashion. They are fun to look at, but for now, all parts have been returned from whence they came.