As Volume 5 was winding down in 2018, I squeezed in a short piece about an interesting pencil marked John Foley, marked “Pat. App. For” and featuring an extending wire bail that could be pulled out for comfort. See “Foley’s Folly” (October 25, 2018: Volume 5, page 284). At some point in the years since, a second example surfaced, and unfortunately I don’t remember when or where it turned up:
This one has a faux “hand hammered” appearance, sort of like but not exactly like the one I showed in that previous article.
The imprint at the top end is as seen earlier.
However, the barrel is otherwise unadorned - recall from that last article that the other one has a charming horse’s head motif on the side:
There was one other detail about that first one that I did not note in my earlier article, and I’m glad I didn’t. I was thinking something stupid . . . although as it turns out, it would not have been stupid at all. There was what appeared to be a name on the side of the barrel, and I didn’t mention it because I thought it was just personalized with the owner’s name. However, this second one has that same name and on closer examination, it is more likely stamped than added by engraving:
What would have been stupid would have been reporting the name as “Madeline,” because that is how I misread it. The trick, I’ve always told myself, is to read words as they actually are, not as I assume they are or should be. I failed there . . . kind of.
“Madeleine” is what it actually says. When I realized that I misread it, and that it may be a model name rather than an owner’s personalization, I chased down its meaning only to learn that a “madeleine,” in the generic sense, is a miniature shell-shaped cake.
That doesn’t make any sense at all.
With those thoughts turning over in the back of my head, I started poking around a bit to give you a thumbnail history of John Foley and his gold pen business. I knew he had started his shop sometime around 1849, but I was having difficulty finding his obituary. That caused me to search newspapers in which “John Foley gold pen” appeared starting with the most recent – often a retrospective piece published more recently will at least narrow my search down to the right year. That is how I found my answer, indirectly:
On August 7, 1911, the Brooklyn Citizen published an obituary for Dr. Thomas L. Fogarty. “On October 12, 1893, he married Madeleine Foley, daughter of John Foley, the gold pen man,” it reads.
Yes, Madeleine is a name and not a confection. Yes, it is possible that Madeleine’s dad made a couple of petite pencils he thought his daughter might like, so he had her name engraved on them. Yes, it is also possible that this was an established model name. I think that is the more likely possibility, but that will be better established as more of these surface in the future.
Maybe those examples will also have an actual patent date rather than “Pat. App. For” - I still have not tracked that one down and it is a needle in a haystack: maybe the patent rights belonged to someone else, shared and pooled among the “Victorian mafia” that decided patent fights were unprofitable and bad for business. by agreement – see “Johnson’s Influence” (August 23, 2017: Volume 5, page 94).
Maybe a patent was never issued; after all, the only thing about the pencil that sets it apart from others along these lines is that pull-out wire extender. I’m imagining a patent examiner looking with skepticism at John while he explains his invention and saying “So . . . you invented a way to make it a little longer?” I don’t see much novelty to that feature, but maybe there is something more interesting that is going on inside.
While I wait for more artifacts to fill in some details regarding John Foley’s Madeleine pencils, I found something I could fill with John Foley’s Madeleine pencil. At some point, Scott Jones parted with this John Foley box:
Scott had thought of me when he ran across it, because a few months earlier I had bought from him this nice John Foley combination pen and pencil:
This black hard rubber combo is built under that same Victorian agreement among New York manufacturers: although it isn’t marked as such, it was made using John Mabie’s patent of October 3, 1854. Maybe (or Mabie) that was after the patent had expired, but likely the holder was manufactured by Mabie Todd & Co. and stamped with Foley’s name for resale:
Foley liked to date his nibs, and while one always has to account for the possibility that the nib has been replaced at some point, the date on this one is 1869.
I didn’t have this combo in hand when Scott offered me his John Foley box, and when I got it home I found that Scott’s combo was a little too long to fit. It does, however, comfortably house a Madeleine:
Normally at this point, that’s the neat half-hour sitcom ending and it’s time to freeze frame with the Leadhead breaking into laughter as the credits roll. After all, we’ve got a second example, a neat new box, and we have answered a question as simply and concisely as one could hope.
And yet there’s a twist . . . rather than a canned laugh track, our camera instead now fades to black with an ominous “to be continued” caption. Once I dipped a toe into the John Foley story, things took a very dark turn . . .
Dum dum daaaaaaaaaa . . .
Part Two of our story, "Citizen Foley," is here.
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