I strive to make clear the difference between what I know and what I have deduced from what I know. In “The Banker and the Specialty King” I offered proof that James Kelley, the slick self-described “Specialty King,” marketed pens and pencils under the names “Banker,” “New Banker,” and “Keystone Banker.”
I never said that James Kelley was the only one to use these trade names. To the contrary, with a character like James Kelley it is more likely than not that others used the same or similar names, given Kelley’s penchance for “lifting” names when nobody was looking. After all, any claims Kelley himself had to use the name were so shaky that anyone horning in on that territory would have just as much right to do so.
The follow up articles to “The Banker and the Specialty King” were published the following two days in “All the King’s Horsemen, Part One” (July 26, 2021: Volume 7, page 290) and Part Two (July 27, 2021: Volume 7, page 293). Those two articles dragged other lower-quality brands into James Kelley’s orbit, including “Master” (another name lifted from the original Banker Pen Company, which marketed a “Master Pen”), Nassau, Packard, and Keystone. There may be others – in fact, given James Kelley’s antics, there probably were.
My attribution of the “Keystone” name to James Kelley was only in relation to pencils along these lines:
Then there are these, which are marked “Banker” but which were referred to in Kelley’s advertising as the “gothic” or “Keystone Banker.”
No, I did not say that James Kelley was the only person on this big blue marble to call his pens and pencils the “Keystone.” In fact, I noted one puzzling detail in that previous article: the word “Keystone” was registered as a trademark with respect to pens and pencils, but not by James Kelley:
The Blaisdell Pencil Company, by its president A.C. Berolzheimer, had applied for registration of the Keystone mark on October 27, 1921, and it was granted registration as number 153,408 on March 21, 1922. In the registration, Berolzheimer claimed the mark was first used in commerce around January 1, 1911.
Both the mark’s first use and its trademark registration occurred before James Kelley entered the picture in 1925 or so, so I don’t believe any of Kelley’s activities hastened Blaisdell’s application to register the mark. The ten-year delay in filing the application was more likely the result of the evolving and complicated relationship between Blaisdell and the Eagle Pencil Company, the latter of which was founded and run by the Berolzheimer family.
Blaisdell and Eagle had spatted back and forth over patent infringement claims beginning in the 1890s; in the early teens, Blaisdell was still a separate entity, but as the Keystone trademark shows, the Berolzheimer family controlled Blaisdell by 1921. Blaisdell formally became a subsidiary of the Eagle Pencil Company in the 1930s.
All of this means that by the time James Kelley started selling “Keystone” pens and pencils in the mid-1920s, the Keystone name was already reserved essentially to the Eagle Pencil Company. Did Eagle make James Kelley’s Keystone-marked products? I don’t think so; if anything, they look more like something David Kahn, Inc. might have made (Kahn is better known for its flagship brand, Wearever).
But there’s another bit of evidence on this point that recently surfaced . . . unintentionally.
This fountain pen turned up at one of the shows I attended this year; it is marked “Worth” on the clip:
When I say it provides an “unintentional” bit of evidence, that’s because I bought it for reasons having nothing to do with today’s subject. I bought it because I suspected that it proved the Eagle Pencil Company might have supplied Worth with at least some of its pens, due to its uncanny similarity to other Eagle metal fountain pens:
More on that tomorrow. Suffice to say that when I bought it, it was so cheap that I did not even bother to see if it had a nib in it. But when I did . . .
While it clearly isn’t “gold filled” to the brim, the Keystone part hit me squarely between the eyes. Blaisdell’s trademark registration for the Keystone name had established that Eagle had at least some rights by representation to the name, but I was unsure whether that was found only on wood pencils or something else – say fountain pens – that might be a bit outside of my normal area of expertise.
Am I backtracking on my earlier attribution of the use of “Keystone” to James Kelley? No – in fact, James Kelley was exactly the sort of slippery character who had few reservations about appropriating someone else’s name, even without the legal right to do so. I think both Blaisdell (Eagle) and James Kelley were both using the mark, one with and one without the legal authority to do so.
My friend Stan Klemenowicz and I discussed my earlier Keystone article, and he questioned whether an example in his collection, which strongly resembles something branded for Morrison, might suggest that the Keystone was a Morrison brand rather than a James Kelley production. He posted an article at his blog, “stan’s pens” titled “Kahnstone, Kelleystone, or Keystone?” (posted here) to address other examples, including a few examples that appear to have been made in France.
I don’t disagree that at least some of the examples Stan shared in his article were likely not James Kelley productions – or Eagle’s either, for that matter. One of the most fascinating parts about collecting these things is the connections they establish between manufacturers, producers, and suppliers, and surprising connections turn up all the time. Consider this one:
Stan pointed the online auction for this example after he published his article, and once I saw it I felt the need to buy it. The missing pen might have been useful in providing a more definitive analysis of who was responsible for this one, but the paper on both the pencil and the matching warranty sheet was all I needed for the point I’m making today:
The makers of this “Famous Keystone” had some serious cajones reminding buyers to “Beware of Imitations,” since this looks like nothing made by either Blaisdell or Eagle, the rightful owners of the name. The top, though, is a familiar sight:
When these turn up, they are typically unmarked – as is this one, other than the fortuitous price band. I’ve only found a few examples marked with a producer’s name:
The two complete examples are marked “E-Z Rite,” one on the cap and the other on the clip:
The third, however, provides another possible, surprising connection:
John Holland? Now wait a minute, my sharp-eyed peanut gallery might say . . . that might be a cap from a Rex Manufacturing Company pencil (you can just make out the “four horsemen” patent dates to the right of the name). Rex is well-known to have supplied pencils to John Holland, so isn’t that just a convenient replacement? Bear with me on that . . . there is sufficient “junk box provenance” with this example to suggest that this cap accompanied this pencil from whomever might have manufactured it and yes, I think that “whomever” might have been Rex.
More on that later, because this web is already sufficiently tangled. The question of the day is this: who made the Keystone? The answer is simple: anybody who thought they could get away with it without being prosecuted by Blaisdell, Eagle, or the newly-minted Federal Trade Commission.
That last sentence, combining the words “Eagle” and “prosecuted,” leads nicely into what I was going to tell you about the Worth Featherweight Pen Company. That story tomorrow.
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