The Real Deal

Something else occurred to me as I was rereading the two previous articles I discussed yesterday (“Captain Obvious” on January 14, 2015: Volume 4, page 109 and “A Death Most Untimely” on July 23, 2021: Volume 7, page 280). These two articles, posted six years apart, reveal something interesting.

Yesterday I discussed the connection between the New Diamond Point Pen Company and the Eclipse Pen Company. The Court case discussed in “A Death Most Untimely” discussed Marx Finstone’s desire to consolidate Eclipse with his competitors: not just with Diamond Point, but also with two other New York pen companies, Salz Brothers and J. Harris & Co. Only Diamond Point was at issue in the litigation, so there’s no information regarding whether his other merger attempts were successful. 

At the end of “Captain Obvious,” I shared a stationer’s advertisement published in the Wilkes-Barre (Pennsylvania) Record on April 18, 1925:

At the time, I mused whether Diamond Point was also responsible for the Ambassador and “Banker’s Special” brands in addition to the Collegian, since this advertisement says all three are “Guaranteed by manufacturer,” not “manufacturers.”

That hypothesis is thin, and I knew that at the time; however, since I had forgotten that detail by the time I wrote about the Diamond Point/Eclipse litigation, I do think it bears a closer look now. “Ambassador” is well-documented as a J. Harris & Co. brand, so Marx Finstone’s interest in J. Harris may well have been for the same reasons as he was pursuing Diamond Point.

As for the “Banker’s Special,” I’m not so sure. In “The Banker and the Specialty King” (July 25, 2021: Volume 7, page 285), I laid out all of the sordid details surrounding James Kelley, the flamboyant self-promoter. Kelley engaged in a cross-country cat-and-mouse game with the newly formed Federal Trade Commission, which hounded Kelley for his flagrant violations of unfair and deceptive practices. Most notably, the FTC targeted Kelley’s trading on the good name of the L.E. Waterman Company by adopting the name “Waterson” in connection with pens and pencils.

Perhaps the FTC was being overly aggressive with Kelley to teach him a lesson, since Kelley was flagrantly thumbing his nose at the new agency. After all, as I noted in that article, any consumer who bought one of Kelley’s low-grade Waterson pens thinking it was a Waterman was a fool who should be parted with his money.

I didn’t find any evidence that James Kelley was responsible for any pen or pencil formally called the “Bankers’ Special.” He did, however, appropriate the “Banker” name from a Banker’s Pen Company that failed by 1922 and traded under the names “Banker,” “New Banker,” and “Kelley Banker.” He referred to his Banker pens and pencils with pointy or “gothic” top ends as the “Keystone Banker” in advertising.

As for that Keystone name . . . we’ll get to that one tomorrow. 

For our purposes today, the conclusion at which I had arrived in my earlier article was that the “Banker” and “New Banker” pencils with which we are familiar were products of James Kelley’s ventures. Kelley had appropriated the name from the original Bankers’ Pen Company, which had shuttered sometime in late 1921 or early 1922, likely a casualty of the brief but sharp 1921 economic slowdown. 

It is of course possible that there was another huckster who had also appropriated the “Banker’s Special” name – no honor among thieves and all. Had that been the case, I would have expected to find something marked “Banker’s Special” or some reference to the name other than in this lone stationer’s advertisement. Eliminating that possibility would be nice, but I’m inclined to “bank” on what is probable rather than what is possible. I don’t believe that in 1925, Kelley’s Banker pens and pencils were in any way connected with whoever was manufactured and warranted the Collegian or the Ambassador brands.

Neither did I believe that the original Bankers’ Pen Company made any pencils at all, because I didn’t know things like this existed at the time:

This hard rubber pencil turned up in an online auction, imprinted “Bankers Pen Co., Inc. / New York Pat.”:

Kelley’s Banker and New Banker writing instruments came in pretty colors, but they were not technically very sophisticated - none of their features were anything that would have been the subject of a patent. Also, Kelley’s Banker products are not known to exist in hard rubber. I am convinced this is the “real” Banker, made prior to the original Banker’s Pen Company’s failure sometime in 1921 or 1922.

What of this “patent” nonsense suggested by the imprint? There’s two suspects, one at either end of the pencil. At the nose, it has a “catch and release” leadholder configuration – unscrewing the nose a bit releases the lead, while tightening causes it to clamp down on the lead to secure it.

That was a patented innovation, but it was another New York manufacturer, not Banker’s, which laid claim to it:

Egon L.  Schmitz applied for patent number 960,588 on December 21, 1908, and when it was issued on June 7, 1910, it was assigned to the Eberhard Faber Pencil Company. I think this is most likely the patent referred to on this Bankers’ pencil – the time and the location fit what we know about the company well.

At the other end of the pencil, there’s another interesting feature that may have been patented somewhere along the line:

Those little prongs are pretty effective as a pencil sharpener. I checked that outstanding reference,  American Writing Instrument Patents Volume 2: 1911-1945, and nothing struck me as applying to this doohickey. However, since it is an attachment rather than a writing instrument itself, it might have been filed away in some obscure patent category I wouldn’t have thought to search. 

That’s possible, but as I mentioned earlier, I’d rather bank on what is probable rather than what is possible. My money is on old Egon until something like this turns up with an actual patent date or number.