The Riedell Family Reunion

The Riedell Repeating Pencils are what I refer to as one of those “cult” brands. You either like them for their weirdness, their unusual appearance, and their history, or you don’t like them because of their weirdness, their unusual appearance, and . . . well, if you don’t like history, you are reading the wrong blog.

This was the image I had taken of the full length Riedells with clips in my collection back in back in October, 2021.

I thought I’d be waiting for some time to circle back around to the Riedell, since all that new example added was another pretty color. I buy them whenever I find them hoping to glean some new information from these, but that new addition had the same imprint they all have: “Riedell Corp. N.Y. U.S.A. Pat. Pend’g.”

The patent which was pending was that of Hugo Hasselquist, best known as the co-inventor of the military clip used on metal and hard rubber Eversharp pencils. He was enticed away from Wahl by Charles Keeran to briefly join Autopoint, then filed a patent application for what would become the Riedell on June 5, 1922. The patent examiners apparently didn’t know what to make of it, because it took seven years for the patent to finally issue as number 1,720,417 on July 9, 1929:

While these don’t look too unconventional on the outside, with the exception of those neat faceted caps, on the inside they look like something a character in Whoville might wield in a Dr. Seuss book:

These images are from the articles I wrote about the Riedell in 2014; unfortunately, those articles were destroyed in the great Googlef*** of 2018, in which images were wiped from some 700 articles here. The articles do live on in the print version, starting with “An Entirely New Take On the Riedell” (October 9, 2014: Volume 3, page 41).

That first article covered the history of the brand as well as I knew it, but it proved only to be the setup for “The Email From March,” which ran the following day (October 10, 2014: Volume 3, page 43). Bob Leslie, the grandson of Charles Martin Riedell, the New Jersey CPA for whom the pencil was named, had stumbled across my blog. After a few emails back and forth, he shared with me some pictures that his sister Lynn Riedell had of some Riedell stuff that had been kept in the family for all these years:

Including a picture of a tube of Riedell pencil leads with a new bit of information – the “thread that unknits the whole sweater,” I called it. The leads provided the company’s address in New York as well as a link to Demley, Inc., a New York specialties dealer and cigarette lighter manufacturer.

(Editor’s note: mea culpa . . . I don’t know where I got the idea that Lynn was Bob’s brother rather than his sister, and I mistakenly referred to Lynn as a “he.” If you have the book, break out the whiteout and fix that one for me.)

I revisited the Riedell in “Stars of the Show” (May 25, 2020: Volume 6, page 128), mostly to introduce a few new varieties to the collection, partly to republish some images that were destroyed from those earlier articles, and also to discuss Hasselquist’s design patent number 66,797, which he applied for around the time his utility patents were issued but which he received much more quickly, on March 17, 1925.

The last time I talked about these pencils, I included a Riedell in “The King” (August 9, 2021: Volume 7, page 325), an article which delved into the factors that make these old pencils desirable to collectors and in which I crowned what I consider the King of all mechanical pencils. The Riedell didn’t win, but I included it in a discussion of how design ingenuity enhances desirability for collectors.

And with that, things went quiet for a few years . . . until everything burst open again at once, starting with a couple that turned up at the 2025 Chicago show this May. A couple more surfaced in Bob Speerbrecher’s online auctions in late May (many of you know him as “Speerbob”). After I scooped up all the ones Speerbob offered, he brought a few more with him to the Raleigh Show in June. 

The universe was talking to me.

It was the first time I’d seen a full-sized Riedell in jade, and here’s three of them popping up within a month. The price tags add a bit of context, too:

As extraordinary as it was for six of these rare birds to turn up within a month, a couple new variations aren’t what has me circling back around. By chance, after the Raleigh show I received another email from Bob Leslie (Riedell’s grandson). He and his wife would be passing through Ohio from Virginia on the way to a train show in Michigan, and he wondered . . . could he stop by and see the collection? 

Of course, I said, and on July 11 the Leslies stopped by for an evening. I expected they would just want to see the Riedells, but Bob is a man after my own heart: he wanted to see everything, and those who have toured the museum know that is quite a feat to see everything in a day or a week, maybe a month to do it properly.

Bob brought some vintage pencils that he wanted to ask about - I fitted each of them with a new piece of lead so he could write with them, and he was delighted to learn that one of them had a stanhope viewer with a picture of the Statue of Liberty.

Bob didn’t come empty handed: he brought something he knew that I would appreciate, which would trigger me to write this article:

There is a family photo of our man Charles Martin Riedell, finally putting a face on the man behind these wonderful pencils. At the end of our visit I also had the chance to have a photo with the man behind the photo of the man: