Welcome Distraction

There I was, minding my own business in the spring of 2024 . . . writing my Eversharp book with blinders firmly clamped on my head, trying as hard as I might to avoid distractions. Despite my best efforts to stay focused, on May 14, 2024, Amber Skeeter distracted me with a question in David Nishimura’s Antique Writing Instruments and Accessories group on Facebook. 

Amber wanted to know about this pencil topper made by the Eagle Pencil Company, and she claimed “we have a huge collection of what was a salesman’s kit.”

I’ve been down this road countless times before. People will claim they have a “huge collection” when the entire affair fits comfortably in an old coffee can. They say they want more information about what they have, but before long the conversation will make it clear that what they want is a free appraisal. Few things are worse than being invited to make an offer, then being ghosted and learning that whatever number I had thrown out there is now the opening bid in an online auction.

Amber’s post, however, was different. She had already tracked down an obscure design patent for the teddy bear-shaped pencil topper – that demonstrates a level of genuine interest in the subject beyond its market value. The present tense “we have a huge collection” suggests that the collection has not yet been broken up. It was worth a follow up comment – not to buy, but to collaborate. If I can’t keep this collection intact, I said, at least let me document it as it came to you before it is scattered to the four winds and whatever history it provides can be lost.

That, fortunately, is exactly what Amber was looking for. Over the course of numerous emails, she sent pictures of everything as it had come to her and her husband. They had owned a pawn shop near Shelbyville, Tennessee, and Amber reported that several years earlier an elderly couple who had some prior connection with the Eagle Pencil Company had brought all of this stuff in to sell. The pawn shop had closed, and they had decided to move some things on.

I’ve written about the two kinds of joy people get from buying and selling things in my weird little world. On the one hand, there’s the thrill of making a bit of money from knowing something others don’t. While there’s no shame in making a profit, in the end all of the happy dollars coming your way look exactly the same; Ben Franklin’s grin on a hundred dollar bill is unchanged, regardless of how or why the piece of paper on which it is printed came into your possession. 

Then there’s another, deeper joy that comes from playing a part in preserving something that would otherwise be lost. It is an exceptional pawn broker who comes into a pile of stuff, recognizes its historical value as a whole, and looks for a way to keep it together for future generations rather than maximizing short-term happy dollars by parting things out in online auctions.

As a few of my friends piled on in the comments to agree that whatever Amber had should stay together, Amber was sharing pictures of what she had with me by email. She said their goal was to get this group into the “right hands,” my first offer was accepted, and the only question was how we would exchange cash for goods.

Since Amber and her husband enjoy a good road trip as much as Janet and I do, we agreed that Louisville, Kentucky was a good place to meet. Janet and I arrived early enough on Saturday to visit Whiskey Row, a neat bar district just a couple blocks from the hotel:

The next morning, we met Amber and her husband for breakfast at a nearby restaurant, after we did our business out of the back of her van in the parking lot. Everything was neatly packed in a couple plastic totes, and when we got home I was able to do a brief inventory – brief, I say, because it was only a week or so before the Raleigh Pen Show. Terry Mawhorter had let me know that one of the vendors was unable to attend, so I was able to get an extra table to put the “show” in pen show. I wasn’t parting with anything, but I was better able to spread things out, see what all was there, and do a bit of show and tell:

The odds and ends – some of which are truly odd – are at left, and at the back there’s several original Eagle catalogs, none of which have previously been published. The maroon folders are stocked with sales samples of dip pens, compasses, and other Eagle products. Most exciting of all, however, is that short plastic tote in the upper right corner. While everything else might pass for a collection some random Eagle enthusiast might have assembled themselves, the contents of this tote are the compelling evidence that this is an official archive from the Eagle Pencil Company:

There are 101 envelopes, each containing Eagle products and meticulously numbered and dated on the outside. It is by no means a complete archive, with numbers ranging from 27 through 3,198, but the contents are consistent with the dates and descriptions on the outside of each envelope – numbered, of course, with Eagle’s famous purple copying leads and nearly all of which are dated between 1921 and 1929.

After a tentative inventory, I moved these envelopes into the printer’s cabinet containing all of my other Eagle stuff, and I will eventually properly document everything that is here, with an eye towards a monograph about the Eagle Pencil Company.

Documenting all of these envelopes and what they contain will have to wait for those long Ohio winter days, I tell myself . . . 

all but one.

Out of everything that came in this bunch, this was the only item that was not an Eagle product. The “Leadograph” was a product of the Inkograph Company, which was better known for its stylographic pens. Leadograph pencils were made over several years, evolving from commanding hard rubber pencils with a unique look to more conventional celluloid pencils through the 1930s:

I was thrilled to add the one with the yellow top to my collection a few years ago . . . but that one pales in comparison to this example, in red hard rubber with a bright green top:

While the colors are off the charts, the imprint is the same as what is found on all of these:

Now this is where things get really interesting.

For years, I have quietly suspected that these hard rubber pencils were made by the Eagle Pencil Company. That belief came from observing how similar the materials on these hard rubber Leadograph pencils are to Eagle Pointers:

Maybe I never said it out loud – after all, I say a lot of things – but if I didn’t, it was because that connection is very, very thin. Neither Eagle nor Inkograph made their own hard rubber, so anybody could have used commonly sourced materials; the only thing I could prove the two had in common was the combination of wild mottling in the hard rubber and the use of contrasting caps. That alone isn’t enough to support attribution of the Leadograph to Eagle.

Now that a Leadograph in hard rubber surfaced in what is doubtless part of Eagle’s official archive, the case is much stronger for that connection . . . particularly since this is the only non-Eagle item in the entire bunch. Still, that wasn’t the clincher. That arrived just a few weeks ago in the mail, for no reason other than that I made a mistake.

Another example of a hard rubber Leadograph turned up in an online auction. I don’t need a second one, I told myself, but I swiftly talked myself out of such nonsense. They don’t come up that often, I told myself. Besides, maybe this new example will teach me something I don’t already know. 

It did teach me something, but not how I expected.

What won my argument with myself was that this one looked longer than the one I already had so . . . not exactly identical. I threw in a small bid that ended up carrying the day, and I looked forward to seeing how nice the long and short examples would look beside one another. I snapped this picture of the two of them together . . . 

Pretty nice, but that lead is sticking out a bit far. As I twisted the nose to retract it a bit, I noticed that the barrel got a little bit longer and I could push the lead back with one finger. Wait a tick . . . so I twisted it some more . . . 

A fixed rod holds the lead, which “advances” as the lower barrel retracts into the barrel. We have seen that before:

That’s exactly how the Eagle Simplex works, and as the barrel on this Simplex indicates, that exact mechanism was the subject of patent number 1,683,285, applied for on May 17, 1922 by veteran Eagle inventor Claes W. Boman, assisted by Charles Kaiser. Their patent was granted on September 4, 1928:

I had to know what was inside that red hard rubber example that was found in the Eagle archive, but it was delicate work. Red hard rubber is extremely brittle, and it creaked menacingly as I gently twisted the lower barrel. At last, I breathed a sigh of relief as it came apart:

There it is, but without the metal insert found on my other hard rubber Leadographs – the entire lower barrel is milled from a solid piece of red hard rubber. That clinches it: the hard rubber Leadograph was a variation of the Eagle Simplex, made by the Eagle Pencil Company for the Inkograph Company.