The Royal Challenge

As if I had not spent enough money at Michael Krut’s table at the Detroit Show, he also had this one:

“I have to check the pictures on my laptop first,” I said. Up in the room that evening, I checked – and I was back at Michael’s table first thing Saturday morning. This is a Parker Royal Challenger, bearing a date code of 9 with no dots; that’s the fourth quarter of 1939.

I had started to write an article about these a few years ago, then stopped because I was missing a couple pieces of the puzzle, this being one of them. 

All of the examples with sword clips shown here have date codes of 17; that designates the first quarter of 1937 (the coding system changed between then and 1939). That isn’t a large enough sampling from which I can draw any conclusions, but it does square with what sparse documentation we have about these. Parker’s regular catalogs between 1937 and 1941 include no references to the Royal Challenger, but a four-page flyer printed in July 1937 shows them. Perhaps this was intended as supplemental pages for the 1937 or 1938 catalog.

The back page, which includes the publication date, shows a Parker Royal Challenger pen and pencil set, “with swank Roman Dagger Clip.”

These sword or “Dagger” clips were apparently discontinued shortly into production in favor of a clip with a stepped end, which was used exclusively on the Royal Challenger series.

The example shown here with three bands has a 28 date code, for the second quarter 1938; the wide band example, like Michael’s example, has a 9 date code designating fourth quarter 1939.

The stepped clip might have been introduced for 1938; one page in N.Shure Company’s 1938 catalog shows the Royal Challenger with that same clip:

My working theory is that 1939 was the final year for the Royal Challenger, and these all . . . mostly . . . had that wide band and the same stepped clip from 1938. As I worked on this article a couple years ago, I found an online auction for another wide band example in red, but also with that same clip. Unfortunately, the date code was not visible in the pictures.

Of course, it would be too much to expect Parker to be consistent in 1939, as the Royal Challenger was being phased out and the company was piecing together all sorts of weird combinations of parts. The example I got from Michael has the straight clip found on the lesser Challengers.

Perhaps that is a replacement at some point during the last ninety years or so, since the clips are interchangeable. However, I can’t discount the possibility that this might be as it was originally assembled after the supply of stepped clips was exhausted.

And speaking of parts . . . the Royal Challenger’s parts are not compatible with anything else I’ve found. For some time I’ve had a red Royal Challenger I’ve been trying to complete. The threaded end of the mechanism was snapped off at some point, and I haven’t been able to find a donor.

The 1939 wide band should – in theory – provide a perfect replacement, but it doesn’t. The mechanism was modified slightly between 1937 and 1939, just enough that the one doesn’t fit in the other.

That means . . . the only mechanism that will get my sword clip Royal Challenger back on the road will be what’s inside another 1937 Royal Challenger.

Motor City Highlights

The stories behind how these bits and trinkets find their way to me are sometimes as much fun as exploring the history of the objects themselves. Unfortunately, during the time I was off fooling around writing the Sheaffer and Eversharp books, many of these back stories have faded from my memory.

Janet and I were at the Detroit Pen Show last weekend, and I found a few interesting things to show you. Rather than lining them up at the end of the long queue of stuff I need to photograph, I thought I’d tell you about them now, while my memory is fresh.

Detroit was better attended and busier this year than it has been in recent years. Janet and I had two tables, and on Friday show organizer Dale Penkala stopped by to ask me how business was. Great, I replied – I’m losing all kinds of money. 

Dale looked concerned until I told him it’s a great show when I lose money on Friday: that’s what happens when I am so busy flitting around the room, talking to people, and buying things for my collection that I’m not minding my shop. Saturday, I told him, is when I stay at my table and make all of that money back. Funny . . . I sell so much more when I’m sitting there.

I added all five of these to my collection that Friday.

Michael Krut was responsible for corrupting my pencil collection with those two half-pencil, half-pen combos at the top, but I was a willing co-conspirator. Both have those distinctive, turned-up ball clips that place them squarely in the Edward Todd / William S. Hicks family:

The gold filled example is marked for Edward Todd, both imprinted on the barrel and with a nice number 3 Edward Todd nib:

Although the sterling silver one has no imprint on the barrel, it does have a nib marked “W.S. Hicks Sons,” and I don’t have any reason to attribute it to any other maker:

The example at center came from Jerry Rosenthal, and it might have started life out as another combination pen and pencil before someone had a better idea for it.

Instead of a pencil, this has a really weird metal piece on the end, the parts of which don’t budge. With that  end removed, there’s nothing but an empty space inside:

I’m recalling the “Presso” toilet powder dispenser from “Marveling at Last in Person” (September 10, 2025), but there’s no movement with that end piece to suggest that it dispenses anything. Neither would there be any reason to store leads in a fountain pen. Perhaps it was a pill container or something.

There is a Hicks hallmark on the end of the cap, and the curled end of the clip instead of a ball is unusual but not unprecedented for a Hicks:

The nib, however, is a generic 14k nib. 

What had me puzzled was that there is no lever on the barrel, leaving me to wonder what this thing might be. Unscrewing the section provided that answer: it is a cheap bulb filler.

That pen and pencil set shown at bottom in that first image were also from Michael Krut. I had to give chase, because I’ve only seen one other pencil like this one.

I had a devil of a time finding that gold one - I knew I had taken pictures of it, but since these are so unlike anything else Hicks produced, I ended up shooting it alongside a few other random things I had purchased at the Baltimore Show a few years ago.

From top in this picture are a solid gold Mabie Todd:

A solid gold Hicks:

A vermiel (gold fill over sterling) pencil made by Louis Tamis & Son:

And this one, which was owned by Bob Johnson. It too is vermiel:

I’ll admit I didn’t shoot Bob’s pencil on its own because at the time, I thought it was kind of ugly but I felt compelled to buy it . . . the same sense of obligation I feel whenever I wind up buying a beautifully ugly Parker-Eversharp. I’ve softened on that a bit now, since it looks so nice alongside Michael Krut’s sterling silver set.

Both the pen and pencil bear Hicks hallmarks . . . 

The nib is a correct W.S. Hicks sons nib:

And just like the example I got from Jerry Rosenthal, there’s no lever on this pen, either. It has that same bulb-filler mechanism inside.

Lund . . . ish

One of my oft-repeated and frequently ignored mantras is that I avoid buying pencils that were not made in America or at least marketed heavily here. There’s two reasons for that, neither of which involves xenophobia or wearing a hat that says “Make American Pencils Great Again.” 

The first reason is that if I don’t draw a line somewhere – even if it is a line I frequently cross or blithely ignore – I know what will happen. “If at first you don’t drown in a huge pile of pencils, try try again by opening up the floodgates foreign-made pencils,” the saying goes. Or something like that.

The other reason is that my primary source of enjoyment when it comes to collecting mechanical pencils is researching the history behind them. I’ve got a few Pelikan pencils, but my Pelikan book is in German and so are the relevant patents – and I don’t know any German. There’s also an information availability problem: the United States is fairly unique in that our patents are fully digitized and freely available. In other countries, including Great Britain, patents are either not available at all or you have to purchase copies.

Notwithstanding all of these challenges, Victorian English “Lund Pencils” are something that I just have to have whenever they come along. I broke down and bought my first examples in 2016, acknowledging that I was long overdue to break my American-only rule in “And I Called Myself a Pencil Collector” (September 11, 2016: Volume 4, page 164). In the years since, I have added a few more examples:

Most of the time these are unmarked, but those top two examples have fantastic imprints on the barrels that read “Lund Patentee London.”

In that article, I was hamstrung trying to figure out exactly when Lund pencils were made, because the English, unlike we unruly Colonists, steadfastly refuse to make digitized copies of their patents freely available. The pencils are named after William Lund (see that earlier article for his biography), but I noted a discrepancy in reports indicating he had received his patent for the pencil in 1856: the only patent William Lund received in 1856, from what I could tell, was for a paper clip and not a pencil.

I also explained that notwithstanding imprints that read “Lund Patentee,” Lund apparently acquired the rights to someone else’s patent rather than receiving one in his own name. I had dug up William Riddle’s patent of December 21, 1848, the specifications for which were reprinted in the June 30, 1849 edition of Mechanics’ Magazine, Museum, Register, Journal and Gazette. The text of Riddle’s specifications, including the notation that his pencil barrels have a “spiral cut on its periphery, and extending from end to end,” clearly identify Riddle’s pencils as the same ones William Lund marked as his own.

Still, it made no sense to me that contemporary accounts of William Lund’s pencil operations would be so far off with respect to the year in which they were patented. With nothing else to go on I could do nothing but wait for these last nine years with that nagging, lingering question rattling around in the back of my head.

And then, as these things usually happen, the answer was revealed.

At the DC show in August, Dad and I had just pulled in Thursday afternoon when Rob Bader pounced upon me in the ballroom, before I could even pull my bottle of Jameson’s from my backpack. He had stumbled into a large collection of Victorian pens and pencils that he wanted to sell to me, all in one go. David Nishimura tagged along with me when I went up to Rob’s hotel room for a look-see, and yes . . . I agreed that I wanted to buy them, too. The problem was I didn’t bring enough cash to do the whole thing.

Nishimura piped up that he’d pay for half, and we could divide the things we each wanted between us and split the proceeds equally from anything we sold during the rest of the show. That sounds great, I said, as long as these two things wound up in my pile. I’ll tell you more about that whole deal tomorrow, because that’s an entire story all its own – for now, suffice to say these two landed at the museum.

I neglected to use my loupe to carefully examine them for flaws, partly due to the level of trust I have in Rob Bader and David Nishimura but mostly because I had never seen a sterling silver Lund and I wanted to write about it, regardless of whatever warts it might have. It wasn’t until late in the show, as I was showing them off to someone, that I pulled out a magnifier to see what was imprinted on them . . . and when I did, they were even better than I thought. The white one has an imprint, but it doesn’t say “Lund Patentee” . . . 

It’s marked “A.W. Faber,” something I never knew existed; the few people I’ve discussed this with never knew there were Lund pencils marked for A.W. Faber, either, and now I’m looking forward to hearing from the population at large now to see whether there are any others out there like this.

The main event, though, is the sterling silver one, which has features different from other Lunds I’ve seen. Although many Victorian pencils have crown tops with glass “jewels” set into the top, Lund pencils do not.

The other difference is the mechanism. The Faber example has a typical Lund setup, with the threaded exterior band locked between two tabs in the pushrod, so that the rod is both advanced and retracted depending on which way the band is turned. The sterling example, however, only has a tab on the front end – twisting it forward advances the rod, but it spins freely backwards, so a fresh lead must be used to push the rod back manually.

What dropped my jaw, though, was the imprint around the nose:

“Taylor’s Patent.” Now I found myself caught in the very researcher's quagmire I have tried to avoid: Taylor’s patent doesn’t appear in American Writing Instrument Patents 1799-1910, and I didn’t expect that it would – I was certain some guy named Taylor received a patent in England, and there are no resources comparable to what we have in the United States to track down British patents. I resorted to getting down on my knees and reciting my researcher’s prayer . . . “Oh Google, I beseech thee . . .” it begins.

I didn’t have to finish that incantation, because my first search result was a 2020 Facebook post by my Australian friend Pam Sutton, who had shared some images of her Taylor’s patent pencils. Pam has collaborated with me before here at the blog (see “On High Alert” on June 8, 2021: Volume 7, page 177), so I messaged her to request and obtain permission to share her images here:

Pam asked for my email address so that she could send me some more information she had found about Taylor’s patent. She found this reference published in The Practical Mechanic's Journal, Volumes 7-8, Page 190, Vol 8.

J.G. Taylor patented two improvements to Riddle’s 1846 design: first, it was made out of metal – not really a patentable difference from the prior art. The other, though, explains the differences I observed between Taylor’s patent pencils and Riddle’s Lunds: it “adds an ingenious contrivance for getting rid of the objectionable points of the traversing piece standing up, one on each side of the nut.” Taylor’s invention omits the rear tab and adds a collar on the front end, so those with delicate fingers don’t chafe their digits on the protruding tabs. 

The patent was undated, and when I checked the primary source, Google indicates it was published in 1855. I wondered . . . darn, that’s close to the mysterious 1856 patent date that has puzzled me all these years. After another researcher’s prayer, I double checked the source: yes, Google books reports that Volumes 7 and 8 of The Practical Mechanics’ Journal were published in 1855, but Google’s copy combines Volumes 7 and 8 together in a single scan. Volume 7 was published in 1855, but Volume 8 . . . 

. . . covers the period ending in March, 1856. Pam indicates that according to her records, Taylor’s patent was number 1994: I couldn’t verify this, because Hathitrust’s English patents library is missing a few volumes from 1856 – including the one that includes patent 1994.

I poked around some more. Patent 2225, for couplings and fastening connectors, was issued to John George Taylor of Glasgow, Scotland on October 17, 1856, according to The Engineer (page 566). The inventor’s full name and residence provided the details that made it easier to find patent 2823 in the Hathitrust library, which was issued on November 29, 1856:

Patent drawings are not included with the published specifications; however, the text describes the very improvements to the Lund pencil enumerated in the synopsis published in The Practical Mechanics’ Journal. Perhaps that synopsis was published when the application was filed in early 1856, before the patent was ultimately issued. Perhaps also there were two Taylor patents for related improvements, one issued as number 1994 and the other as patent 2823.

Either way, Taylor’s patent 2823 was issued in 1856, and all those references I found stating that William Lund’s pencil was patented in 1856 must relate to the date of Taylor’s improvements.

That solves one mystery, but Pam’s pictures raised another question: she also included this montage of images of another pencil marked “Taylor’s patent,” and it looks nothing like a Lund.

Sigh . . . I guess I’ll see you in another nine years.