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.