The Criterion Criteria

My friend Jim Mamoulides, when he is not accomplishing superhuman feats as editor of The Pennant, is accomplishing superhuman feats posting articles about obscure brands at his website, Penhero.com. He beat me to the punch with a nice writeup of the Criterion line of pens and pencils with a 2024 article he posted here.

I’ve had a Criterion set just like the one Jim featured in his article photographed for some time.

Jim ably ran down all the newspaper advertisements and other information that was available about the Criterion, all of which suggest these were offered by retailers including the Rexall Drug Stores between 1923 and 1926, all of which share an infuriating lack of detail concerning who made them. Jim also relied on my previous article, even though I wasn’t able to offer much more . . . other than a suggestion that maybe the Rex Manufacturing Company had something to do with these. See “How I Know” (July 1, 2015: Volume 3, page 278) and “Two Cans of Worms” (July 2, 2015: Volume 3, page 279).

In retrospect, there’s flawed logic in my association of the Criterion brand with Rex. That theory was based primarily on the similarity of the warranty papers that came with my Criterion set, which is identical to the papers included with sets clearly marked with the Rex Manufacturing Company name. In the years since, I’ve seen warranty papers identical to what came with my Criterion set stuffed in boxes containing sets that clearly had nothing to do with Rex.

So maybe Rex, maybe not. Jim suggests a Rexall connection in his article, which would point more convincingly towards DeWitt-LaFrance, which made the “Signet” line for Rexall.

What I believe will be the key to unraveling who manufactured the Criterion is going to be figuring out who designed the clip found on the pens:

In “Two Cans of Worms” I discussed that possibility, and I noted that this same clip is also found on pencils bearing various names, including Ever Last, Parrott, Postal, and Thompson.

The identify of that jobber, unfortunately, remains a mystery.

Back to that warranty paperwork, because I need to clarify something that Jim wrote as he mused. My paperwork is identical to what Jim shows, including references on the back to “De Luxe” and “Premo” pens and pencils.

Jim questioned whether one of these names was for a pen and the other was for the pencil. That is a reasonable assumption in a vacuum, since many manufacturers used different brand names for pens and pencils – the Wahl Pen and Eversharp Pencil, for example. In this case, however, I can answer Jim's question: there are both De Luxe and Premo pencils. They are identical other than the name on the clip, and I have no reason to doubt that both were offered with a similarly marked, similarly un-deluxe and un-premo fountain pens.

While I am on the subject of the Criterion, I have one more update. In my last articles, I showed an oversized fountain pen marked Criterion and owned by Nathaniel Cerf, and I theorized their might be a matching pencil out there I had yet to find. I didn’t find one in jade, but I did find something that would be more in keeping with consumer tastes as bright colors overtook metal as a preferred medium in the mid-1920s:

There’s something noteworthy here, because this very same thing recently came up in connection with the “Collegian” in “Nearly a Waste of Time” (September 5, 2025). Note the nose on the Collegian in that article – it’s the same nose that’s on this Criterion. This image from that earlier article shows the Collegian compared to Eclipse-made pencils. 

Maybe my earlier wild goose chase trying to figure out whether my Collegian was made by Diamond Point or Eclipse has now borne more fruit. After all, Eclipse’s distinctive 1923 patent clip would look exactly like that banded clip on a Criterion pen, or a Parrott, a Postal, or a host of other makers – with the clip secured by a band across the top rather than concealed underneath.