When Good Luck is a Bad Thing

My “bank” of articles heading into the Ohio Show this weekend is pretty thin. I write these articles in advance and schedule them to publish automatically, but lately it seems like everything I touch has a great story that requires more time and research than I thought it would.

It’s October 25 right now, and as time runs short before the show, with friends from all over letting me know when they are arriving, I’m switching to simpler “one-off” show-and-tell articles that are worth telling, but without too much to tell. You’ll have something new to read each day, and I’ll be back with more in-depth stories after our community has adjourned and things quiet down for a long winters’ nap.

Here’s one I don’t have much more to say about than I did back in 2012, when I reported that Lee Anderson had shown it to me at the Chicago Show that year. I wrote that there was “zero chance I was going to talk him out of it.” See “Also Seen At Chicago” (May 27, 2012: Volume 1, page 218).

That brown marbled plastic is one of the more unusual and uncataloged Parker colors, perhaps used for test marketing, and this remains the only example I have seen in Parker Vest Pocket configuration. When I ran the article all those years ago, the only pictures I had of it were the terrible shots I captured at the show.

Times change, and Lee isn’t as active in the hobby as he was. A few months ago Lee emailed to ask if I wanted to bring this one home. Of course I do, I said, so here it resides these days.

I also ran across another Parker Vest Pocket pencil, although I don’t remember where, how, or when.

There isn’t anything new to report about this, other than a little bit of paper stuck to the side of the barrel.

Model 500, it was. $2.50, it cost. And it joined an example in black that I already had in the collection – in black, this was Model 510.

The only difference between them is the top rings. 

One of these days I will take a moderately deep dive into Parker’s ringtop rings. Maybe I’ll conclude one of these is a replacement from something else, or that different shapes were used in different years.