The Rainy Day That Finally Came

As a trawled through my photo archive looking for simple subjects that would be quick and easy to write up, I remembered that I found this example of a Russell in an online auction:

The Russell is a fat, conventional nose drive pencil with only one complication: an adjustable eraser that protrudes through a cap on the top. Unscrewing and removing the cap releases it for repositioning.

As with the other examples I’ve found, it is stamped “Russell / Pat. Pend.” on the barrel.

This example joins the other two that I wrote about in “A Rainy Day Project” (September 10, 2017: Volume 5, page 114). In that article, I expressed doubt that a patent was ever issued for such a simple addition to an otherwise ordinary pencil.

However, I promised on some rainy day to dust off the notes I had compiled in preparation for one day completing a third volume of writing instrument patents – a project that I’ve indefinitely shelved due to a lack of demand, but my working spreadsheet occasionally proves useful in tracking down post-1945 patents.

The problem, though, was that I had no idea when a patent for the Russell would have been issued, or even if it was ever issued at all. “Duly dusted,” I noted in the print version of Volume 5: the only search results that were turning up for “Russell Adjustable Eraser” were leading me back to my own article.

This new addition, however, added a couple details that I hoped would be useful in putting this one to bed. It provides an address and phone number for the Russell Pencil Company in Gardena, California:

My previous newspaper searches for “Russell Pencil” were only narrowing things down to those pages that have the words Russell and Pencil on them . . . not particularly helpful . . . but adding “Gardena” to the mix yielded a hit: The Daily Breeze in Torrance, California published the only advertisement I’ve found for the Russell Pencil Company on October 21, 1948.

Now I had a place – probably somewhere in California, since the only advertising was in a small, local paper. I also had narrowed down the time during which some patent was pending – around 1948. Those two details, used in conjunction with my patent volume 3 notes, were just enough to help me find this:

Hiram Earl Temple, of Los Angeles, California, applied for patent number 2,478,437 on September 17, 1945, and it was issued on August 9, 1949. There’s some differences between what Temple shows and the Russell as it went into production – Temple’s design actually called for an eraser with a hole bored through it, so that a super long eraser could be nested inside the barrel, with a super long eraser nested inside the eraser and protruding through the opposite end. Since all of the examples I’ve found of the Russell have a conventional screw drive mechanism, that feature isn’t included. At best, Temple’s application – pending at the right time and in the right place – was only good enough to warrant a “Pat. Pend.” stamp on the Russell’s barrel.

I did find one other item that looks like it has Temple’s fingerprints on it. It doesn’t have a pencil, but it has a pair of two-inch erasers inserted in opposing ends.

“TEC” reads the imprint mid-barrel. Somewhere I think I have a TEC leadholder set, and from what I remember they were used to mark film with different colors. A quick search led me to an Etsy listing by seller “roughroughdraft,” including a box identifying the Venmo TEC photo retouching set as being made by the V & E Manufacturing Company in Pasadena, California. 

Hiram Temple died on October 18, 1990, and his obituary was published in the Ventura County Star on October 20; he was a mechanical engineer primarily remembered for his baking equipment invetions who was born January 12, 1901.

Whether there was any connection between Hiram Temple and the V & E Manufacturing Company, I don’t know. I still don’t know who “Russell” was, either. I need a few more rainy days . . .

Mighty Mites

Eversharp: Cornerstone of an Industry covers the Eversharp Bantam line of pencils on pages 294 to 296; it shows most of them, but it didn’t include everything.  I’ve got a few updates to report.

The first bit of news is that yes, there were Bantam desk pens and sets – the pens are danged near impossible to find, and the bases . . . unobtainium. I did manage to scrounge up a desk pen, as well as a stickered Bantam Doric, with that same faceted barrel.

In fact, the Bantam Doric is doubly stickered . . . one just adds a bit of NOS goodness, while the other contributes an official model number, and it was quite the designation for such a small pencil: Model Q29108DK:

On page 296 in Eversharp, I commented that examples of the Bantam in later plastics had either two bands or three bands, at least as far as the pencils go. I showed green Bantam pencils in two and three band configurations, a brown with three bands, and a grey one with two bands. Then this came along in an online auction:

The box may or may not be official Eversharp, since I haven’t seen this variation before and it has a jeweler’s sticker on the lid. Inside, however, was a set that I bought because I wanted to read the paperwork that came with it.

Bantam-specific paperwork for “The Big Little Pen” is tough to find, but other than the campy artwork and language, it doesn’t provide any information we didn’t already know.

The back side is devoted to an advertisement for Eversharp’s square leads; the patent dates in the bottom corner are for Robert Back’s square leads patent and a pencil patent by John Straka - not the removable nose pencil for which Straka is best remembered, but another patent. I’ll have to explore why that apparently unrelated patent is doing here some time.

The paperwork was a bit of a let down, but the set itself was not. Yes, Virginia, the brown later Bantam pencils also have either two or three bands.

No, Virginia, I could not find this next image, and it was quicker to just reshoot it. Yes Virginia, the gray Bantam pencils also have either two or three bands.

I haven’t seen any Bantam fountain pens with three bands on the cap, and I haven’t found a pen or a pencil with three bands in black.

Zen and the Art of Picking

After David Nishimura and I finished negotiating the purchase of a Victorian collection from Rob Bader in DC, Rob mentioned that he had a few other random pencils that had come from that same collection. Since we bought everything else, Rob said, take whatever you want out of them.

I wasn’t greedy, but I did grab a couple items that are perennial favorites to me, including these four:

First is that cute little Gordon, with its telephone dialer and hugely disproportionate “fanged” clip. Even if I had five identical ones at home I would have snagged this one – the color is amazing, the telephone dialer ones are a delight, and besides – it was “free” (ish, he tells himself, after the amount of money he spent on the Victorians).

The clip didn’t look nearly this nice when I rescued it, and there was a lot of work involved in getting it looking presentable. The effort was worth it, because this scratched one of those longtime itches I’d forgotten I had.

In “Like Playing the Lottery” (March 7, 2013: Volume 2, page 83), I mused whether a two-tone Gordon was correct. “It’s possible that Gordon decided to jazz things up a bit by making two-color pencils out of parts from each,” I wrote, “but if anyone’s got a red veined example with a bronze and cream cap and wants to swap parts, I’m all ears!”

Now I’m all ears for an all red veined example. And it continues . . . 

That was happy accident number one from Rob’s freebie pile. Here’s number two:

I like these later Moore “Mastercraft” pencils, and I figured since I probably already had one, I wouldn’t mind carrying this one around as an everyday doodler (and besides, I told myself, it’s “free”).

And then I checked my photo archive . . .

I couldn’t have called a better shot.

That blue “Hiriter” is another one I wouldn’t have thought twice about if there was more money to be paid. Hiriter was a David Kahn brand (Kahn is best known as maker of the Wearever), although I don’t know if the Hiriter was for Kahn’s own account or whether it was supplied to some retailer. It wasn’t a high quality affair, but still – I liked the clip and the color, and when I got it home:

Now I have one that has all of its parts.

As for the last one in this group, it is a Dur-O-Lite and one of the earliest ones, at that. The company was founded in 1926, and that square bolt securing the clip to the barrel was only used until 1928. It isn’t the earliest, but it’s pretty early – that longer nose was adopted in early 1927.

I was sure I had one, but I’m a sucker for these and if I run across one that needs a clip or a good nose, I figured it would be handy to have. Besides . . . its free . . . and yes, I did have one.

But the one I have didn’t have this written on the side, which I didn’t notice when I plucked it from the pile to bring home:

I’m confident that if I had actually spent additional money on these things, I would never have batted four for four!