Jim Stauffer was one of the most active Autopoint enthusiasts in the world. His personality was prickly, though – he did not suffer fools gladly, and he was quick to lump people into that category whenever they said something with which he did not fully agree. I’ve always said if nobody gets offended by anything you say, you aren’t saying anything, and since I say a lot, it was inevitable that I would run afoul of Jim’s sensibilities.
Jim took visceral and personal offense to my inclusion of one pencil in the Autopoint section of The Catalogue in 2011. Although I had included it only for whatever it was worth, with the benefit of hindsight Jim was right – it was a marriage of unrelated parts and not an Autopoint. When I asked Jim if he wanted a copy of The Catalogue anyway, he said no - he just wanted copies of the pages about Autopoint.
That was Jim.
Jim liked my Dad though, and I was eventually able to claw my way out of his fool’s dungeon while Dad and I worked on A Century of Autopoint, which was released in late 2019. Jim contributed a lot of information and pictures of things in his collection for the book, and while he did not fully agree with everything I wrote in the book, he agreed with enough to accept a free copy.
That, also, was Jim.
Unfortunately, Jim was diagnosed with cancer after the book came out, and by early 2023 it was clear he was living on borrowed time. None of his family members were interested in his pencil collection, so Jim had made the difficult decision to liquidate his collection while he was still well enough to name his price and find the appropriate caretaker. He emailed me to ask if I would like the opportunity to acquire all or parts of his collection – he said he wanted me to have the first opportunity to acquire the things he had photographed for me and which I included in the book.
I later found out that I received that first opportunity after two dealers had already turned him down.
That, again, was Jim.
Even if I had known that I was Jim’s third choice to look at his collection, that wouldn’t have mattered to me. Of course, I wanted to visit Jim. Of course, I wanted to at least see his collection before it was dispersed to the four winds. Of course, I would be interested in buying a few things, if they were available and reasonably priced.
I called Dad, who had remained in closer contact with Jim than I had, and we decided that since Jim lived in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, what made the most sense was to split our time at the Philadelphia Show that year. We’d spend some time at the show on Friday, commute to Lancaster to spend the day with Jim on Saturday, then scurry back to the show.
Wear warm socks, Jim warned us before we arrived – he had set up tables on his enclosed patio, where he had lights set up to give us the full tour. “Autopex,” read the sign he had printed and placed on the table for his one-man show.
Jim and his wife brought tray after tray from his printer’s cabinet into the room, and he had Dad and I pick out the things we wanted to what we wanted. As we went, Jim ask us to name what we thought were fair prices for each item – we assumed that when we were finished seeing everything, Jim would total up those fair prices and factor in an appropriate discount for everything. When we had gone through everything, though, Jim totaled up all of our fair prices and that was what he said we owed him.
That, yet again, was Jim.
I had to pare back my pile, since Janet and I had agreed in advance the maximum amount I could spend on Jim’s stuff and still have a place to sleep when I got home. Dad gulped a bit and did the same. Still, I was able to bring home many of the things that were pictured in the book.
Towards the end of our visit, Jim was down to the non-Autopoint items in his collection – random things that he had picked up over the years just because they interested him. One of them was this:
All that I knew when I was putting this in my pile was that this pencil didn’t look like any Diamond Point pencil I had ever seen. Its closest relative in my collection is those 1924 McNary patent Rex pencils, like the Franklin in my recent article:
However, note that Jim’s pencil lacks the telltale banding you’ll usually see on the nose of McNary patent pencils, and it’s a bit bigger. The nose doesn’t pull off, so it isn’t an early Autopoint or Dur-O-Lite . . . although the similarity is probably what attracted Jim to this one in the first place. I did not unfurl the fragile instruction sheet that was inside the box until I got home, and it had something more along the lines of what I expected to see in a Diamond Point box.
Diamond Point’s first mechanical pencils were made by the Pencil Product Corporation, which also made the metal Salz Sta-Sharp on which these pencils were based. These first Diamond Point pencils, introduced in 1920 were branded as the Auto-Sharp. See “Whew” (March 2, 2013: Volume 2, page 75).
I’ve found a few of these Auto-Sharp pencils in a nice array of different patterns:
In 1922, the New Diamond Point Pen Company rolled out a new mechanical pencil that was branded with the Diamond Point name and sported a distinctive top cap.
Note that this short announcement refers to “the manufacturer,” without specifying that Diamond Point was actually making them as opposed to sourcing them from Pencil Products or from someone else. They are distinctive enough that I’m inclined to believe they were actually manufactured by Diamond Point, and since they weren’t offered in as wide a range of patterns, I haven’t had to reshoot them since The Catalogue was published; here’s the image from page 39 of The Catalogue.
This distinctive shape is what we see on the printed instructions which accompany Jim’s mystery pencil.
Diamond Point, like most other manufacturers, switched from metal pencils to larger pencils made with brightly colored celluloid in the mid-1920s, providing us with a fairly narrow window during which these instructions were printed - probably between 1922 and 1925. As for Jim’s pencil, I’d estimate about the same date range, but that’s as far as I can go with my analysis.
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