"So Huge that You'll Have Loads of Fun With It"

I always get a kick out of these, and finding a “deluxe” model with an overlay a few years ago got me all stirred up.

“Jumbo” pens and pencils were made in Japan, and somewhere along the line our collectors’ lore came up with the ridiculous notion that they were made and marketed especially for those with arthritis. They were no such thing, just novelties . . . although when Bloomingdale’s advertised the new pens in the New York Daily News on April 14, 1936, the ad does say the were “really a fist-full; so big you don’t have to cramp your fingers tight together!”

The earliest advertisement I found for these was published in the Albuquerque Journal on December 13, 1935. “Holds as much ink as 5 ordinary pens,” it claims.

Since weird has always been my chosen milieu, I tend to pick these things up when I see them. Here are the Jumbo pens and pencils that I had found, pictured in 2022:

The boxed example at center is the most common variation of these, with the “streamlined” (as streamlined as Bader’s Zeppelin, anyway) ones being a little less common. The celluloid and overlay pencils shown here are the only ones I’ve seen. I haven’t seen a pencil in the box, but I did grab this picture a few years ago of a streamlined Jumbo pencil in its natural habitat. I think it was in an online auction I missed.

I had been looking for a plain old Jumbo pencil that matched my fountain pen, and Myk Daigle had that very thing when I saw him at the Raleigh Show in June. It came with that pesky pen, but I didn’t mind . . . 

The pens, as the Bloomingdale’s ad states, are “not a self filler, but it holds so much ink that it needs filling once in a ‘blue moon.’” “The pen is black!” it says, and I’d go along with that, too. But the claim that it “writes beautifully with a smooth 14-karat gold-plated point?”

Meh . . . the headline of the ad is closer to the truth: “so huge you’ll have loads of fun with it.”

I am in fact having loads of fun, because this one is not an exact duplicate of what I already had:

This one bears a souvenir decal with a picture of the Empire State Building, which had opened just five years earlier, in 1931. A jumbo building on a Jumbo pen just seems . . . perfect . . . 

These Jumbo pens appear in various retailer advertisements through 1937. Other pens were advertised as “jumbo,” but after 1937 these advertisements appear to use the word in the generic sense rather than referring to this specific novelty. Since they were made in Japan (and the box I have clearly indicates that they were), I’m sure none were sold after the United States entered World War II.