The Philadelphia Acquisitions

This year’s Philadelphia Show in January yielded a few more updates to A Field Guide to Sheaffer’s Pencils:

That top pencil probably belonged in yesterday’s installment of updates about Sheaffer’s metal pencils, but the condition of the paint is the best I’ve seen and its worth showing alongside my better examples.

The second one down was an unmarked pencil I found in a junk box, and I bought it primarily as a curiosity. Sheaffer Balance golf pencils are typically marked with the Sheaffer name, but on occasion they do turn up without any markings. Could this be a more gargantuan unmarked Sheaffer golf pencil?

I’m on the fence with this one - if the black and pearl color carried all the way to the top of the pencil, I’d be more convinced . . . but then again, if you subtract that the length of the part that is all black, the black and pearl part is about the right length. What the heck – it’s fun to display alongside my other Sheaffer golf pencils.

The two cherry red flattops both came from David Isaacson. The Titan is really special, but it takes a second to recognize why: in addition to the color, this is a Titan equipped for .076" checking leads, which is more clear when it sits alongside its “normal” brother:

My only other example of a Titan checking pencil appears on page 35 of the Field Guide, and it’s worth showing you them together for another reason:

You’ll notice that the gold cap is a bit shorter on the cherry red example. As explained on page 34 of the book, the way these pencils were built was changed at some point between 1925 and 1928. Those shorter caps indicate that the cap has a post with the eraser mounted on the end, a feature carried over from the earliest Sharp Point pencils since 1917. Longer caps indicate that the eraser is attached to the pencil itself. For me, that is more than a purely acedemic distinction: it means that Titan Checking Pencils were made, even if in very limited numbers, over several years. 

David’s other cherry red example neatly filled out a gap in my flattop collection. 

The two coral examples shown here were pictured on page 36 of the Field Guide, and note that there are three different clips represented here: the top one is the “Little S” clip in use when the Radite (celluloid) flattop pencils were introduced in 1925, carried over from the earlier metal pencil line. At center, the “Big S” clips (note the larger letters at either end of the word “Sheaffer’S” are illustrated in Sheaffer’s 1928 catalog. At bottom, David’s pencil has the flat ball clip introduced on the Sheaffer Balance between 1933 and 1934; this one was likely a leftover barrel put to good use after flattops were no longer in production.

This last one from the Philly Show is my favorite in this batch, because it’s one of those that you really need to understand what you are looking at before you can see what is different:

Steve Wiederlight had this one, and I passed it a few times before I could figure out why I had to have it. The Craig was a Sheaffer subbrand, named after Walter Sheaffer’s son. Flattop Craig pencils are not a particularly rare sight, and Sheaffer pens and pencils in jade are downright common. What is unusual here is the combination of those two things: I have never seen a Craig flattop in jade green. That makes for an interesting family picture:

There’s all of the known colors, with the exception of cherry red; the image of flattop Craig pencils on page 94 of the Field Guide shows one, but that example was on loan from my friend Jonathan Pollack. Another cherry red example surfaced in an online auction recently . . . I bid the stupid money, and someone else bid money that was even stupider. 

You can’t win them all and besides . . . there’s always Philadelphia next year.

A Breather

 The last few weeks here at the blog have been intense. Time and time again I have started what I thought would be a simple article, and time and time again it became more intricate than I dreamed it would be. For today, I’m taking a step back to offer a few simple updates to update my 2023 book, A Field Guide to Sheaffer’s Pencils. 

This installment is the first of many updates, beginning with a few odds and ends concerning Sheaffer’s metal pencils, offered between 1917 and 1930. Here’s a good start:

I don’t remember who sold me this Sheaffer Sharp Point, as those earliest Sheaffer pencils were named when they were introduced in 1917, but it came to me at the DC Show in 2023 – just after the book was published. The box is as good as these get, with clear lettering and the writing hand still very legible:

The “knobby” cap and “bowler” clip, both of which are nicknames I use, are a combination of features in production during late 1918 and early 1919; since this barrel is marked patent applied for rather than bearing Sheaffer’s November 5, 1918 patent date, I’d believe it was produced in the second half of 1918, before the patent date was added and flared caps and Sheaffer-marked clips were introduced. Pencils like these are shown on page 6 in the book, but no, I didn’t have this pattern:

Model designations were very simple during the Sharp Point era: BD meant sterling silver (B), pattern “Puritan” (D). Of course, that is much easier to decipher when you have a price band containing all of that information:

Moving on -- “Sheaffer metal pencils were offered in five configurations,” I announced with authority on page 26, accompanied by this image:

Sigh. And now there are six. I think Daniel Kirchheimer either sold it to me or pointed it out on someone’s table aa a show and told me I needed to buy it.

This pipsqueak is in the smallest size, and it has both a clip and a ringtop. Even if you thought the ringtop cap might be a replacement, I haven’t previously seen any evidence of the existence of a side clip model this short.

Next is one with a very subtle feature that I didn’t notice until David Nishimura pointed it out to me:

Although the pencil is an ordinary silver-nickel model, what sets is apart is the stippling on the lower half of the barrel:

Sheaffer’s 1928 and 1929 catalogs show a similar treatment applied to oversized utility pencils. With this “satin finish grip,” it was Model SAA, or the AAA if equipped for .076" checking leads. The catalogs are silent, however, with respect to standard diameter pencils receiving such treatment.

I photographed this next group last March, but I don’t think they all arrived in one go - I think I was just catching up on taking pictures of things that had accumulated around the museum:

Starting at the top is that long ringtop with a handwritten tag. Longer than usual, yes . . . 

. . . but was this the “1921 diamond pattern”? At first blush, that seems about right.

That's what Wahl called this pattern on metal Eversharps, but that isn't what Sheaffer called it. I ran down all of Sheaffer's cataloged pattern names and production dates on page 27 in the book, and this one appeared in 1923, not 1921. While “diamond” seems logical, Sheaffer referred to it only as Pattern L: “hand turned chasing.”

That handwritten “PFC p76" reference resonates with those of us who know our pen collecting history.  Pen Fancier’s Magazine was one of our earliest periodicals, produced by pen collecting pioneer Cliff Lawrence. In addition to the regular magazines, Cliff produced a few PFC Pen Guide books. I have a few different editions, and I was looking forward to seeing this exact pencil in one of those old books. Alas, it must have been a different edition, because it doesn’t appear anywhere in these.

Moving on to the next one, a short gold-filled ringtop, I noticed something weird about it. I have a few similar ones, but the chasing is different.

The bottom two are easy to identify – they are also shown on page 27 in my book. Sheaffer cataloged them as Pattern H - “Craig style chasing.”

That top example, though, isn’t the same thing. It is much earlier, cataloged in 1920 and 1921 simply as Pattern G. The full length version with clip is shown on page 28, but I did not have a ringtop to show when the book went to press.

The next one up for discussion in this group is that badly deteriorated, hand-painted pencil. Ordinarily I might have passed on it due to its poor condition, but in my experience nearly all of the hand-painted Sheaffer pencils were the short models. I’ve only seen one other longer ringtop with this treatment – it’s in the book, on page 32:

The last two in this group are easily dispatched, and I’m not sure why I even included them in that picture. The silver nickel example upgraded the one I had with a broken clip, and the plain gold filled one was just really, really clean:

This last one – at least for now – came to me via Daniel Kirchheimer, who brought it to the Baltimore Show last year. He says it was found among what was left of a Sheaffer repairman’s business:

The finish is called Guilloché enamelling, and it is much more prevalent in Europe than it is in the United States. It is created by layering and then firing enamel and glass over chased metal. 

My first impression was that this might be a marriage of Sheaffer parts with a European barrel, since I’ve never seen a Sheaffer pencil with this sort of treatment. Sheaffer didn’t use the underlying pattern, at least to my knowledge:

I don’t think it’s a marriage, and neither does Daniel. No, this exact pattern was not cataloged, but it is close enough to Sheaffers “diamond” or “hand turned chasing” discussed earlier that nothing more than a flick of a few switches on the same machines might have produced it. Also, there’s so much that would be involved in transplanting a Sheaffer pencil’s guts into something else, and while this Guilloché shows evidence of wear, it doesn’t have the sort of damage one would expect from that sort of procedure. Besides, “junk box provenance” suggests that nobody would go through all of that effort only to leave it behind.

The cap has Sheaffer’s 1918 patent date but lacks the “Lifetime” name, which was added to the pencil caps in 1924. As I showed on page 32 of the book, Sheaffer’s hand-painted pencils also lack the Lifetime name, but they were cataloged in 1928 - I theorized in the book that hand painting old stock might have been a way to clear out obsolete models. Perhaps around the same time, Sheaffer dabbled in Guilloché as another way to do the same thing.

Of Radios, Pencils, and a Migraine

I have known about these pencils for years, but it wasn’t until the last year or so before I finally acquired one. 

All that I remember is that I caught this one “fishing with hand grenades” – that is, I bought a whole bunch of crap and this one happened to be in it. The clip reads “Cunningham Radio Tubes”:

That clip explains why these always seem to go for more money than I could justify paying. Collectibles that sit at the intersection of different disciplines tend to be valued more highly – in this case, pencil collectors and radio aficionados both chase them, and the radio guys are more likely to spend the bigger money. This example, like all of the others I have seen, is in a great lapis color with distinctive red bands, and on the side of the barrel, there’s also a metal plaque offering birthday greetings to “O.D.M.”

Cunningham Radio Tubes were marketed by Elmer T. Cunningham, who founded the Audio Tron Sales Company in San Francisco in 1915. Cunningham was a slippery character who fought off numerous patent infringement claims and went through a number of different business organizations – it is a fascinating history, but if I attempted to lay out the entire saga here (1) I doubt I would do the story justice, especially for any radio enthusiasts in the audience and (2) it would take me so far out into left field that I fear I would never get around to the story I’m telling today. 

For our purposes, by 1931 the most recent incarnation of the Cunningham Radio Tubes business, by then going by “E.T. Cunningham, Inc.,” had been purchased by RCA. The distinctive letter C on the clip is drawn from Cunningham’s handwritten signature, as shown in this magazine advertisement published in 1925 or so:

I don’t believe the makers of Cunningham Radio Tubes got a wild hair and went into the pencil business (even though the Tri-Pen Company, makers of Triad pens and pencils, did exactly that). This is the only color and configuration in which I believe these are found, and if Cunningham had started a pencil business I’d expect to see more than one variation. I believe this is a specially commissioned advertising pencil, complete with a figural cap made to look like one of the company’s radio tubes.

My best guess as to who might have manufactured these pencils is Mabie Todd & Co., which used that same color celluloid, offered colored bands like these on some models, and Mabie Todd pencils share that slender front end and elongated metal tip. In the absence of any manufacturer’s marking, that is just my best guess. 

That guess took a weird left turn recently. Unless Mabie Todd did some really weird stuff like what I’m about to show you, and I don’t think it did, Elmer Cunningham must have sourced pencils from other manufacturers, as well.

And who that manufacturer might have been is just fascinating . . . 

Bob Speerbrecher (known by eBay shoppers as Speerbob) sometimes sends me pictures of things he is getting ready to list to ask for my input about what they are and what a reasonable price might be to ask. In this case, I told him not to bother listing it, because he had already found his buyer. Neither of us knew what a reasonable price for it might be, so we agreed that I’d find some extra pencils laying around to send him in trade (and that trade, I’ll tell you at some point, was an entire story all its own).

There are three weird things about this pencil I have to show you. The obvious first question concerns that cap - I don’t remember whether I made the connection while Bob and I were discussing the pencil by email, but by the time it arrived I understood exactly what it was:

Yes, Virginia . . . that’s Elmer’s distinctive handwriting all right. Although the pencil is not otherwise marked, the shape of the cap and the letter stamped on top of it are all I need to identify this as another Cunningham Radio Tubes advertising pencil.

I took another look at my lapis Cunningham Radio Tubes pencil because I didn’t recall that same treatment, but it does share that same letter C on top of the cap. It was so faintly stamped that I hadn’t noticed it before.

Speerbob’s Cunningham pencil is enigmatic. It is an early repeater pencil, and its resemblance to a Presto is both uncanny and just a little bit off.

The lead is significantly thicker on the Cunningham pencil, while all of the Presto repeaters I have seen have been uniformly equipped to accept ordinary 1.1 millimeter leads. If Presto was commissioned to make a special order pencil, in this case they made one that was really special. The oddities continue inside:

The internal workings of Presto repeaters are as consistent as the lead size they used, but this Cunningham repeater is built a little different, with a nose cone that screws into the threaded end of the barrel and different proportions of the brass inner parts. The Presto was derived from Abraham Pollak’s patent number 1,592,502 issued on July 13, 1926.

Pollak’s patent is famous because it was invalidated after the Gilfred Corporation (makers of the Everfeed, descended from the Presto) sued Eversharp for infringement of this very patent. I discussed the Gilfred v. Eversharp litigation in one of  my earliest articles here, long since wiped from the Internet but surviving in print form - see “My Find of the Year” (December 31, 2011: Volume 1, page 63). The story was also reprised in Eversharp: Cornerstone of an Industry, at page 314.

In my opinion, this Cunningham pencil is so similar to a Presto repeater that they must have been made by the same manufacturer. At the time, with Pollak’s patent fresh on the books, anyone else copying his design this closely would have treaded in perilous waters indeed.

Unless . . . 

I told you earlier there are three weird things about this pencil: the Cunningham connection and this pencil’s weird, close-but-not-exact relationship to the Presto are two of them. The third weird thing about it is that unusual clip:

I have never seen a clip like that on a Presto, but I have seen it . . . and so have you:

That’s our Cunningham posed alongside an early Ever Sharp made between 1913 and 1915. Charles Keeran’s earliest Ever Sharp pencils (“Eversharp” was two words in those days) were manufactured by George W. Heath & Co., and they sported clips patented by brothers George and Alfred Heath, who applied for patent 1,145,583 on June 12, 1912. Their patent was granted on July 6, 1915:

There is no question that what we see on this Cunningham pencil is this same patented Heath clip, with a ball added at its terminus. On Ever Sharp pencils, these are invariably stamped “Pat. App. For”; Keeran had hired the Wahl Adding Machine Company to take over production of his Ever Sharp in October 1915, and no Ever Sharp pencils are known to exist with the actual patent date stamped on the clips.

However, this Cunningham pencil has no markings on the clip, sending my thought process in an entirely new direction. In the mid-1920s, when this Cunningham pencil was likely made, Heath’s clip patent was still very much in force – unless someone else succeeded in court to invalidate it, but I haven’t seen any evidence for that. Maybe someone acquired the rights to the patent, or maybe someone deliberately copied it.

No love was lost between Heath and the makers of the Eversharp after production of the Ever Sharp was turned over to Wahl - Heath apparently refused to allow Wahl to license the clip, so Keeran and John Wahl scrambled to design new clips (first the spade or “trowel” clip, followed quickly by Wahl’s ubiquitous tombstone-shaped version). I have no idea why the Wahl Company would have any interest in acquiring Heath’s clip after coming up with its own.

Yet, I can’t shake this feeling that this is more than a coincidence. This is the second connection I’ve found between the Presto and the Eversharp: the Gilfred v. Eversharp litigation in 1940 is one, and this Presto-ish pencil’s use of the Heath clips Ever Sharp pencils once used makes two.

There may be three.

Back in 2013, I compared Presto’s earlier, metal repeating pencils to engine-turned Wahl Eversharps. I found them to be so similar that I theorized The Wahl Company may have been the actual manufacturer of those early metal Prestos. See “Presto! A Revelation!” (August 15, 2013: Volume 2, page 214).

There’s more. While Presto did not to my knowledge offer pencils using fatter leads like this Cunningham, The Wahl Company offered several models equipped for .075" leads, just like the Cunningham pencil. In addition, one repeating pencil with thick lead and a shaky Wahl connection also comes to mind:

This is the John C. Wahl “120,” which was not a product of the Wahl Company exactly, but by John C. Wahl, Inc. John was still connected with Wahl at the time the John C. Wahl 120 was made; for whatever reason the company that bore Wahl’s name did not pursue the project but apparently allowed him to produce the pencil on his own – see “Not Just to Show Off” (February 10, 2015: Volume 3, page 221). 

Wahl’s patent for what I believe was the John C. Wahl 120 was applied for on June 19, 1939 and was issued on August 6, 1940 as number 2,210,845.

John Wahl’s design is a bit different from what we see on the Cunningham pencil, which in turn is a bit different from the Presto. While E.T. Cunningham, Inc. had been sold to RCA by the time the John C. Wahl 120 was introduced, RCA was still advertising radio tubes under the Cunningham name.

All I know at this point is that my head hurts.

Leave the Thunder. Take the Cannoli.

In addition to writing books and articles, between 2014 and 2016 I served a three-year stint as editor of the Pennant, journal of the Pen Collectors of America. When my initial three-year contract expired, I was offered an extension but I declined to continue. Somebody else should take a turn, I said, and that was true – it’s never good to have any one person driving the boat for too long, and I didn’t want The Pennant to become my personal yacht. The greater issue, however, was that nobody was helping me drive that boat and I couldn’t do it all myself.

These days my friend Jim Mamoulides is the editor, and he has succeeded where I failed: he has been able to enlist volunteers to assist with fact-checking and editing.

Of course, one of those fact checkers is me. Every time I think I’m out . . .

Before the DC Show last month, Jim asked me to help proofread an article some colleagues of mine had submitted concerning the Dictator Fountain Pen Company - I think I was tapped to help with this one because I had been discussing my only example of the Dictator pencil with one of the authors since last February:

Truth be told, I had never thoroughly examined this pencil before. I’ve had it for at least twenty years, and I don’t remember where it came from. It resided through my early years of chasing pencils in pretty colors in a shoebox along with my other “boring” metal pencils that I had accumulated, where it was all but forgotten until 2011, when I included it in The Catalogue. That was the first time most of the obscure pencils in that box received any attention at all, and I didn’t have much to say about the Dictator.

I reported its value as “unique,” not because I thought it was worth tons of money but because I had never seen another one – I had no comparable sales to which I could refer. To this day, it remains the only example that I have seen. 

Jim Mamoulides asked me to bring my Dictator pencil to the DC Show so that he borrow it and take some high-resolution photographs for the planned article. We made the exchange, and I received my pencil back around the same time Jim emailed me the draft article for review. 

After an initial read, those of us proofreading the article noted some loose ends in the article that need to be addressed before it is ready for publication. I am looking forward to seeing the revisions when they are ready - the story of the Dictator Fountain Pen Company is both lurid and fascinating.

Full stop for a quick note, not a spoiler alert but just to clarify something: there is no evidence that “Dictator” was a reference to any authoritarian leader. Given our current climate, that’s worth mentioning.

While the authors work on tightening up their article, I hope this article helps to tie up one of those loose ends. The authors were understandably hamstrung in drawing any conclusions about Dictator pencils, because all they had to go on was Jim’s pictures of my pencil’s exterior. Jim had not asked if he could try to tear my pencil apart while it was on loan to see what’s inside – while I trust Jim completely, I’m not sure what I would have said had he asked. It’s the only example any of us know exists . . . 

What the heck, I thought. Jim’s high-resolution shots of the outside of my pencil are preserved for posterity, so the time is nigh to really see what is going on inside my Dictator-marked pencil, no matter the risk. Should an attempt to dissasemble it fail and the pencil be destroyed, at least I would be the one who destroyed it, and besides . . . we all need to know whether my pencil is the same as those offered by the Dictator Fountain Pen Company, rather than an unrelated pencil someone marked “Dictator” just because it was a cool name.

I told Jim I would do a thorough analysis of the pencil here without stealing the authors’ thunder - to riff on that famous line from the Godfather, I would leave the thunder but take the cannoli. 

A small amount of background information is in order before this exercise begins. Richard Binder’s Pen Glossopedia contains an entry for the Dictator Fountain Pen Company, and I don’t think I’m stealing any thunder by reporting the current state of our collective research. Binder reports the company was formed in in 1920 by J. Hendricks, W. Burress, and E. A. Paulton. Dictator pens, like Frank Furedy’s Ink Pak pens discussed here the other day (see here), used concentrated ink cartridges and filled with water, so that in theory the pens would write for several weeks or months without refilling.

The inventor of the pen was Arthur Winter, who had obtained his original patent in Great Britain (British Patent No 178,406), and Winter obtained other patents for improvements on this design in the United States. Binder reports that Winter dissolved and reorganized Dicator in 1921 and that there is no evidence that the company continued to operate after 1923. Binder also reports the existence of the Dictator pencil, with a magazine of 18 spare leads that was advertised to write for a year without refilling.

Dictator pencils – the pen’s “little brother” – are discussed and illustrated on page two of a two-page spread published in System: The Magazine of Business in September, 1921. The authors plan to use the full advertisement in their article, but I don’t believe it takes any thunder away from them to reproduce the second page here, since a ten-second Google search is all it takes to brings it up as the first search result.

Advertising artwork is notoriously inaccurate – particularly when a pen manufacturer is sourcing pencils from a third-party manufacturer rather than making their pencils in-house. In this case, the cap and clip shown in the illustrations do not match the example in my hands, which drove my concern that my Dictator may not be what is described.

Sometimes these advertisements will show an x-ray vision cutaway of what’s going on inside, and that would have been very helpful – this, however, was not one of those times.  The text of the ad is vague but intriguing: a pencil that holds 18 spare leads isn’t unusual, but at the bottom of the page, this one says that “[o]ne lead automatically takes the place of other when it is used” and therefore it “will write 1,200,000 words without recharging.”

“Recharging” – does that mean you don’t have to put more spare leads in the magazine, or does it mean that each of those leads in the magazine somehow find their way into position automatically, without touching them at all? One of the authors provided me the documentation proving it was the latter: Donald Ladd of Elmira Heights, New York filed a Canadian patent application for this pencil on March 20, 1922, and Ladd’s drawings and specifications were published in the Canadian Illustrated Official Journal (Patents) on June 28, 1922, along with the notation that his invention was assigned to the Dictator Fountain Pen Company. Canada’s rudimentary patent database indicates that Ladd received patent number 225,369 on October 31, 1922.

Ladd’s name does not appear in American Writing Instrument Patents Vol. 2: 1910-1945, and I found no other evidence that Ladd ever obtained a patent for a pencil or anything else in the United States. The imprint on my pencil indicates only that a patent is pending, without specifying where it was pending . . . if Ladd ever filed a patent application for this pencil in the United States, I doubt that it was granted. 

I’ll leave that Canadian Official Journal image for the authors to share with you if they so choose, but here’s a cannoli to add: Ladd also filed his application in New Zealand, where it was published in the New Zealand Patent Office Journal on May 18, 1922.  The New Zealand drawings are better than the Canadian ones, showing more clearly what is going on inside Ladd’s Dictator pencil:

Twisting the cap advances or retracts a pushrod through an open space in the lower barrel, which contains spare leads. Once a lead is used up, the cap is turned the opposite direction, the pushrod retracts and, as shown at left, that little crook in the rod moves the end of the rod to the side. In theory, that allows enough space for the next lead to drop neatly down to the point, where the pushrod can advance it into position . . . at least, in theory.

While this is a pretty neat idea, in practice a design like this would never have worked well if at all. First, since the lead magazine is completely concealed from view, there is no way to see if the remains of  the previous lead are out of the way, if the rod has been retracted far enough, or that the next lead is sufficiently in position. If there are any crumbs of lead or other debris preventing that next lead from seating perfectly square, the pushrod will strike a glancing blow to the end of the lead, breaking it rather than pushing it forward.

Complicating matters further are the long-term issues that typically arise with any of these old pencils. Colored leads swell in humid conditions, so any Dictator left out in the summer filled with colored leads will inevitably become fouled. Even if only black leads are used, dust and debris builds up over time and there’s no access to clean the chamber out. 

As I prepared to disassemble my pencil, I noticed something that I need to correct in my Dictator entry in The Catalogue. I wrote that the barrel has a seam created by “folding” the metal together in the front, but that isn’t right: the barrel is in fact a solid tube with a groove pressed into one side. That creates a thinner wall where the metal is pushed in, and in the case of my pencil the barrel has partially split open at that weakened part of the barrel.

That split now caused me some anxiety as I started taking it apart, but fortunately it was easier than I thought it might be. A bayonet-style groove engages with that little indentation above the clip, and that is all that the pencil needs to hold the insides . . . well, inside:

Now we can see how that groove is a functional part of the mechanism: that groove lines up with a slotted  metal bushing at the end of the mechanism, holding it in place so that as the cap is turned, the pushrod moves up and down:

Note that the pushrod in my example lacks the bend shown in the New Zealand drawings, and likely with good reason. It was another good theory, moving the rod to the side so the next lead can fall into place, but that feature likely never worked – especially in a brand-new Dictator pencil packed to capacity with 18 spare leads, or if the user didn’t face the point straight down as the rod was retracted. 

This exercise has been a success all around. I can now say with absolute certainty that my Dictator-marked pencil is a slight variation of the design patented by Donald Ladd, assigned to the Dictator Fountain Pen Company and offered as the “little brother” to Dictator Fountain Pens between 1921 or so and 1923. I know that Ladd’s innovative design failed because it was poorly thought out. If they ever worked at all, they would have been prone to the barrels splitting, and ordinary use over time would inevitably foul them beyond repair.

I leave our Pennant authors this platter of cannoli as they continue their work on a great article about the history of the Dictator Fountain Pen Company. At least now they know everything that can be drawn from the only known surviving example of a Dictator pencil, to the extent they want to use the information it provides.

Besides, who knows? When I say I have the “only known surviving example,” all that means is I haven’t seen another one. The peanut gallery may be able to supplement what I’ve offered here with other examples, and that may add even more to the pool of knowledge that will be available to them.

That’s how these articles work - once you throw some information out there, it seems like even more information comes back that benefits us all.