Some American Adventures

The American Lead Pencil Company of New York doesn’t get much respect, since the company’s products were made for the lower-priced market. Cross-town rival Eagle Pencil Company did much the same thing, but with a much wider range of products and, therefore, a proportionally greater cult following. 

A few things have been accumulating around the A.L.P. wing of the museum (in case you have seen pencils with that imprint on the top . . . well, now you know what that stands for), starting with one that is so nice, you might question whether “lower-priced” is really a fair characterization of the company’s products:

This is a Venus Everpointed, and about the only thing subtle about it is the faint imprint on the upper barrel.

These came both with slightly domed crown tops like this, but also with rounded caps resembling a metal Conklin pencil. Both were pictured a few years ago in “The ‘Everrounded,’ Perhaps” (March 1, 2018: Volume 5, page 168), in which other variations along these lines appeared:

The American Lead Pencil Company’s bread and butter, however, was the company’s woodcased pencils, and the Venus name is more closely associated with wood pencils than their mechanical ones. American, like Eagle, had a flair for kitsch, and one of their more dramatic offerings surfaced in a box lot of pencils John Martenson sold to me at the Chicago Show in May:

This is the American Model 400 “Club,” complete with a figural golf club tip for which a patent was applied for:

That would have been a design patent to protect the tip’s appearance, rather than a utility patent to protect its function – except perhaps on the miniest of mini-golf courses. I was unable to find any patent issued to protect a golf club-shaped pencil topper. I did list a design patent for a hockey stick -shaped pencil in American Writing Instrument Patents Vol. 2: 1911-1945, but hockey players don’t use woods, and that design patent wasn’t issued until 1932.

There’s another clue on the back side of the club: “Trade Mark.” 

I’m striking out again there: in American Writing Instrument Trademarks 1870-1953, I didn’t list a trademark either for a golf club-shaped pencil, or for the word “Club” in connection with writing instruments.

What I did find, when I went to file my American “Club” pencil away, was that I already had one – or at least, something very close:

Apparently the “Club” came both in a wood and an iron, also marked with the “Trade Mark” on the face of the club:

This No. 129 “Aurora” set of wax crayons with holder  came from an online auction:

The holder is the most primitive form of “mechanical” pencil, called a porte crayon amongst those who collect pencils with their pinkies extended. It is nothing more than a tube with a slot on the end - sliding the ring forward with a crayon in place clamps the holder down to secure it for writing.

This next item is a nice piece of ephemera that was gifted to me by a visitor to the museum – I don’t remember who it was, so someone please remind me:

This 1892 postcard thanked a good customer for a recent order.

Such a nice snapshot in time, with fantastic artwork and a connection to the Housatonic Railroad Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut, was the perfect piece to put next to my “Little Giant” American dropper pencil, which has that same shield logo - see “That’s Heavy, Man” (December 20, 2016: Volume 4, page 294).

I have no idea where this last item came from – these things seem to reproduce like rabbits whenever I turn out the lights in the museum for the night.

The box is empty, and I haven’t seen an American Lead Pencil branded as the “Jewel” – but if I ever do, I know where it belongs!

Lifting the Veil a Bit More

This article has been edited and included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 6, now on sale at The Legendary Lead Company.  I have just a few hard copies left of the first printing, available here, and an ebook version in pdf format is available for download here.

If you don't want the book but you enjoy this article, please consider supporting the Blog project here.

One of the last articles I posted here before my hiatus in 2018 ("Lifting the Veil") was about this set of pencils:

The logo stands for “Veiled Prophet,” an organization in the St. Louis area that put on an annual “Fair St. Louis.”   That article leaves something out: without any manufacturer’s imprints, I wasn’t able to speculate on who might have made these generic-looking pencils, distinguishable only by their square red upper fittings (which prevent these clipless pencils from rolling around) and exposed erasers.

Even though this set was in its original box and as mint as you’d ever see, there is nothing to indicate who made them:

However, a recent online auction for another set of these appears to answer that question.  The set up for bids is identical to mine, with one small difference:

Now I suppose it’s possible that over the course of 85 years, someone might have picked up a box of pencils and thought it would look cool to slap an unrelated sticker on the front of it, but I’m back to Occam’s razor – the most reasonable explanation is that the maker of these pencils put its label on some of them, just not mine:

I’m good with attributing these to the American Lead Pencil Company, “Makers of the famous VENUS Pencils.”

Until just a couple days ago, that was all I had to add about Veiled Prophet pencils . . . but then a package arrived from Rob Bader, bearing something I’d been eyeing in his online store for a year or more.  I finally had to bite on it, since it fits in perfectly with another article you’ll see here a bit later.  When I unwrapped what was inside, though, this wasn’t what I was expecting:

I thought Rob got his wires crossed, but the pencil I was waiting for was also in there, along with a note: “Let me know if you want this one too,” it read.  

Maybe, maybe not, I thought.  It’s a Hutcheon “Finer Pointe,” and I do like those:

But it’s a lot like one I have already.  

You’ve seen it before, in The Leadhead’s Pencil Blog Vol.2, page 168.  The top part of this one also made a cameo appearance in "The Tangled Web" when I was comparing this later clip to what appears on the “Fine Point” pencils initially offered by General Manufacturing (before General came up with the goofy lever-operated Kaligraf).

On the plus side, Rob’s pencil has that more graceful, earlier clip and a pattern that’s more intricate than the one I’ve already shown you, but judging from the traces of black in the recesses and the fact that the first part of the imprint is so weak, I’m suspecting at some point in its history someone polished the tar out of it in an effort to make it look pretty (not Rob, by the way – he knows better than that).  

But there was something else about Rob’s pencil that had me abandoning my plus/minus chart.  Embossed lettering is fairly unique to Hutcheon – it’s on the back side of one of my “Hutch Clutch” pencils (see "The Mabie Todd-Hutcheon Connection").  It’s the second one from top in this picture:

Rob’s pencil also has embossing along these lines, but what it says fits perfectly in a “Veiled Prophet” update:

“Vail of Profit St. Louis Mo. 1923.”   I have no idea what it means or for what purpose it was made, but I do have a much better idea what it is meant to suggest – only because John Rimakis clued me in to the meaning of those “Veiled Prophet” pencils and I’d written about them here before.

I called Rob.  “I suppose you’re calling me about that pencil I sent you,” he said.  “Do you want it?”

“Yeah, you got me," I sighed.  "I’ve already photographed it to include in this Saturday’s article.”  We’ll settle up in Raleigh this August, I suppose.  If the creek don’t rise, as Rob would say.

Call Me Yogi

This article has been edited and included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 6, now on sale at The Legendary Lead Company.  I have just a few hard copies left of the first printing, available here, and an ebook version in pdf format is available for download here.

If you don't want the book but you enjoy this article, please consider supporting the Blog project here.

I get a lot of emails from people who want to sell me something.  Today’s pencil was offered to me for a price I couldn’t justify, as nice as it is – yes, I tend to value these things more than the average bear, but no, I’m not willing to spend vastly more than what I believe average bears would pay.

We parted friends as he set off to find an above average bear, and he agreed to let me use his pictures here at the blog (probably in the hopes I would bait such bears through an article here).  I never did – although his pictures were good enough that I could see what he had, the cell phone snapshots just didn’t do it justice.  Besides, I’m not running an advertising agency here!

Fast forward a couple years, and he’s back to offer the pencil to me again.  I was never sure whether he remembered who I was from our last exchange, but he had apparently exhausted the world’s bear population and determined that I was top bear.  It took a couple years but it was worth the wait:

It’s an American Perpetual in its original box, with paperwork and a tube of replacement leads.  I’ve written about these a couple times here at the blog (The Leadhead’s Pencil Blog Volume 2, page 206 and Volume 3, page 10):

The three examples I have with model numbers are all different . . . there’s a number 25C, a number 26, and this one is a 26-2:

The box is just fantastic, with great Jules Verne sorts of Victorian flourish on every bit of it:

I’ve had a few of these lead containers over the years, but since the lettering is dark grey on navy, they usually aren’t as legible as this:

These little points of lead were only used on the American Perpetual and they are hard to come by – that might be why in this box was a little slip of paper assuring buyers that more were available if they needed them:

The pencil is also as mint as they come:

The two patent dates for the pencil, 480,188 and 584, 993, are evident on the barrel:

In the last article I did about these, about the more green “Panopepton” advertising example, I had noted there was a six-digit number stamped on the top part that I couldn’t figure out.  The number on that one was 336,333:

I was never able to conclusively determine what that number meant, but I came up with a reasonable guess.  The hex color number corresponding to 336,333 was really close to the color of the barrel, so I thought it might be a paint code:

This new addition also has a six digit number on the extender, but this one is 483,979:

I went back to color-hex.com to see what color number 483,979, hoping it would be that pale pea-green, but alas:

I guess that was just a one-in-a-million coincidence, since it’s nowhere close to the right color this time.  Back to square one, and my only other guess is that American actually stamped serial numbers on the Perpetual, at least for a time.

There was paperwork neatly folded in the box, undisturbed for more than a century.  I spent some time carefully unfolding it and flattening it out, and it was different from paperwork I’ve seen for these before:

And on the reverse, wonderful instructions:

Normally, once I get paperwork like this flattened out, I’ll keep it in a plastic protective sleeve.  In this case though, it just didn’t seem right.  After these photos were taken, I carefully folded it back the way it was and put it back in the box.

That's Heavy, Man

This article has been edited and included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 4; copies are available print on demand through Amazon here, and I offer an ebook version in pdf format at the Legendary Lead Company here.

If you don't want the book but you enjoy this article, please consider supporting the Blog project here.

Robert Foster offered this one online recently, and I’d watched it for weeks.  When I came home after the DC show, I couldn’t take it anymore, and I finally bit:

It’s a gravity pencil . . . point the tip down, and the tip emerges and locks into place for writing; tilt the tip up, and it unlocks and retracts back into the barrel.

More or less.  The mechanism is a bit cranky and it takes a fair amount of shaking and jiggling accompanied with the tilting to make it do its thing.  That’s not bad though, considering the pencil is more than a century old:

“Hicks Pat. May 9, 05.”  Note also the little acorn hallmark in the left panel - right next to the end of the word “sterling.”  Richard H. Ryan applied for a patent for his “gravity-pencil” on February 7, 1905 and it was issued May 9 as number 789,386.  Ryan’s patent was assigned to William S. Hicks’ Sons, of New York, NY, a firm.

This one might have shattered your notions concerning how old the gravity mechanism is . . . most of the time, these show up on 1960s ballpoints.  But the Hicks gravity pencil wasn’t the first - not by a longshot:

This one hails from the American Lead Pencil Company:

At the top it is identified as the “Little Giant”:

And at the nose, a bit of evidence that this one was around more than a decade and a half earlier than the Hicks:

“American L.P. Co. / L & C Hardmuth / Pat. Jan. 31 ‘88.”  The date refers to patent number 377,194, applied for on September 24, 1887 by Costi De Meyer of Budweis, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary:

Unlike the cantankerous Hicks, the American works flawlessly.  Who would have thought?