The Other Beegee

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.

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(Originally scheduled to post May 14, 2018) 

It’s been years since I’ve thought about the Beegee line of budget leadholders (see The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Vol. 1, page 413).  I don’t know why I never posted about this find, from the Philadelphia Show that year:

With the box and paperwork, the “Beegee Perfect Ink Eraser” deserves a mention:

The “eraser” is actually a fiberglass brush, concealed within the nose cone - exposing just a tiny bit would create a very stiff abrasive surface to buff ink from the page.   Although it was marketed as an ink eraser, it works equally for scuffing pencil marks away, too:

The cap is marked “Beegee Jr. / Pat. Oct. 17, 1911:

Francis Henry Baldwin and William Graff of New York applied for this patent on June 30, 1910, and it was issued as number 1,005,924:

And yes Virginia, the patent is listed in American Writing Instrument Patents Volume 2: 1911-1945.

Worth The Price Of Admission

For the bargain basement price of 99 cents, I won a small group of tired pencils in an online auction, including this one.

It’s a leadholder, and the barrel is so thin that someone actually cracked it in a couple places just by tightening the clutch around the lead. But it has a few interesting features. Around the top is a name I hadn’t heard of before:  "Beegee." It seems that the only reason I hadn’t heard of this one is that so few of them survived (did I mention how thin the barrel was?), not that there weren’t many made. The earliest advertisement I could find for the pencil was in the June, 1914 edition of The Magazine of Business . . .

NOTE:  This article is now included in the print version of The Leadhead's Pencil Blog, available anywhere you buy books, or also from The Legendary Lead Company.

To order, here's the link:  Volume 1 at Legendary Lead Company