Rib Night at the Museum

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There’s something I want you to notice about that “sterling”(ish) Morrison ringtop from yesterday’s article: that little ring just beneath the cap:

A “tell,” I call it . . . a distinctive little feature that suggests connection with other brands.  The diamonds around the crown are another one.  I’ve come to believe that the Rex Manufacturing Company was quietly working behind the scenes making all of these, shortly before McNary’s patent launched the company onto its trajectory into “stardom,” in my little world.

Recently, a couple other ribbed pencils came my way.  The first is this one:

The name on this one is “Wilrite” – another one that I thought had made the blog before, but I don’t see it. 

 I know I took pictures of one at the Baltimore Show, back when it was at the Tremont Grand.   I don’t remember who had it, but it’s the full-size set along the same lines:

Inside the box lid, there’s a neat logo with “Reg. U.S. Pat. Off.” beneath it:

That’s a cue to check trademarks registered with the Patent Office, and the Wilrite trademark is included in American Writing Instrument Trademarks 1870-1953:

Gustave Rappeport, as Secretary and Treasurer of the Wilrite Fountain Pen Corporation, claimed that the company had used the mark since January, 1922, and the company’s address was 312-314 Lafayette Street, New York City as of the date of the application, January 23, 1925.

The trademark application must have been filed while the company was in the process of moving.  A Wilrite  advertisement for sales representatives in the Chicago Tribune on March 22, 1925 identified the company’s address as 1493 Broadway:

Morrison, according to the trademark filing in yesterday’s article, was offering pencils with that same little rib near the top just a few doors down, at 1547 Broadway.  In fact, New York seems to be the common denominator for a lot of these:

The first two beneath the Wilrite have that same rib, but the top ends and crowns are different.  You’ve seen them before: the “Bonnwear” (Volume 3, page 33 and most recently in Volume 6, page 25):

And the Ever-Rite (Volume 3, page 71).  Note that the color of the cap is slightly different from the barrel, so I can’t say with certainty that it isn’t a replacement:

The Bonnwear and Ever-Rite have a Sheafferesque mechanism, which has led me back down that rabbit hole several times.  The others, however, have caps that just pull off just like the Wilrite.  From top to bottom, there’s a “Keene New York,” sporting a cap with diamonds around the crown, like the Morrison:

A “Just-Rite / P.S.M. Co” (see Volume 4, page 147), with those same diamonds:

A “Handy Pencil,” also with those diamonds:

And a “Newark Pen Co.,” with the same ribbing on the top as the Wilrite:

After these pictures were taken, another one surfaced in an online auction:

This one also has diamonds around the crown, and another shadowy imprint – “W.J.B.”:

I’m confident that the same firm made the ribbed pencils marked Morrison, Wilrite, Keene, Just-Rite, Handy Pencil, Newark Pen Co., and W.J.B.  It definitely wasn’t Keene, because he was a jeweler, not a manufacturer (see Volume 5, page 285).  I suspect it wasn’t Morrison or Newark Pen, since both were mainly in the pen business.  

That leaves open the P.S.M. Co., maker of the “Just-Rite,” whoever this W.J.B. was, and whoever made the “Handy Pencil.” 

Or someone else entirely.  I haven’t given up on Rex as a possibility, but as of this writing I don’t have enough information.

One Itch Down

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.

As long as I have a picture, I don’t need to have the pencil, I always tell myself.

Sometimes, I’m lying.  In The Catalogue, one of the few pictures in the book I didn’t take showed this pencil:

Well, not this pencil exactly.  It’s just taken me ten years to find my own example, and it turned up at the Ohio Show last November.  The imprint tells the story:

“Arthur A. Waterman Co. / Modern Pen Co. Successor / Not Connected With / The L.E. Waterman Co.”   The picture of one of these on page 161 of The Catalogue was from a kindly online seller who allowed me to use his – I was excited to finally handle and be able to photograph one in person.

Arthur A. Waterman’s history is a convoluted one, told here at the blog back in 2013 (the full article is no longer online, but it is in the print version of The Leadhead’s Pencil Blog Volume 2, at page 156).  The Modern Pen Company was formed by agreement with Arthur A. Waterman in 1905, as a sales agent to sell A.A. Waterman pens.  Litigation with the L.E. Waterman Company culminated with a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1914, affirming an appeals court decision requiring A.A. Waterman to use the “not connected with” disclaimer on its products.

In 1921, the Modern Pen Company dropped the Waterman name altogether, renamed itself Chicago Safety Pen Company, and its pencils were thereafter named the EVRDA (that’s a goofy acronym for “Everyday”). 

That puts today’s pencil between 1914 and 1921, and it’s going to be on the later side of that range; in 1914, the Ever Sharp pencil was only just beginning its upward trajectory, and pencils such as these copied the Eversharp look after it became widely available after 1917.

Did the Modern Pen Company make this pencil?  Absolutely not - they were made for it by a third party supplier, stamped with the ungainly Modern name and disclaimer.  There’s a tell here that points towards who made these: that rib on the barrel, just above the imprint.  It appears on the Bonnwear, the Ever-Rite and others along those lines:

These pencils led me into one of the deepest quagmires I’ve explored here.  The series began with “Wear it Well” in October, 2014 (Volume 3, page 33), then blossomed into an exploration of the Ever-Rite and the similarities of these pencils to the Sheaffer Sharp Point (Volume 3, page 71) . . . which, in turn, led to Wahl, Sheaffer and the Race for Boston (that one is still online here, at https://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2016/12/wahl-sheaffer-and-race-for-boston-part.html).  Pencils like these make my head hurt trying to find and explain all the connections between 1920s manufacturers.

And today’s A.A. Waterman presents yet another wrinkle: although from the outside this pencil looks just like those Bonnwear and Ever-Rite pencils, with those eraser tubes that pull out of the barrel, when I pulled the cap this A.A. Waterman, it’s just an ordinary cap over an eraser.  No Sheaffer-like mechanism.

So that’s one itch scratched.  Another still has me climbing the walls.

The Evidence Continues to Build

The other day, as I was getting caught up on taking some pictures, I found myself looking for a pencil I just knew I last saw right over . . . there . . .ish. I don’t know what made me think that it might have been in this box, because I remembered it didn’t come with one, but that didn’t stop me from opening this up and forgetting completely what I was looking for:

This was in a drawer with other stuff I found at the Chicago Pen Show last May, and I remember I saw it late in the show on my good friend Presnall Wood’s table. Presnall is a great guy to talk to, and I know as usual I must have stopped to chat with him a dozen times or more over the course of the weekend, but whether I had been too wrapped up in talking with him or whether he had just pulled this set out from under his table late in the show, I hadn’t noticed it before.

I’d bought plenty that weekend, including other things from Presnall, and I wasn’t showing much interest in the set – after all, it included one of those pesky pens I don’t have much use for. Yet for whatever reason, Presnall was determined not to take it home with him. I don’t remember what his offer was, but I do remember that it was one I was powerless to refuse.

Now, in light of some research here at the blog, I’m glad I didn’t.

To learn more, this full article is included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 3, available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and everywhere else you buy books, or you can order a copy signed by yours truly through the Legendary Lead Company HERE.

Wear it Well

This is one that I’ve had for a while, and I’ve been waiting for the day that I could write about it and say something better than "I don’t know."

The day has come, and yet as I started writing this, I went right back to "I don’t know" – as in I didn’t know where I’d put the darn thing, leading Truman the Cat and I to spend half an hour scouring the museum for this one! Fortunately, my recollection of what it looked like and roughly (very roughly) were I had seen it last eventually turned it up in the stuff-not-yet-photographed zone:

This fairly typical metal pencil, apparently from the early 1920s, has "Bonnwear" imprinted on it. I hadn’t seen the name before, and after a bit of poking around with nothing to show for it, the pencil quietly slipped into my dead letter office years ago. Until the other day, about the closest thing I’d ever found to that name was the "Bon-Ton," but I knew that probably wasn’t right. And it wasn’t.

Then I stumbled across that 1922-early 1923 volume of issues from The Jewelers’ Circular, the same bunch that unraveled J.C. Wood & Sons for me recently. No focused search took me down this road, and I was just electronically thumbing through old issues when I ran across this advertisement in the November 22, 1922 issue . . .

To learn more, this full article is included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 3, available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and everywhere else you buy books, or you can order a copy signed by yours truly through the Legendary Lead Company HERE.