That's All I'm Going To Say About That

This article has been included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 7, now available here.

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When I sit down to write one of these articles, my method of picking the topic of the day is very non-scientific:  I open the file folder containing all the pictures I’ve taken, and I scroll through until I find something that I think would be fun to write about.  As the more meaty subjects get pulled out and placed in the “published” file, what's left behind are the brisket tips -- good stuff, worth photographing and definitely worth noting here, but more of an appetizer than a meal.  While each of these notes might not be enough for a complete article, today I'll string a few of these little notes together into a little tune.  

The Colorgraph:

I haven’t written about the Colorgraph for some time, most recently in Volume 2, page 95.  Since I’ve found so few of these duplex pencils over the years, it’s one of those brands I’ll chase even if I think I already have one, in the hopes there will be some tiny difference that will add to the story.  Recently, I chased and caught an example in black:

Unfortunately, it was identical to my other examples (and I still haven’t found an intact earlier model, with the longer nose).  So . . . all I have to tell you is that they also come in black.

The Ruxton:

The 1,000th post here at the Blog (Volume 4, page 351) covered the Ruxton well, including the company’s archive of prototype and shop models as well as production examples – including some boxed ones.  I bought this one because the box was different - the other examples in my collection are dark blue with black lettering, but this one you can actually read:

The pencil is extremely clean, but unfortunately there’s nothing different about it from what I’ve shown you already:

The Welsh Manufacturing Company:

This one was in a box lot of junk that came my way, and it wasn’t my intended target.  

From the clip and the nose, I knew it was made by the Welsh Manufacturing Company of Providence, Rhode Island.  Here it is shown alongside other variations on the theme:

I would have just put it in the Welsh drawer without photographing it, except for one small detail:

This one has a painted wood barrel.

The “Arrow Double”:

I’d never heard of this one before:

It nearly identical to one already in my collection, with two exceptions:

First, it lacks that great arched “14kt Gold Plate” imprint on the clip:

And second, the producer’s imprint on the top is different.  I say producer, because I don’t know who manufactured either one:

The one I had is an Ajax; this new one is marked “Arrow Double.”  I haven’t been able to discover anything about the Arrow Double in the year since I found it.

The Bridge Set:

I had such high hopes for this next find:

This nice box contained a beautiful set of sterling pencils marked with card suits:

I wrote about a similar set in a recent article about bridge pencil sets in Volume 6, page 194.  On page 196, I showed an English set by William Manton along the same lines that Joe Nemecek had given to me; it was newer than I had hoped, bearing a hallmark dating it to 1979.

This set appears to be older, and I expected hallmarks that would be a bit more . . . well, a bit more vintage than me, anyway.  Alas, there are no hallmarks and it appears to have been made for export to the United States, marked only “Made in England / Sterling Silver.” 

An Interesting Sheaffer Sharp Point:

This Sheaffer Sharp Point is on the early side of production, with a bowler clip and that zigzag-with-dots pattern:

What’s inside isn’t what I would expect.

The earliest Sharp Points look like this inside (see Volume 4, page 324):

While later Sheaffers (early 1920s on) look like this:

I’m not sure where this one fits in.

Cross-Built:

Here’s three very similar pencils . . . the bottom one is a typical Cross Century:

Two are marked on the clip: the Cross, and one marked “Swank.”

The Swank brand appeared in Volume 1, page 345 – on a ruler pencil/tie clip pencil.  Swank, Inc., as reported in that previous article, survives as a division of Randa Accessories.  The third pencil has a plain clip, but a nice imprint on the barrel:

It’s a “PAT One Twenty.”  PAT was a trademark of Ketcham & McDougall, Inc., better known for making those pencils attached to a pin by a retractable chain.  The company claimed to first use the mark on September 18, 1936, according to the trademark registration:

All three of these pencils share very similar features, and my suspicion is that Cross made all three.  The Swank and PAT One Twenty share another element - that black plastic ring in the middle:

Welty’s

At the Krinke auction, one of my impulse buys was this fountain pen, complete with the box but with a conspicuously absent pencil:

The imprint is on the barrel, concealed under the cap when closed:

The pen was made by DeWitt-LaFrance, and I wasn’t planning on chasing it until I saw how small it was:

I wrote about the Welty’s DeWitt-LaFrance pencils in Volume 3, page 158; I came across the pen at some time since.  If the matching Welty’s pencil surfaces, it would be about the smallest DeWitt-LaFrance pencil I’ve seen.

The Baby Jumbo:

The Baby Jumbo is in Volume 1, page 373, and it’s not really “mechanical.”  A wood pencil is wedged in the neck of a glass bottle containing candy:

There was another example up for bids at the Krinke auction; I took “just in case” pictures of it before the auction started, because this one had the original paper label on it:

It would have been nice to bring this one home, but the pencil was identical to what I had, and the only thing the label provided was a cute admonishment to “Write your mother a letter today.”  When the bidding got a little crazy on this one, I couldn’t justify spending what it would take - so my “just in case” picture will have to do!

Coincidence No 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.

There’s two types of “bridge pencils.”  In America, they usually took the form of pencils with on-board scoring “cheat sheets,” like those ones bearing a seal of approval from Ely Culbertson, bridge-playing rock star of the 1930s (see "Bridge Player of the Century").

Overseas, bridge pencils were less gimmicky and more genteel sets of four pencils, representing the four card suits, one for each player in a game of contract bridge.  They were typically packaged in nice cases, to be brought out ceremoniously like fine china for a more formal sort of social occasion.  

And, since they typically aren’t American, they fall outside my self-imposed collecting bailiwick.  “Two’s a coincidence and three’s a collection” has been my mantra, which is why as late as 2015 I was still counting these as “two” (see"This Counts as Two, Right?"):

These sets were made by English maker Burnham; the Canasta set is so marked, and the set marked “Harrod’s” inside the box lid was marketed by the London department store by that name.

The fiction that I don’t collect these has long since collapsed, and I’m keen on finding nice bridge sets regardless of their country of manufacture.  The first picture in this article is from the box lid of a set that recently came my way via Jerome Rosenthal:

While Mabie Todd & Co. is a firm with American origins, the “Ltd.” at the end designates its British operations, and the pencils are clearly continental.  They have triangular barrels, and the colors are just spectacular:

And unlike the Burnham sets, these pencils sport imprints.  Even if they didn’t I wouldn’t question whether these are Mabie Todds, but it doesn’t hurt to have that extra little bit of confirmation:

“‘DACE’ / Mabie, Todd & Co. Ltd. / Registered No. 728198.”  It’s frustrating trying to find information concerning British registrations; they consider such historical information over there to be a profit center.  One day I aspire to do for British patents and trademarks what I’ve been able to do over here, where free access facilitated the creation of the reference books I needed.  Unfortunately, without spending a considerable amount of money on British records, a registration number like this is about as useful as a bicycle is to a fish, so the saying goes.

A rant for another day, I suppose.  

Here’s another British bridge set, which Joe Nemecek gifted to me:

I used to think this was a much older set which had been rehoused in something much newer, since the pencils look like something from the turn of the last century.  Quite a coincidence though, to find a perfectly sized case with four perfectly sized bands to hold these:

The hallmarks tell me that this is all original and as it should be.  It’s quite a bit newer than it looks, and newer also than nearly everything in my collection:

The three stamps in the middle are traditional English silver hallmarks, which have been in use for hundreds of years.  The one on the left is an anchor, denoting Birmingham assay office.  The lion denotes sterling silver (and is a duplicate of the more recent “925" marks on the right).  The important one is that script E, which is the date code corresponding to 1979.  

As for the “W.M” at the beginning, that is the manufacturer’s hallmark.  The only one I found operating in Birmingham in 1979 was William Manton, also known as Birmingham Gold & Silversmiths, Ltd.

The lure of matching pencils with card suits even pulls me in when they are more humble; these came in a box marked “Germany” but are otherwise unidentified:

Then there’s this set, which turned up at the DC show a couple years ago.  

There’s no markings on the pencils other than “Foreign” (meaning foreign to the UK, into which they were imported), and they combine American kitch with a bit of European flair: four pencils, each marked with all four suits and bearing on-board cheat sheets, accompanied with a nice metal plate with an “Honor Column” and brief description of penalties.  At the tops, square inserts prevent these clipless pencils from rolling, which might suggest “Foreign” meant brought back to the crown from the former colonies – that’s just like what you’ll see on the Vanco bridge pencil (see "Trick Pencils . . . For Tricks").

Here in the states, where the Slencil company turned out these “Stag Slencil” bridge sets (featured here back in 2013, see The Leadhead’s Pencil Blog Vol. 2, page 247):

Slencil was one of the few American companies turning out four pencil sets like the ones in Europe, but an article such as this wouldn’t be complete without including the American royalty on the subject:

Resting comfortably in a corner of the museum is Parker’s offerings on the subject: the bridge set consisting of four enameled and separately boxed bases, with red and black golf pencils.  I’ve written about these more continental sets before (see The Leadhead’s Pencil Blog, Vol. 1 at page 300 and Vol. 2 at page 137), and also about Parker’s scoring pencils in the foreground (those weird triangular pencils with red round tops - see Vol. 1, page 318 and more recently, at "Bridging the Gap"). 

I don’t have anything new to add about the Parker stuff – it just didn’t seem right to post an article about bridge sets without including them. 

PS - Joe Nemecek has a similar affinity for things like this - check out his post over at Joe's Pencil Pages:  Joe's Bridge sets.

Bridge Player of the Century

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 already had an example of this pencil, but when one with box and instructions comes up, I can’t help but upgrade if the price is reasonable:

Unfortunately, the box wasn’t right – a cardboard base with an unrelated plastic top with tabs to snap into something else... just something to give a seller that extra bit of “NOS” flavor to sucker in a guy like me.  At least the pencil is nice:

It’s an example of “Ely Culbertson’s Own Bridge Pencil” and it was made by the Apex Products Corporation of New York, makers of the Apex “Magic Multiplying Pencils”:

These had a built-in cheat sheet to help you calculate how much to bid in the card game of contract bridge.  Turning the barrel revealed numbers on a scroll inside.  The instruction sheet shows how:

The mechanics are the same as what Apex employed on its “Magic Multiplying Pencils” and, in fact, Apex also made contract bridge pencils in that form, too:

The striated example has a slightly different imprint: it is simply a “Magic Contract Scoring Pencil” and it reflects rules updated on April 1, 1935.

The boxed Ely Culbertson example has no date, so I don’t know whether the celebrity spokesman signed on before or after 1935.  The “Contract Bridge Game of The Century” took place in 1931-1932 (yes, it kept going while the calendar flipped over to the new year) and Culbertson’s last tournament appearance was in 1937, so it could have been either.

And, Culbertson didn’t just lease out his name to Apex:

These operated on the same principle as the Apex - the center barrel section rotates around a printed scroll, revealing different bid calculations based on different scenarios.  However, they weren’t made by Apex:

These “Culbertson Scoring Pencils” were made by Salz, and while the imprint indicates that patents were pending, I wasn’t able to find one that lines up with what I’m seeing here.  Perhaps someone else beat Salz to it, or he was licensing the rights to make these pencils from someone else:

This one also has Ely Culbertson’s name on it – and a patent number:

Nicholas E. Nicolet, of New York City, filed a patent application for his scoring device on October 8, 1931, and his patent was issued on May 24, 1932 as number 1,859,524.

This patent doesn’t appear in American Writing Instrument Patents Vol. 2: 1911-1945; although the patent shows his invention incorporated into a pencil or pen, it wasn’t filed under the categories in which pens and pencils were patented.  This one was filed in category 235, for “Registers,” subcategory 87R, “cylindrical.”  Nothing short of reviewing every patent would have turned this one up!

However, since I was now in that neighborhood, I checked this odd category to see if there were any other patents along these lines worth reporting to you today, and I found one – in fact, it may well be the one licensed to Apex for its “Magic Multiplying Pencils”:

Helen Rowe Thomas and Adolph A. Thomas acquire this design patent on an application filed October 24, 1928; it was issued on March 4, 1930 as Design Patent 80,646.

(Note: I’d also photographed and nearly included other bridge pencils, a “Vanco,” one made by Welsh Manufacturing Co., and an unidentified one.  Then I searched “Vanco” because I knew I’d seen an advertisement for them somewhere, and the first thing that popped up was the article I wrote about them here in 2018.  Rather than repeat myself, see https://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2018/03/trick-pencils-for-tricks.html.)