More on Racing Stripes

As detailed on October 28, it was Ephraim S. Johnson and not Alonzo Cross who was awarded the design patent for “racing stripes” on writing instruments, but those rights were likely shared with Cross (and with those whom Cross supplied, such as Bates & Bacon) while the patent was active. 

After Johnson’s patent expired, though, A.T. Cross would take Johnson’s idea to an entirely new level. In this group of Cross “Alwrite” pencils, note the bottom one:

That striped green one came from Jeffrey Krasner, who sold me a box full o’ stuff at the Boston Show in 2022. All of these are marked Cross with “Alwrite” in script below:

“Alwrite” was a Cross trademark, applied for by Walter R. Boss, its president, on January 13, 1919. Boss claimed that the company began using the mark on December 5, 1918, and the mark was awarded registration number 129,664.

Those large plastic models, with their two-piece tips, were also rebadged and supplied to LeBoeuf and Grieshaber, and I haven’t had the heart to scavenge a tip to complete that jade example. The real focus for today’s purposes are the twin sets of twin stripes on the bottom one: those aren’t painted, but are separate pieces of black plastic sandwiched in place.

Next is this one, which slipped through the cracks. It was hiding in a pile of junk that sold for peanuts in an online auction:

The Cross Century is so ubiquitous that it’s easy to miss what’s special here, although I’m surprised nobody else noticed the telltale racing stripes. This isn’t a Cross Century - the name was adopted in commemoration of A.T. Cross’s 100th anniversary in 1946. For the Century, clips are more streamlined, and when you see a ball clip, that’s a dead giveaway that we are looking at a pre-Century streamlined Cross pencil. In fact, this one has one foot in the past and one foot in what’s to come: it’s somewhat obscured by the engine turned pattern, but it has the Alwrite name mid-barrel.

As you can see, it is missing the typical conical black plastic piece on the top. No worries, I thought – but in hindsight I should have worried a little bit, because it was tougher to replace than I expected. I had thought all I needed to do was salvage a black plastic top from those common, chrome Century ballpoints and pencils. Not so:

The tops on Modern Cross Century pens and pencils are press fit, while these pre-Century pencils have end pieces that are threaded. I went through my stash and found a couple other ball clip Cross pencils

Since I found two and one is a duplicate, I wasn’t too concerned repurposing the top piece from one of them.

And, once the transplant was completed, I had what I considered to be the finished shot for this article - a happy family of Cross racing stripes on parade.

Alas . . . the family was about to get happier. 

This one also appeared in an online auction, with badly deteriorated paint and like the other one, missing its top piece. I was hesitant to steal the one from my other plain, ball clip Cross - so I experimented a bit with the press-fit top that I had removed from a modern Century. After I turned down the diameter a bit, I was able to get it to thread into the top end; while the attachment is different, the more modern Century top piece is otherwise a perfect fit.

Then there was the paint, which was badly chipped in several spots showing ugly brass underneath. I used masking tap, a bottle of Testor’s black model paint and a set of tiny paint brushes to bring it back to life.

In 1996, Cross did do a 150th Anniversary pen in this same configuration, complete with ball clip, and there was also a matching pencil (although the pencils I’ve seen were in gold fill rather than chromed). There are differences, though, and this one is the real deal. The 150th Anniversary pens and pencils used .9mm leads, while this one takes 1.1mm. In addition, the Anniversary edition was not marked with the pre-Century AXT imprint – as in A.T. “Cross.”

Racing Stripes: The Origin Story

Many years ago, I wrote a series of articles exploring A.T. Cross after I photographed the late Jim Rouse’s collection at the 2012 Baltimore Show. The title of the article that included these was “A.T. Cross: Racing Stripes” (May 6, 2012: Volume 1, page 192).

Black enameled stripes on a metal pencil are usually a clear indication that Cross was the manufacturer. This example recently turned up in an online auction:

Yes, it is marked AXT as so many of the pencils along these lines are . . . but what caught my eye is what is stamped on the extender of this magic pencil.

“Design Patented. Mar. 25, 73.” I haven’t seen this on any other Cross pencil, and those of use who like Cross have long puzzled over whether there was ever any design patent, trademark, or other intellectual property claim protecting the “racing stripe” look, since that is such an easily recognizable feature of Cross pencils.

I pulled out American Writing Instrument Patents 1799-1910 – I was sure I would have remembered seeing this one, as I went through them one by one in the course of writing the book, but maybe I forgot . . . no, there are no design patents listed in there for March 25, 1873. That left no alternative but the old fashioned way, thumbing through patents issued on that date one by one until it turned up.

No wonder I missed design patent number 6,523 - it was filed only in a design patent category for “paper products.” I also wouldn’t have found it by searching Alonzo T. Cross by name: it was issued to Ephraim S. Johnson, perhaps best known for his “Pearl Patent” of December 5, 1871. The “Pearl Patent” was for a method of attaching distinctive pearl-slab barrels like the one at bottom in this group of E.S. Johnson pencils. 

Design patents protect the appearance rather than the function of an item, so Johnson’s patent 6,523 would have protected the black banding on this pencil too, even though these are hard rubber bands rather than painted. However, there’s no reference to Johnson’s 1873 racing stripes patent on this one - just the usual “Pearl Patent.” Perhaps he had yet to apply for his design patent for racing stripes.

The New York writing instrument manufacturers had a gentlemen’s agreement to share patents and pay each other royalties rather than litigate disputes over who invented what. As I was preparing to write this article, this next one appeared in an online auction – if my antennae hadn’t been up thinking about these at the time, I might have dismissed it as a common Cross magic pencil:

This one sure looks like a Cross, and comparing the front end to the first picture in this article, I’d say it’s a pretty safe bet that Cross made it . . . but not for its own account.

“Bates & B.,” as in Bates & Bacon (see “B Who?” on October 19, 2012: Volume 1, page 383), the Attleboro, Massachusetts jeweler responsible for a disastrous 1898 fire that originated – of all things – when lacquer caught fire in their factory. Bates & Bacon rebuilt after the fire, but the company was sold in 1901 to the Philadelphia Watch Case Company. 

Ephraim Johnson may have come up with the idea and held the design patent for the racing stripe idea, but it was Cross that would pick it up and run with it so successfully for decades after Johnson’s patent expired.

A New Flavor

A few days ago, I mentioned that Paul Erano had sold me that last bag of John Holland pencils and parts. Now I’ll tell you why I was so eager to buy it. At the Raleigh Show a few months earlier, I bought a few other John Holland items from Paul, including this one:

That barrel looks like marbled celluloid at first, but I think it’s hard rubber that has been painted or stained to look that way - note at the nose end, the marbling stops where the material is stepped down:

As with many of the other items that came from Bob Johnson’s collection, this one has a nice price sticker indicating the original price was $3.50.

The barrel is stamped “John Holland” right above the clip, which has Holland’s tulip logo impressed into it:

Paul and I examined it together, and we agreed this one is a little off of the beaten path for a John Holland. I didn’t want to pay much for just part of a pencil, but Paul reassured me: he had a whole box filled with John Holland parts, and he would bring them to me in DC so I could finish putting this one together.

He forgot to bring them along to DC, but at the Ohio Show in November all those parts went from box to bag to Jon. There were a lot of great stuff in there . . . unfortunately, the pieces I needed to finish putting this one together were not among them. That left me trolling through my parts bins at home trying to find what I needed to complete it.  

I started with my stash of Rex Manufacturing Company parts, thinking perhaps it might be one of these with a different style cap and clip:

Nope, those parts don’t work at all. Rex patent pencils have noses that screw onto the end of a threaded barrel rather than slip over the end of an unthreaded one. I settled for taking the preceding pictures and filing it away. The answer will come to me at some point, I hoped.

It did – only because I finally got around to rearranging things at the museum. The addition of two printers’ cabinets gave me the chance to finally get all of my John Holland stuff spread out but in one place . . . it had previously been scattered – er . . . carefully grouped – in three areas, with the Victorian stuff in one place, the Rex patent pencils with the other Rex stuff, and the “everything else” part crowded onto the wall o’ pencils. As things went into the drawer, I noticed that I did have an intact John Holland pencil along these lines.

There’s that same cap and clip, and I know the pencil I got from Paul had a two-stage smooth tip – assuming, of course, that all John Holland pencils like this looked the same, but I think that’s a fair assumption. I started pulling things off the shelves in other areas of the museum, looking for things to compare.

Here’s the John Holland next to a maroon Grieshaber pencil at center, and a LeBoeuf “Unbreakable” parts pencil I picked up for peanuts at the Don Scott show because it is . . . well, it’s broken. Note that both of these have a very similar two-stage tip, and there is a reason for that: both the Grieshaber and the LeBoeuf were built around mechanisms supplied by Cross and used on the Cross Alwrite line of oversized pencils.

I was really hoping that LeBoeuf would be able to breathe its last making my John Holland whole, but when I attempted to transplant the nose I ran into a problem.

The tip unscrewed easily and fits like a glove on the threaded end of the John Holland, but I wasn’t able to wrestle the gold filled section from the LeBoeuf barrel. I was able to get it budge just a little, enough to see that the diameter of the stepped down section on the barrel is narrower than my John Holland. Even should I resort to barbaric means of parts removal, it wouldn’t fit my Holland.

I really didn’t want to scavenge a perfectly good Grieshaber, but I wondered if that might be the same nose . . . 

Nope.  Grieshaber sections screw into the barrel. No worries for now; most of my John Holland will reside comfortably in the museum, awaiting the day that the front half of the right pencil comes along . . . 

. . . or Paul finds another bag of parts.

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.

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

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!