No Names of Significance

A “No Name” pen or pencil, in our collectors’ vernacular, is one which does not have a desirable manufacturer’s name. It does not mean that an item is entirely unmarked. “No Name of Significance” is more accurate.

I get a huge kick out of picking up these “No Name” brands. Sometimes one will turn out to be a subbrand of a well-known manufacturer. Other times there’s a neat back story about how or why they were made, or an interesting charlatan at work. 

Then there are those that just provide a good laugh. I don’t have much to say about the pencils in this article, other than I’ve enjoyed adding them to the museum.

This is a typical cheap, Welsh-style mechanism pencil, with “Old Fogey” on the clip.

If this next one is to be believed, I’m surprised I had not heard of it before:

There’s something strange going on at the nose - that mechanism had to be press fit in place from the front, since there’s no access from the rear. It either never made it all the way in or has worked itself back out. If it is indeed as “Famous” as advertised, you’d think I’d know the answer:

Here is the “Alwasrite,” with a cap reminiscent of the Eclipse-made Keene pencils, but a decidedly cheaper clip:

Is that a riff on “Always Right,” or was it “All Was Right” before this one came along?

This next one showed up in the online auctions with an opening bid of one cent and five dollars shipping.

I didn’t want to pay much, so I bid two cents . . . and I won for half that much, so I was $5.01 all in with shipping. I paid too much.

“Consolidated,” it says on the clip. Usually, people consolidate their strengths, but in this case, I think every bad design idea was consolidated into one pencil. Maybe the notion was to get all the bad ideas off the market in one fell swoop, from the crappy barrel material, cheap wartime plastic clip (or perhaps, one left over after the war), and lousy trim plating. 

Next up is a cigar figural novelty pencil. Louis F. Dow made these in large numbers, but they were made of wood; this one is plastic:

I don’t have any evidence to suggest that Dow was behind this one, but whoever was shared Louis’ campy sense of humor. This is the “El Pencillo”:

I’ve found two examples of this next “No Name,” although there are enough differences between the two that I can’t confirm the same characters were behind both of them:

Maybe the pens had a “Reservoir,” but the pencils at least had the name on the clip:

I have a couple clues to suggest these were made by Eclipse – nothing definitive, but suggestive. The same clips were used on some Eclipse pencils. 

And one example in my collection uses a cursive script that is very similar to one of the Reservoirs.

I also have a pretty good idea who might have been responsible for the “Supreme”:

I have two of these - the model that was already in my collection was missing that mysterious “B” in a circle above the name, and it has a tag from its previous owner indicating he (or she) had found it at a flea market in Rockville, Maryland in 1981. Good collector’s history there.

That wild green and white combination strongly resembles an example of the Nassau, which I believe was made by David Kahn (maker of the Wearever line) for that rascal James Kelley (see “All the King’s Horsemen Part 1, posted July 26, 2021: Volume 7, page 290). Kelley’s brands included letters within a circle above the name like this, and perhaps “B” is a throwback to the “Banker” line Kelley sold.  The celluloid also matches a Gordon that turned up recently.

Next in this parade of unknowns is the “Tokany”:

I have a notion about the source of this one, even if the meaning of the name eludes me. My example bears a striking resemblance to pencils marked “Monroe” (not the Eclipse ‘uberbrand,’ but the other one). It even has a knife inside like most Monroe pencils along these lines:

Last for today is the large red example in this next image. I think I shot it next to that great oversized Autopoint only because they were in the same lot, because there’s no connection between the two:

“York” is the name on the clip:

That is quite the English-sounding name, and I do believe this one was made in England. Inside, the mechanics are identical to the British “Lifelong” pencil:

Still, it is possible this is an Englishman’s American cousin . . . nowhere is this example marked as to country of origin:

Now that I have thrown out a bunch of new names on the backs of digital milk cartons, I am hoping this might yield additional evidence from the peanut gallery. I am confident that I’ll be circling back around to one or more of these as more information becomes available – maybe in a couple weeks, maybe in ten years . . .

The Wiiiide Circle

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 one of these came my way recently, I was eager to circle back around:

Even the fuzziest of online auction pictures showed that clear window mid-barrel to show where the spare leads are kept, so I knew exactly what it was:

“Tripp Barr.”  These pencils come in two sizes, and as is the case with my new addition, the caps are often missing.  Here’s all of the examples that have come my way over the years:

That turquoise one at bottom is really nice, and it’s in far better condition than average for these.  Let’s back up and try that again:   “. . . so I knew exactly what it was:”

I haven’t written about the Tripp Barr since 2012, when I posted two articles which appear in Volume 1.  In the first, the main point of the article was to marvel at how crazy people seem to go for the Tripp-Barr when they show up in online auctions (Volume 1, page 228).  I revisited the brand a couple months later, when a short version of the all-transparent barrel surfaced in the pencils I acquired from the estate of Edgar Nichols (inventor of the Tri-Point and proprietor of the Nichols Products Corporation - see Volume 1, page 293):

Information often comes fast and furious when I post an article about an obscure brand like this one, and I’m writing follow up articles every few months.  The Tripp-Barr has been a much longer fishing trip - since I threw out a baited hook in 2012, that bobber’s just been sitting dead in the water with nary a ripple for nearly ten years.

In September 2020, I logged into the administrator’s area of the blog to clean out junk comments (the spammers tend to play when the blog is inactive).  The Tripp-Barr bobber was gone, and the tip of the pole was touching the water, since Terrence A. Beverley had posted a comment to my Tripp-Barr article:

“The Tripp Barr pencil was patented in 1933 by Edmund R. Barany, the paternal grandfather of my wife,” Terrence wrote.  “We have the original patent documents which are beautiful works in themselves. The Tripp Barr was carried by Macy's and sold for $1.47 with the slogan ‘Loaded with lead for the year ahead.’

“We have a Tripp Barr brochure and a full newspaper page showing the Macy's ad. The pencil was manufactured and sold in two configurations. One being a two-part solid shaft and the other being a three-part shaft with one of the parts known as an indicator window. To gain access to the spare LED, remove the cap and remove the eraser. Tilt the pencil and the spare LEDs will slide out.”

Well!  Send that stuff along, I said, and let’s answer a few questions!

I included Edmund Barany’s patent in American Writing Instrument Patents Volume 2: 1922-1945, but I never associated Barany with the Tripp-Barr because what makes the Tripp-Barr stand out – the center visible window – doesn’t appear in his drawings.  

The patent is consistent with the first part of the family history Terrence passed on: Edmund R. Barany applied for his patent June 10, 1933, and it was issued on May 15, 1934 as number 1,959,226.  The patent number also appears in the brochure Terrence mentioned, which he was kind enough to share with us:

Terrence also forwarded a copy of that Macy’s advertisement, which appeared in The New York Herald on April 1, 1934:

Yes, the Tripp Barr was marketed at Macy’s – but not exclusively.  Hutzler Brothers, a local jeweler in Baltimore, also advertised the pencils in The Baltimore Sun on May 5, 1934:

The Tripp Barr disappears from circulation within a year . . . at least, in the form we know.  Another bit of information Terrence supplied provided a clue.  He mentioned the family was in possession of original patent documents, and he forwarded one of them to me:

Recall above the “Other Patents Pending” reference in that brochure?  Since these drawings don’t match the only pencil patent I found issued to Barany, these drawings must have been prepared in connection with another patent application which was never granted . . .  and that cap, with its star-shaped metal insert to create a lead magazine within the barrel, reminded me of something else . . . 

A while back Rob Bader sold me a few trade catalogs, which I’ve scanned and at some point will contribute to the PCA library (projects, projects, projects).  One of these catalogs is from David Kahn, Inc., makers of the Wearever, and I dated it to 1935 or 1936, since one page in the catalog advertises the “Treasure,” complete with the same 1935 photograph from “Mutiny on the Bounty” from the “Treasure Chest” set I wrote about in 2018 (see Volume 5, page 140).  

Another page in the catalog illustrates the “new” Wearever “Visible Pencil” . . . 

That’s right.  Edmund Barany’s design for a pencil with a cap including a star shaped insert might have been intended for his Tripp Barr line, but it wound up on David Kahn’s Wearever “Visible Pencil.”

There’s more.

While I was researching this story, I ran across an online auction that I just missed by a month or so; the auction title included the words “Tripp Barr.”  I zoomed in on the terrible pictures, and by process of elimination I figured out which one bore that obscure name.  It was another all-translucent barrel model, with a telling difference:

I immediately recognized the diagonal brick pattern on the barrel . . . it shows up on another page of my David Kahn catalog, illustrating the Wearever Visible “Year ‘Round” pencil:

Early in my collecting days I had fun chasing down the diagonal and horizontal versions of Kahn’s “Year ‘Round” in the cataloged colors of black, red and green:

Incidentally, it drove me a little crazy to find two varieties of the clip on these, one with a pronounced hump and larger ball, the other one straight with a smaller one – since the catalog artwork seems to show something in between the two, I’m thinking they were using whatever was on hand at the time.  The bottom example has a clip marked “Onward,” another Kahn brand, another thing rubbing my OCD tendencies a bit raw. 

“Year ‘Round” . . . sort of reminiscent of the tagline on that Tripp Barr brochure, isn’t it?  “Loaded with lead for the year ahead.”

I am sure to a moral certainty that David Kahn, Inc. manufactured the Tripp Barr, but according to Terrence the brand was solely Edmund Barany’s baby; if that’s true, David Kahn made the pencils for Barany – it was not a Kahn production.

So where did the name “Tripp Barr” come from?  Unfortunately, the family’s oral history didn’t preserve that information.  Barany’s son, from whom Terrance got what information he was able to provide, passed away in 2019.  However, I do have a theory.

Edmund Barany was a very prolific inventor with dozens of patents to his credit, but his dabbling in the pencil business was a very brief one.  Earlier in his career he invented and patented numerous innovations in flashlights, including one which was near and dear to my heart: a flashlight with a second button, so with the flashlight on you could easily flick it on and off to communicate in Morse code:

My grandfather had one of these I used to play with as a kid – that’s the same grandfather whose Autopoints inspired my Dad to start collecting pencils and in turn inspired me.  I remember how effective this device could be, not so much in signaling Morse code as annoying Gramps on weekend sleepover visits, after nights of drinking too many sugary “Little Hugs” over games of Yahtzee.

“Tripp Barr” would make sense as a cute riff on “trip bar” - a mechanical device which would hold a circuit open or closed in electrical applications.  Perhaps the name was Barany’s tongue-in-cheek homage to his earlier career as a flashlight inventor.

Edmund Barany wasn’t finished as an inventor after his brief foray into pencils.  Terrence reports that his best-known invention was still to come: the reader head on those reel-to-reel sound recording devices.  He also shared a picture of Edmund, at work later in his career:

I wonder . . . 

. . . if there was ever a desk pencil version of the Tripp Barr?

A Worthy Wearever At Last

 I'll admit that my interest in writing articles about the repair and restoration of these old pencils is not entirely altruistic.  More often than not, my mission isn't so much to educate mankind in the care and feeding of these little beasts . . . it's so that later I can remember how I did it, too.

The lowly Wearever brand, produced by David Kahn, Inc., doesn't get as much love as it should.  Kahn was a real visionary in writing instruments who found ways to make pens and pencils that mimicked the look of higher priced brands, but more cheaply and efficiently.   They remain plentiful today, and since it takes a lot to knock one of these out of commission, the fact that almost all of them still work today means that there hasn't really been much call for me to dive into repairing one.

Until Loyal Knight Harry Shubin asked if I could take a shot at this one:

Wearever Deluxe pencils are not too terrible, and the sample engraving on the side of this one makes it better and, Harry and I agreed, worth taking a shot at getting it to work again.  The Wearever Deluxe was a rear drive pencil that advanced and retracted the lead by turning the top, a feature typically found on more expensive pencils, but in the case of this one the entire top was missing:

I happened to have a suitable donor lounging around in one of my bins.  It was missing the cap (or more likely, as often as the caps go missing, it already gave its cap up to complete another one in my collection), so it was just waiting for the opportunity to give its last full measure of service:

Tug as I might, I couldn't get the damned bushing out of the top so, rather than risk crushing it using pliers, I decided to attack from the other end.  After wrapping a rubber band around it and twisting without any progress, I twisted the other way . . . yep, it is reverse threaded (tuck that one away for future reference):

I figured that spiral mechanism was all that held the upper bushing in place.  I figured wrong.  Time to bring out the big guns . . . 

That's a knockout block for getting feeds and nibs out of their sections, which I've used more times than I can count in circumstances like these.  I had to put two of those rods into the barrel in order to reach the bushing, then a couple sharp whacks got the job done.

The reason it was so stubborn was that there is a groove in the barrel of the orange one into which the bushing seats.  That was probably added later in production:

The bushing engages the mechanism with the help of 2 little bumps protruding near the top of the spiral:

I inserted the bushing into the top of Harry's pencil, and like magic, the pencil worked perfectly.  The only issue was that the bushing pulled out easily, so I used a pair of flat pliers to squeeze the end of the bushing slightly out of round -- just like I do to give cracked Parker drive tubes enough "grab" to work without soldering. 

Now about that missing cap . . . there were a few different variations of these caps, but I have a pretty good idea what they looked like:

I heard a story about these caps once, about how they were repurposed tire valve caps from military Jeeps.  Hogwash, I say.  Although I do have one that has an actual tire valve cap, it looks terrible and obviously out of place.  Besides, the insides of these caps aren't threaded.

So Harry, you owe me a cap: