A Diamond Something from Autopex

Jim Stauffer was one of the most active Autopoint enthusiasts in the world. His personality was prickly, though – he did not suffer fools gladly, and he was quick to lump people into that category whenever they said something with which he did not fully agree. I’ve always said if nobody gets offended by anything you say, you aren’t saying anything, and since I say a lot, it was inevitable that I would run afoul of Jim’s sensibilities.

Jim took visceral and personal offense to my inclusion of one pencil in the Autopoint section of The Catalogue in 2011. Although I had included it only for whatever it was worth, with the benefit of hindsight Jim was right – it was a marriage of unrelated parts and not an Autopoint. When I asked Jim if he wanted a copy of The Catalogue anyway, he said no - he just wanted copies of the pages about Autopoint.

That was Jim.

Jim liked my Dad though, and I was eventually able to claw my way out of his fool’s dungeon while Dad and I worked on A Century of Autopoint, which was released in late 2019. Jim contributed a lot of information and pictures of things in his collection for the book, and while he did not fully agree with everything I wrote in the book, he agreed with enough to accept a free copy.

That, also, was Jim. 

Unfortunately, Jim was diagnosed with cancer after the book came out, and by early 2023 it was clear he was living on borrowed time. None of his family members were interested in his pencil collection, so Jim had made the difficult decision to liquidate his collection while he was still well enough to name his price and find the appropriate caretaker. He emailed me to ask if I would like the opportunity to acquire all or parts of his collection – he said he wanted me to have the first opportunity to acquire the things he had photographed for me and which I included in the book.

I later found out that I received that first opportunity after two dealers had already turned him down.

That, again, was Jim.

Even if I had known that I was Jim’s third choice to look at his collection, that wouldn’t have mattered to me. Of course, I wanted to visit Jim. Of course, I wanted to at least see his collection before it was dispersed to the four winds. Of course, I would be interested in buying a few things, if they were available and reasonably priced. 

I called Dad, who had remained in closer contact with Jim than I had, and we decided that since Jim lived in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, what made the most sense was to split our time at the Philadelphia Show that year. We’d spend some time at the show on Friday, commute to Lancaster to spend the day with Jim on Saturday, then scurry back to the show. 

Wear warm socks, Jim warned us before we arrived – he had set up tables on his enclosed patio, where he had lights set up to give us the full tour. “Autopex,” read the sign he had printed and placed on the table for his one-man show.

Jim and his wife brought tray after tray from his printer’s cabinet into the room, and he had Dad and I pick out the things we wanted. As we went, Jim ask us to name what we thought were fair prices for each item – we assumed that when we were finished seeing everything, Jim would total up those fair prices and factor in an appropriate discount for everything. When we had gone through everything, though, Jim totaled up all of our fair prices and that was what he said we owed him.

That, yet again, was Jim.

I had to pare back my pile, since Janet and I had agreed in advance the maximum amount I could spend on Jim’s stuff and still have a place to sleep when I got home. Dad gulped a bit and did the same. Still, I was able to bring home many of the things that were pictured in the book.

Towards the end of our visit, Jim was down to the non-Autopoint items in his collection – random things that he had picked up over the years just because they interested him. One of them was this:

All that I knew when I was putting this in my pile was that this pencil didn’t look like any Diamond Point pencil I had ever seen. Its closest relative in my collection is those 1924 McNary patent Rex pencils, like the Franklin in my recent article:

However, note that Jim’s pencil lacks the telltale banding you’ll usually see on the nose of McNary patent pencils, and it’s a bit bigger. The nose doesn’t pull off, so it isn’t an early Autopoint or Dur-O-Lite . . . although the similarity is probably what attracted Jim to this one in the first place. I did not unfurl the fragile instruction sheet that was inside the box until I got home, and it had something more along the lines of what I expected to see in a Diamond Point box.

Diamond Point’s first mechanical pencils were made by the Pencil Product Corporation, which also made the metal Salz Sta-Sharp on which these pencils were based. These first Diamond Point pencils, introduced  in 1920 were branded as the Auto-Sharp. See “Whew” (March 2, 2013: Volume 2, page 75).

I’ve found a few of these Auto-Sharp pencils in a nice array of different patterns:

In 1922, the New Diamond Point Pen Company rolled out a new mechanical pencil that was branded with the Diamond Point name and sported a distinctive top cap.

Note that this short announcement refers to “the manufacturer,” without specifying that Diamond Point was actually making them as opposed to sourcing them from Pencil Products or from someone else. They are distinctive enough that I’m inclined to believe they were actually manufactured by Diamond Point, and since they weren’t offered in as wide a range of patterns, I haven’t had to reshoot them since The Catalogue was published; here’s the image from page 39 of The Catalogue. 

This distinctive shape is what we see on the printed instructions which accompany Jim’s mystery pencil. 

Diamond Point, like most other manufacturers, switched from metal pencils to larger pencils made with brightly colored celluloid in the mid-1920s, providing us with a fairly narrow window during which these instructions were printed - probably between 1922 and 1925. As for Jim’s pencil, I’d estimate about the same date range, but that’s as far as I can go with my analysis.

The Criterion Criteria

My friend Jim Mamoulides, when he is not accomplishing superhuman feats as editor of The Pennant, is accomplishing superhuman feats posting articles about obscure brands at his website, Penhero.com. He beat me to the punch with a nice writeup of the Criterion line of pens and pencils with a 2024 article he posted here.

I’ve had a Criterion set just like the one Jim featured in his article photographed for some time.

Jim ably ran down all the newspaper advertisements and other information that was available about the Criterion, all of which suggest these were offered by retailers including the Rexall Drug Stores between 1923 and 1926, all of which share an infuriating lack of detail concerning who made them. Jim also relied on my previous article, even though I wasn’t able to offer much more . . . other than a suggestion that maybe the Rex Manufacturing Company had something to do with these. See “How I Know” (July 1, 2015: Volume 3, page 278) and “Two Cans of Worms” (July 2, 2015: Volume 3, page 279).

In retrospect, there’s flawed logic in my association of the Criterion brand with Rex. That theory was based primarily on the similarity of the warranty papers that came with my Criterion set, which is identical to the papers included with sets clearly marked with the Rex Manufacturing Company name. In the years since, I’ve seen warranty papers identical to what came with my Criterion set stuffed in boxes containing sets that clearly had nothing to do with Rex.

So maybe Rex, maybe not. Jim suggests a Rexall connection in his article, which would point more convincingly towards DeWitt-LaFrance, which made the “Signet” line for Rexall.

What I believe will be the key to unraveling who manufactured the Criterion is going to be figuring out who designed the clip found on the pens:

In “Two Cans of Worms” I discussed that possibility, and I noted that this same clip is also found on pencils bearing various names, including Ever Last, Parrott, Postal, and Thompson.

The identify of that jobber, unfortunately, remains a mystery.

Back to that warranty paperwork, because I need to clarify something that Jim wrote as he mused. My paperwork is identical to what Jim shows, including references on the back to “De Luxe” and “Premo” pens and pencils.

Jim questioned whether one of these names was for a pen and the other was for the pencil. That is a reasonable assumption in a vacuum, since many manufacturers used different brand names for pens and pencils – the Wahl Pen and Eversharp Pencil, for example. In this case, however, I can answer Jim's question: there are both De Luxe and Premo pencils. They are identical other than the name on the clip, and I have no reason to doubt that both were offered with a similarly marked, similarly un-deluxe and un-premo fountain pens.

While I am on the subject of the Criterion, I have one more update. In my last articles, I showed an oversized fountain pen marked Criterion and owned by Nathaniel Cerf, and I theorized their might be a matching pencil out there I had yet to find. I didn’t find one in jade, but I did find something that would be more in keeping with consumer tastes as bright colors overtook metal as a preferred medium in the mid-1920s:

There’s something noteworthy here, because this very same thing recently came up in connection with the “Collegian” in “Nearly a Waste of Time” (September 5, 2025). Note the nose on the Collegian in that article – it’s the same nose that’s on this Criterion. This image from that earlier article shows the Collegian compared to Eclipse-made pencils. 

Maybe my earlier wild goose chase trying to figure out whether my Collegian was made by Diamond Point or Eclipse has now borne more fruit. After all, Eclipse’s distinctive 1923 patent clip would look exactly like that banded clip on a Criterion pen, or a Parrott, a Postal, or a host of other makers – with the clip secured by a band across the top rather than concealed underneath.

The Real Deal

Something else occurred to me as I was rereading the two previous articles I discussed yesterday (“Captain Obvious” on January 24, 2016: Volume 4, page 109 and “A Death Most Untimely” on July 23, 2021: Volume 7, page 280). These two articles, posted six years apart, reveal something interesting.

Yesterday I discussed the connection between the New Diamond Point Pen Company and the Eclipse Pen Company. The Court case discussed in “A Death Most Untimely” discussed Marx Finstone’s desire to consolidate Eclipse with his competitors: not just with Diamond Point, but also with two other New York pen companies, Salz Brothers and J. Harris & Co. Only Diamond Point was at issue in the litigation, so there’s no information regarding whether his other merger attempts were successful. 

At the end of “Captain Obvious,” I shared a stationer’s advertisement published in the Wilkes-Barre (Pennsylvania) Record on April 18, 1925:

At the time, I mused whether Diamond Point was also responsible for the Ambassador and “Banker’s Special” brands in addition to the Collegian, since this advertisement says all three are “Guaranteed by manufacturer,” not “manufacturers.”

That hypothesis is thin, and I knew that at the time; however, since I had forgotten that detail by the time I wrote about the Diamond Point/Eclipse litigation, I do think it bears a closer look now. “Ambassador” is well-documented as a J. Harris & Co. brand, so Marx Finstone’s interest in J. Harris may well have been for the same reasons as he was pursuing Diamond Point.

As for the “Banker’s Special,” I’m not so sure. In “Banker and the Specialty King” (July 25, 2021: Volume 7, page 285), I laid out all of the sordid details surrounding James Kelley, the flamboyant self-promoter. Kelley engaged in a cross-country cat-and-mouse game with the newly formed Federal Trade Commission, which hounded Kelley for his flagrant violations of laws regarding unfair and deceptive practices. Most notably, the FTC targeted Kelley’s trading on the good name of the L.E. Waterman Company by adopting the name “Waterson” in connection with pens and pencils.

Perhaps the FTC was being overly aggressive with Kelley to teach him a lesson, since Kelley was flagrantly thumbing his nose at the new agency. After all, as I noted in that article, any consumer who bought one of Kelley’s low-grade Waterson pens thinking it was a Waterman was a fool who should be parted with his money.

I didn’t find any evidence that James Kelley was responsible for any pen or pencil formally called the “Bankers’ Special.” He did, however, appropriate the “Banker” name from a Banker’s Pen Company that failed by 1922 and traded under the names “Banker,” “New Banker,” and “Kelley Banker.” He referred to his Banker pens and pencils with pointy or “gothic” top ends as the “Keystone Banker” in advertising.

As for that Keystone name . . . we’ll get to that one tomorrow. 

For our purposes today, the conclusion at which I had arrived in my earlier article was that the “Banker” and “New Banker” pencils with which we are familiar were products of James Kelley’s ventures. Kelley had appropriated the name from the original Bankers’ Pen Company, which had shuttered sometime in late 1921 or early 1922, likely a casualty of the brief but sharp 1921 economic slowdown. 

It is of course possible that there was another huckster who had also appropriated the “Banker’s Special” name – no honor among thieves and all. Had that been the case, I would have expected to find something marked “Banker’s Special” or some reference to the name other than in this lone stationer’s advertisement. Eliminating that possibility would be nice, but I’m inclined to “bank” on what is probable rather than what is possible. I don’t believe that in 1925, Kelley’s Banker pens and pencils were in any way connected with whoever was manufactured and warranted the Collegian or the Ambassador brands.

Neither did I believe that the original Bankers’ Pen Company made any pencils at all, because I didn’t know things like this existed at the time:

This hard rubber pencil turned up in an online auction, imprinted “Bankers Pen Co., Inc. / New York Pat.”:

Kelley’s Banker and New Banker writing instruments came in pretty colors, but they were not technically very sophisticated - none of their features were anything that would have been the subject of a patent. Also, Kelley’s Banker products are not known to exist in hard rubber. I am convinced this is the “real” Banker, made prior to the original Banker’s Pen Company’s failure sometime in 1921 or 1922.

What of this “patent” nonsense suggested by the imprint? There’s two suspects, one at either end of the pencil. At the nose, it has a “catch and release” leadholder configuration – unscrewing the nose a bit releases the lead, while tightening causes it to clamp down on the lead to secure it.

That was a patented innovation, but it was another New York manufacturer, not Banker’s, which laid claim to it:

Egon L.  Schmitz applied for patent number 960,588 on December 21, 1909, and when it was issued on June 7, 1910, it was assigned to the Eberhard Faber Pencil Company. I think this is most likely the patent referred to on this Bankers’ pencil – the time and the location fit what we know about the company well.

At the other end of the pencil, there’s another interesting feature that may have been patented somewhere along the line:

Those little prongs are pretty effective as a pencil sharpener. I checked that outstanding reference,  American Writing Instrument Patents Volume 2: 1911-1945, and nothing struck me as applying to this doohickey. However, since it is an attachment rather than a writing instrument itself, it might have been filed away in some obscure patent category I wouldn’t have thought to search. 

That’s possible, but as I mentioned earlier, I’d rather bank on what is probable rather than what is possible. My money is on old Egon until something like this turns up with an actual patent date or number.   

Nearly a Waste of Time

You can nearly smell my frustration in the following image, which were taken in late 2023:

These are both marked “Collegian,” and I found the pencil at the Ohio show that year. It is marked only on the clip:

At that same show I stumbled across the pen, which has a stylized letter C on the clip. I felt the occasion called for bringing the pen home because it has a nice imprint, one that I just knew I had seen somewhere before . . . 

I could swear that I had a pencil that had the same imprint on the barrel somewhere, but search as I might in all the usual places, it was nowhere to be found. That, my friends, is more terrifying to me than you might suspect. By necessity, the museum is very tightly and meticulously organized; if something is put in the wrong place, who knows when I’ll see it again.

Throw that on top of my CDO tendencies (that’s OCD with the letters in the right order, for those who don’t know) and a simple case of something being misplaced blossoms quickly into something approaching a panic attack. When I say “search as I might,” I am talking about a couple of hours checking every place it should be, then every place it shouldn’t be . . . then doing it again. I even considered tipping a couple scotches in the hopes that Tipsy Jon might remember something that sober, neurotic Jon could not.

I was pretty sure the Collegian I thought I had was also in jade, and besides yearning to compare the two examples, I really wanted to know what the cap was supposed to look like. That’s also a little bit CDO, but there is a legitimate archival purpose: I’d rather have an example missing a cap than to replace it with something that fits but isn’t “correct.” 

The angst passed after I belted out a few cries of “serenity now!” (a la Costanza), and daily life resumed. I resigned myself that my other Collegian was lost for the foreseeable future, so I set about my normal process of comparing what I had to other things in the collection to figure out who made the Collegian. What I noticed were striking similarities to pencils made by Eclipse. The clip was not Eclipse’s distinctive 1923 patent clip: 

But that nose, with that little rib at the front end, was a dead ringer for other items in the Eclipse wing at the museum, and the clips used on Eclipse’s “Marxton” subbrand (named for Marx Finstone, Eclipse’s founder) is a dead ringer:

And with those images, I put down my camera and forgot about the whole affair . . . until the other day.

My “deal” at home is that my pencils remain confined to a single room, and I’ve mostly stayed within that Maginot Line with just a few minor encroachments. My pencil lead counter displays creeped into an adjoining room (because, after all, they aren’t technically pencils), and over the years I’ve stored some random ink bottles, desk sets and other miscellany on a bookshelf just outside the door.

Over the last couple months, I’ve started picking up dipless desk pen sets, without giving much thought to where I was going to put them. With no space in the museum, I decided to clear off that bookcase and make a nice display area (because, after all, dipless desk sets aren’t technically pencils, either). 

On one of the lower shelves, lower than I normally look and out of sight of those who patrol the Maginot Line, I had discretely tucked away a few pen and pencil sets that were nice, but which no longer fit in the area I kept other such sets. 

It was like Christmas morning, finding all of these sets I haven’t seen for a while, all of which have been pictured here over the years. There was that Parker 51 demonstrator set I had less aggressively been searching for, a few nice Eclipse sets, and this . . . 

If you heard a loud sigh of relief emanating from Ohio, that was two years of pent-up relief. There was the pencil I remembered, with the imprint I had remembered, and accompanied by a pen and warranty card. Better still, it answered my question:

The cap is a perfect fit for the one that had gone missing, and it looks just like what you would find on a comparable Eclipse pencil. Question one: solved. Question two now reared its head as I examined that warranty card:

The Collegian Pen Company was located at 333-339 Hudson Street in New York. Perhaps what I don’t know might actually be knowable, I thought: if I can track down that address, I should be able to remove any doubt who was behind the “Collegian” brand.

I did my usual search of period newspapers and unfortunately, nothing turned up other than the occasional stationer’s references that Collegian pens and pencils were for sale. Between 1925 and 1929, some advertisements included rudimentary drawings of flattop pens like those I've shown, and I did find one 1932 advertisement showing a streamlined pen that should have been close enough to a Sheaffer Balance to raise Walter Sheaffer’s ire. Nothing, however, provided any insights as to who produced or made the Collegian.

It was time for the Hail Mary: a good ol’ fashioned Google search combining “Collegian” with “333-339 Hudson Street” ought to draw out the answer, I thought.

It did.

Someone definitively answered that question.

It was me.

In my defense, it was more than ten years ago and there have been more than 1,500 articles posted here at the blog, but all that pointless muddling around had another “serenity now!” welling up inside me.

In “Captain Obvious” (January 24, 2016: Volume 4, page 109), I recounted how Marc Shiman, a student of New York pen companies and all-around good egg, had immediately recognized that address as being shared with the New Diamond Point Pen Company. In the article, I found my own independent verification of that detail and even shared this image of a nearly identical Diamond Point set:

If I was Captain Obvious ten years ago, now I am the Flat-Foreheaded Captain Obvious . . . mostly.

But there’s more, because my muddling around wasn’t so pointless after all. Remember how I started this article by noting the similarities between my Collegian and Eclipse products? That got me thinking . . . was there any connection between Diamond Point and Eclipse?

There was. And this time, I remembered what that connection was. I also remembered that I had written about it.

“A Death Most Untimely” (July 23, 2021: Volume 7, page 280) tells the story of Marx Finstone’s harebrained scheme to merge Diamond Point with Eclipse, which he put into motion shortly before Finstone’s untimely death in 1927.

It is easy to characterize Finstone’s plan as mere ruthless capitalism, gobbling up a competitor in the Wild West that was business in the 1920s. However, my unwitting comparison of the Collegian to Eclipse products suggests a new dimension to the scuffle that ensued. If Diamond Point and Eclipse were both sourcing identical components from some third-party supplier, maybe Marx wasn’t simply trying to eliminate a competitor for its market share . . . perhaps he was eliminating another customer for the same parts Eclipse was using – to give himself more leverage in negotiating more favorable pricing from his supplier.   

Of course, that contains an element of conjecture, since Finstone wasn’t alive to testify in the court case that provided what we know about the dispute. However, that explanation paints Finstone as more of a shrewd businessman than a megalomaniac, and I think that explanation makes more sense.

The Tier Straddler

Some collectors like to refer to pen and pencil manufacturers as “first tier,” “second tier,” or “third tier.” Among American manufacturers, some people reserve the first tier label to the “Big Four” of American manufacturers: Parker, Sheaffer, Eversharp, and Waterman. Sometimes, other prominent manufacturers such as Conklin worm their way into that category.

Second tier is generally regarded as referring to high quality, often regional manufacturers. LeBoeuf, Carter, and that sort of thing.

Third tier is a polite way of saying “crap.” “No name” is synonymous, as in no name of significance.

It is an imperfect system. “First tier” manufacturers sometimes made crap, some “third tier” stuff is pretty nice, and some of the one-hit wonders in the writing instrument world defy classification. Tell me, for example, into what tier the General Manufacturing Company’s “Kaligraf” lever filler pencils fit? If your answer is anything other than first tier, why would a $10 Parker Parkette rank more highly?

I digress. I think the whole tier system dates from the early days of the hobby, when the annointed would tell the unwashed that if it isn’t a Waterman overlay, it’s crap (rolling the R like Mike Myers would).

Perhaps that’s the long way around the barn for me to tell you that some Diamond Point pencils are better than others, although the brand doesn’t get as much respect . . . until a few years ago, I think it would have fallen into the third tier. I had a few new additions that warrant showing you how they fit into the taxonomy:

Starting from the top, I’m loving that green and blue marble. It’s a color combination not often found in writing instruments, and this one fits in well with two others in the collection:

The rounded caps are disconcerting; with a flared bell cap, these would be more recognizable. 

The example at far right, with triple bands, appears to be in the same series as the green one from that first image; there are also double banded ones in some striking celluloids, both streamlined perilously close to the shape of a Sheaffer Balance and more stubby and rounded:

Here are other triple and double banded examples along those lines:

I believe the examples in this next image are a bit later; they follow the same form and materials as the previous group, with only a different clip:

The clip was designed and patented by Harry Esterow, who designed several pen and pencil clips, including the famous “PATO” clips (that’s actually PAT’D, as in patented – online sellers frequently misread them). His application for this variation was filed on December 31, 1930 and was granted Design Patent 83,673 on March 17, 1931.

Unfortunately, as Diamond Point switched to jobbed Esterow clips, the company’s tenuous claim to second tier status weakened. The third example in the first image fits in with later Diamond Point pencils – interesting to look at, but not the best quality. 

Note the great plastics and geometric center bands:

Clips on these are all marked “PATD” in tiny letters at the top, and these are also Esterow clips. I didn’t find these exact variations in his patents, but Design Patent 103,813, filed January 21, 1937 and granted on March 30, 1937, is close enough that Esterow could legitimately cry foul if he didn’t supply them:

Our last new addition to the Diamond Point family fits neatly – sort of – into a series I’ve collected since almost the beginning. Here it is at top with similarly feathered birds:

The “fitting neatly” part is the bottom four examples, but since I scrounged up each of the four colors, I found the two examples in slightly different sizes and with slightly different banding. Note that the “PATD” has been dropped from the clips; maybe Esterow’s design patent expired, or maybe he never managed to secure one for this variation:

If you can’t make it good, make it pretty, I suppose. Tiers schmears, these are great to look at.

If these are third tier, I don’t wanna be first.