More Fine Snails

The “snail” pattern is ubiquitous among Victorian makers; in “In the Company of Fine Snails” (February 15, 2018: Volume 5, page 152), I presented desk pencils with that sort of treatment made by Mabie Todd, Hicks, and Fairchild & Johnson. There were a few snails in that recent collection I recently purchased from Rob Bader, too.

The example at top is an ordinary magic pencil made by W.S. Hicks – nothing extraordinary, but very clean. It bears that acorn mark I have theorized indicated it was made by the Hicks firm for wholesale to retailers.

The second pencil down is also made by Hicks, but it has an interesting “twist.” 

The nose is fixed in position. The back can be pulled out as an extender, and twisting it advances and retracts the lead; the Eagle Pencil Company did something similar. Like the first one, this one also bears the Hicks acorn:

The next pencil down advances into position by twisting the back half of the barrel; this is the pencil part of John Mabie’s ubiquitous patent 11,762 issued on October 3, 1854, but without the nib slider found on Mabie Todd patented combination pens and pencils. It’s a chunky hunk o’ sterling, but the reason I wanted to keep it in the collection is because it bears a mark I don’t see very often:

In “Two Hallmarks, Two Connections” (June 29, 2021: Volume 7, page 227), I showed another pencil with a similar mark, which was picked up in the 1904 edition of Trade-Marks of the Jewelry and Kindred Trades as a state-protected mark by Ephraim S. Johnson & Co.

Whenever I find that sideways J in a diamond, it is flanked by the numbers 925 and 1000, denoting sterling silver. Typically, that appears on pencils made for export to the European market, but their near universal presence on Johnson pencils suggests that Johnson was simply adding a bit of continental flair to his hallmark. 

This next item isn’t a pencil at all. It is an empty container with a threaded cap – its dimensions suggest that it might be a thermometer holder. I kept it because of the hallmark on both the cap and the barrel:

The Hutcheon Brothers mark isn’t surprising on a snail-patterned piece, since Mabie Todd was a prolific user of this pattern and Hutcheon was named for Alfred G. Hutcheon, who left Mabie Todd but retained an unusually close relationship with his former firm; see “House of Hutcheon” published October 15, 2025. 

The last example isn’t quite the same level of quality; the pattern is less refined, and a couple spots of wear reveal it is plated brass rather than sterling. Still, a desk pencil like this is quite the step up from its maker’s usual fare:

The Eagle Pencil Company was a pioneer in producing less expensive writing instruments that had the look of something more exclusive – a wolf in snail’s clothing in this case.

Wingnut of the Universe

There I was yesterday, minding my own business and telling you about a few Victorian pencils I brought home with me from the Chicago Show in May. Five pencils there were, and after I told you about the first four, I had to poke around a bit so that I could tell you about that last one.

This one did come home from Chicago with me, but I had been talking with David Nishimura about it since he first showed it to me at the Philadelphia Show in January. I was smitten with it at first sight, but I didn’t feel like spending the money at the Philly show (I had thought I might actually break even in Philly this year . . . before I heard about that Tiffany Met Life pencil in “Two Kings”). David brought it along again to Baltimore in March . . . at that point, I was digging myself out of a deep hole after buying Terry Johnson’s pencil collection.

In Chicago, however, I was vulnerable. My grand deal with Zeppelin Commander Bader left a bit of cash in my pocket, ripe for the picking. I got picked.

The metalwork is exquisite, and from the first time I saw it, I thought it resembled those John Foley “Madeleine” pencils I wrote about just a few weeks ago (see “That Other, Bigger Shoe Drops” on September 25, 2025). There’s no maker’s mark on the pencil, but it does have a patent date I didn’t recall seeing before: December 8, 188 . . . something . . .

I thought, as I started writing up that fifth Chicago purchase, that I would simply look up a new, obscure patent, show off a few images, and call it a day. I was wrong. There’s a lot more to this story, and you are going to be convinced that I did this on purpose.

Twice.

Finding the patent was not difficult, thanks to American Writing Instrument Patents 1799-1910. American patents were only issued on Tuesdays, so in the chronological section of the book all I had to do was find a patent for a dropper pencil, issued on a December 8, sometime in the 1880s . . . 

Stephen M. Brougham of Brooklyn, New York was awarded patent number 331,941 on December 8, 1885 for his “drop movement for pocket utensils,” and the patent was assigned to the Standard Pencil Company of New York. Back I went to American Writing Instrument Patents, where I found another entry under Brougham’s name: Patent 194,216 issued on August 14, 1877, for a combination pen and pencil:

Brougham’s earlier patent was not assigned to anyone, and it is intriguing that it was ever issued at all. His design is for a split slider: a slotted outer ring advances a dip pen, and a second slider slips through that ring to advance a pencil. Perhaps it was issued in error, since this patent so closely resembles a much earlier patent issued to Henry Withers in 1836. The oversight may have resulted from the Patent Office fire that year, which wiped out any record of nearly all of the patents issued up to that point. After the fire, the Patent Office began numbering issued patents, something that had not previously been done; Withers’ patent was not numbered initially, but after the fire it was retroactively assigned an “X-patent” number of X9527, with the X denoting it predated the fire.

Note: David Nishimura broke the news about Withers’ Patent at his blog in 2017. His article is published here.

I next turned my attention to this “Standard Pencil Company,” and that’s where things became really interesting. Incorporation of the company in New York was announced in the Brooklyn Daily Times on December 1, 1888: the “trustees” of the company were Brougham, joined by Edward Flackman and Edwin Terry:

By 1890, Standard had apparently diversified into fountain pen manufacturing; the company advertised for “rubber turners on fountain pens” in the New York World on June 17, 1890. The Company received a short writeup in History and Commerce of New York (1891), in which Brougham is not mentioned but Edwin Terry is identified as Treasurer of the company. Albert Terry, presumably a relative of Edwin’s, was the company’s president; when Albert wasn’t messing around making pencils, he was busy running a successful brick manufacturing business in Brooklyn.

The day to day operations of the company, according to this report, were attended to by “worthy superintendent” Gideon Isley of Jersey City, New Jersey, a Civil War veteran who had previously served as Jersey City’s Fire Commissioner. Isley died July 30, 1893 at the age of 52; his death was reported in the New York Herald on August 1, 1893:

The Isley lead proved to be a good one: a Henry Isley, also from Jersey City, co-invented another dropper or gravity pencil with none other than William S. Hicks. Patent number 280,313 was issued on June 26, 1883:

Two men with the last name Isley, both from Jersey City, both patenting dropper pencil designs within two years of each other? That would be a whopper of a coincidence if one believed in such things, and I don’t. I have written about a Hicks gravity pencil here, but the one I wrote about was patented nearly twenty years later, in 1905 – see “That’s Heavy, Man” (December 20, 2016: Volume 4, page 294).

I then turned back to my search results for the Standard Pencil Company, and I hit paydirt. This is the first part you’ll think I did on purpose.

I found a reference in the United States Patent Office Official Gazette for a patent application filed March 3, 1887 by James B. Smith of New York, which was assigned to the Standard Pencil Company:

Smith’s application was for a “glove or shoe buttoner,” and the patent was issued on August 9, 1887 as number 368,024:

Since Smith’s patent was for a button hook, it wasn’t filed in any of the categories in which writing instrument patents are located. That’s why I couldn’t find it in the course of researching my John Foley “Madeleine” pencils.

Boom. Now we know to what the “Pat. App. For” imprints on John Foley’s Madeleine pencils refers.

Now for the other thing I said you might think I did on purpose . . . 

I had some difficulty researching the later history of the Standard Pencil Company, because there was more than one business going by that name. On February 5, 1903, Geyer’s Stationer reported that a Standard Pencil Company registered as a foreign corporation in Newark, New Jersey. I’m not sure whether this was the same company, because none of the same names are affiliated with this Standard: shares were held by Harry H. Picking, Charles A. Greene and C. Frederick Smith.

Further confusing matters, the School Journal’s report of this filing on March 7, 1903 states that this Standard Pencil Company had been “incorporated” in New Jersey, not just registered as a foreign corporation to do business in the state. Maybe this was sloppy reporting, and maybe the owners of the original Standard Pencil Company organized another company by the same name in New Jersey.

Then there was another, totally unrelated Standard Pencil Company that arose from the cornfields of Hutchinson, Kansas in 1911. The Kansan Standard Pencil Company’s business was selling wood pencils painted with advertising, and on October 30, 1911 the Hutchinson News reported that after only a few months in business, this new company had placed an order for 1,300,000 wood pencils, “the largest shipment of wood pencils ever to be shipped to any point in the west.” The shipment was sent in two filled boxcars, and the order was so large that it was filled by two New York manufacturers – the American Lead Pencil Company and the Eagle Pencil Company.

Just a couple weeks later, the Brooklyn Daily Times reported on November 10, 1911 that a Standard Pencil Company had been organized in New York, and Nathan Bloom was named a director. 

On December 20, 1917, the New York Herald reported that an explosion at the New York Cordage Company had destroyed a four-story building at 42 South Street; the upper floors, according to this account, were occupied by the Standard Pencil Company.

This one, I believe, was our Standard Pencil Company – it had been located at 3 and 5 Coenties Slip in 1891, according to The History and Commerce of New York, which was only a block away from 42 South Street – at least, if it wasn’t the same company it would be another wildly improbable coincidence. If it was, the explosion likely was the end of the company Stephen Brougham had founded.

The Kansas wood pencil company by the same name, however, adds more to our story. When it was founded, the company sourced complete wood pencils from manufacturers, which Standard painted with advertising. By 1914, this Standard Pencil Company had moved to St. Louis and was manufacturing its own pencils. In 1920, The Retail Grocers’ Advocate published a short writeup about Standard’s impressive new factory. “Standard Pencil Company products are marketed under the names of birds, lark, wren etc.,” the report notes.

Standard Pencil took the avian theme to a new level, securing a trademark for the phrase “It’s a Bird” with artwork. M.B. Wallace, Jr., as secretary of the company, signed the declaration on the registration certificate, applied for on October 18, 1920. He claimed the mark had been in use since September 28, 1920.

By then, the affairs of the Standard Pencil Company were being directed largely by its vice president, Asa B. Wallace. According to the Centennial History of Missouri, published in 1921, Wallace was “a young man of enterprising business ability who is making his way steadily upward and has already secured a position which many a man twice his years might well envy.”

Wallace’s youthfulness might also have made him impulsive, and under his direction the Standard Pencil Company unwisely adopted another sort of bird for use on the wood pencil company’s letterhead . . . an eagle. Standard’s former supplier, the Eagle Pencil Company, was not amused. 

On February 25, 1921, Modern Stationer and Book-Seller reported that The Eagle Pencil Company, holder of dozens of trademarks with the representation of an eagle, had swiftly and decisively won an injunction against the “Standard Pencil Company of New York.” The decision was a complete rout for Wallace’s company: Standard was permanently restrained from using an eagle in its products or advertising, and the Eagle Pencil Company persuaded Judge Delahanty to go even farther. The judge also ruled that the Standard Pencil Company could no longer use of the word “standard” in connection with its products – even though neither Eagle nor anybody else had secured registration of a trademark for the word.

Ironically, the Standard Pencil Company had also advertised in that very issue of Modern Stationer and Book-Seller. “It’s a Bird” takes on a new context in light of the infringement case, because the timing of the trademark filing – five months before the injunction was issued – suggests that Standard was already being threatened by Eagle when the mark was adopted. “No it isn’t an Eagle, it’s just a bird,” the mark doth seem to protest too much.

The Standard Pencil Company would change its name in obedience to Judge Delahanty’s decision, to – you guessed it – the Wallace Pencil Company.

That’s the second thing you probably think I did on purpose. This blog is about mechanical pencils, not wood pencils, and I can count on one hand the number of articles that have included them. One of them was just a few days ago, when I mentioned my only pencil-related find after scouring the biggest antique malls in the south:

A Charles Lindbergh pencil box made by . . . the Wallace Pencil Company.

Maybe I do believe in coincidences after all.

A Long-Lost Cousin

I believe this one arrived in a boxload of stuff from the “catch up” Chicago Show in September 2021:

It’s a good thing that I am so obsessive in examining newcomers as closely as I do; otherwise, this would have been cast off as a kinda nice but unmarked pencil and gone right back into a junk box full of remainders. Even with the assistance of a china marker I had great difficulty bringing out enough detail for a photograph:

“Rite Away” it reads, with a diamond in between those two words. There are no other markings that I can find, but that was enough to send me plowing through American Writing Instrument Trademarks 1870-1953, so I could share with you the wonderful story of the Rite Away pencil.

It isn’t in there. Therefore, I’m going to tell you the other wonderful story about it.

The features that make this pencil stand out in the crowd are that great mottled hard rubber and the unusual shape of the top. As I perused the rest of the museum looking for similar characteristics, I found one:

There’s the Rite Away posed next to a General Manufacturing Company “Kaligraf,” one of the mostest holiest of holy grails known to pencil collectors. Kaligraf pencils accompanied the company’s Snap-Fil line of fountain pens, and it is the only “lever filled” pencil design known.

Well, it wasn’t exactly lever filled. You pull the lever up, and as the lever is pushed down again it scoots the lead forward a little bit. If you have seen one example, count yourself lucky – I don’t think you’ll ever see as many of these in one place as when I shared an image of the examples Joe Nemecek and I had put together in “Back to Sioux City” (January 5, 2017: Volume 4, page 334):

Now there is one big difference you can see between my Rite Away and a Kaligraf: the Rite Away has no lever. That meant I needed to take it apart and see what was happening inside: the noses on both the Rite Away and the Kaligraf unscrewed easily, and it was clear at least to me that both were made using the same machinery.

With the nose removed, you can see there is a rod inside the barrel that moves up and down by turning the cap at the top.

Does that sound familiar? It should, and if it doesn’t, hold on to your hat. The other day, I wrote about my suspicion that hard rubber Lead-O-Graph pencils were manufactured by the Eagle Pencil Company (see “Welcome Distraction” posted on September 4, 2025). Even before I found one in what I believe is an intact portion of Eagle’s factory archive, I thought that, and I told you why:

Because that hard rubber looked so much like these hard rubber Eagle Pointer pencils. The Leadograph pencils were based on another Eagle product, the Simplex; guess how the Eagle Pointer works? 

Exactly like the Rite Away . . . and Eagle held the patent on the mechanism by virtue of Alfred Michael’s patent number 1,406,056, applied for on March 26, 1921 and issued on February 7, 1922. Michael’s patent was assigned to the Eagle Pencil Company.

That’s not all.

I mentioned earlier that no trademark for “Rite Away” appears in American Writing Instrument Trademarks 1870-1953. I know why:

These painted wood pencils were made by the Eagle Pencil Company, and guess what they were called:

Both of these lines were called the Eagle “Ritaway.” There’s no trademark registration filed for the “Ritaway” name either, which is a bit odd for Eagle – the company filed a LOT of trademarks, so the absence of one . . . in this case, in these circumstances, with this theory tumbling about in my head, tells me something. I’ve got some new theories now:

1. Did Eagle make the Rite Away? I think that is a reasonable conclusion.

2. Did Eagle make the Rite Away for sale on its own account, for the General Manufacturing Company, or for someone else? I don’t have enough evidence to draw any conclusions on that point.

But here’s the big one:

3. Did Eagle manufacture the General Manufacturing Company’s Kaligraf pencils?

I think that is a distinct possibility.

Worth a Second Look

In yesterday’s installment, I introduced a fountain pen marked “Worth” with a nib marked “Keystone.” It was the first of several dominoes to fall connecting different producers.

That tied nicely into a discussion about who made pens and pencils marked “Keystone,” but with an underlying assumption that the nib is original to the pen. I agree that sometimes people put too much weight on what nib is in a particular pen, since nibs can be and often were switched out by repairmen over the last century.

In this case, I fully believe the nib is original. First, this Worth pen appears to have been made by the Eagle Pencil Company, given its similarity to other known Eagle pens:

Second, the word “Keystone” was a registered trademark owned by the Blaisdell Pencil Company. Blaisdell, by the time the trademark was applied for, was controlled by the Berolzheimer family, which also owned the Eagle Pencil Company.

All roads leading from Worth and Blaisdell point to Eagle. As I mentioned earlier, when I bought that Worth pen I didn’t even check to see if there was a nib in it – it was cheap, and the fact that I suspected it was Eagle-made without even removing the cap was all that I needed to add some fascinating context to one of our most celebrated pen history. A Keystone/Blaisdell/Eagle connection adds even more fuel to that fire. 

The Worth Featherweight Pen Company is best known today for being the loser in Walter Sheaffer’s landmark patent infringement case over Sheaffer’s design patents for the Sheaffer Balance. Daniel Kirchheimer wrote an excellent article on the litigation titled “Featherweight vs. Heavyweight” (posted here). The case is notable for the information in trial transcripts detailing the development and history of the Sheaffer Balance. 

Here at the blog, the Worth Featherweight Pen Company last made an appearance in “Worth Something” (July 24, 2021: Volume 7, page 282). In that piece, the evidence was presented that Nathaniel Worth, who tried to secretly sell his shares in New Diamond Point Pen Company to Marx Finstone’s Eclipse Pen Company, was the man behind the Worth Featherweight Pen Company. Both were represented by the same attorney, Charles Greenwald.

“One could argue that it’s a coincidence that there were two guys named Worth [Nathaniel and his brother], and a pen company called the ‘Worth Featherweight Pen Company,’” I wrote. “Slimmer still is the possibility that all were in New York City, and that Nathaniel Worth had been recently relieved of his duties at another pen company shortly before this one emerges.

“But could it still be a coincidence now that we know the same New York lawyer was representing both Nathaniel Worth and the Worth Featherweight Pen Company, in two complex cases, both of which would likely consume nearly all of his time? No, I believe this eliminates all reasonable doubt.” 

OK, so now we have Diamond Point, Eclipse, Keystone, Eagle, Blaisdell, and Worth in the mix. Hang in there . . . it sorts itself out.

I took a more significant dive into Sheaffer’s litigation to protect its design patents for the Balance in A Field Guide to Sheaffer’s Pencils (2023). “Worth was an ideal defendant for Sheaffer to attack,” I wrote on page 40, “since it was a small concern with limited resources with which to defend itself. Worth’s conduct was also intentional and flagrant: the company even marketed its pens as the ‘Safer Fountain Pen,’ and one of Sheaffer’s undercover operatives reported that Worth’s president admitted the name was chosen because the name sounded like ‘Sheaffer.’ Predictably, Sheaffer outgunned this tiny adversary, resulting in a decision upholding the validity of Sheaffer’s design patents.”

Once that judgment was secured, Sheaffer set his sights on the Eagle Pencil Company, whose products had been introduced in evidence during the Worth litigation for the proposition that Eagle had been making streamlined writing instruments like the Balance since Walter Sheaffer was in diapers. In this instance, though, Eagle was one of the more blatant of the copycats, offering metal pencils and pens painted in a faux black and pearl, shaped exactly the same as the Balance. A couple examples turned up in Susan Wirth’s belongings, in this tray of “Susie’s Eagles” with which John Martenson parted:

The Balance-like offerings in this tray filled out what I already had in the collection nicely:

The Court was quick to mete out justice against Eagle: the Court issued a preliminary injunction against Eagle as well, in a published decision filed on December 3, 1931 (W.A. Sheaffer Pen Co. v. Eagle Pencil Co., 55 F.2d 420 (S.D.N.Y. 1931)). As a result, Eagle was forced to modify the shape of some of its products and add a disclaimer to the company’s 1931-1932 catalog:

Now let’s take a step back for a second and take a breath. Yes, it makes sense that Sheaffer would first target a weaker opponent to get a favorable precedent set that his Balance patents were valid. Yes, it also makes sense that Eagle would be in Sheaffer’s sights, since Eagle was one of the more blatant copycats.

With the additional insight that Eagle was supplying the Worth Featherweight Pen Company with at least some of the company’s products, it makes even more sense. After all, if Eagle was supplying one competitor with Balance-shaped products, taking down Eagle would knock out both a direct competitor as well as a supplier.

Which got me to thinking . . . in the Field Guide I brought up another competitor who was restrained by the Courts: the Pick Pen Company of Cincinnati, against whom Sheaffer won a preliminary injunction on December 2, 1931 – the day before the injunction was issued against Eagle.

I wrote up the history of the Pick Pen Company in great detail in Volume 7 (see “Nobody’s Luck Is That Band” on May 5, 2021: Volume 7, page 88). Now that we know that Worth might have been targeted by Sheaffer because Worth was a customer of the Eagle Pencil Company, I wonder: does that suggest Eagle actually made this Pick pen?

Maybe . . . it does share the general lines of Eagle products, and Pick didn’t do much with streamlining. It is an interesting hypothesis. With my head about to explode with adding yet another company into this story, I’ll wait to circle back on that point until I have more evidence.

Now to bring this long, complicated story full circle. This all started with a discussion of James Kelley’s Keystone Banker. In those earlier articles I included this image of three combination pens and pencils, all fitted with Gordon’s “fanged” clips:

These clips are marked “Banker,” “Safer,” and “Gordon.” Gordon is easy to explain: the fanged clips were patented by William Gordon of Union, New Jersey. There were three patented versions of the clip (all three patents were discussed in “Always a Crowd Pleaser” on March 17, 2015: Volume 3, page 263). I’ve never seen the earliest version of Gordon’s clip in the flesh, and I’ve only found one example of the third. All of the other examples I have found are the second incarnation, the patent application for which was filed April 3, 1930 and granted as patent number 1,834,151 on December 1, 1931. 

As for the Banker, these combos were produced (not manufactured) by our friend James Kelley. But what of the “Safer?” Was that meant to comfort the public into believing a writing instrument with built-in spikes wouldn’t harm your shirt pocket? Perhaps . . . but I doubt it.

In Daniel Kirchheimer’s “Featherweight vs. Heavyweight” article, he discussed how Walter Sheaffer’s undercover detectives had learned that the Worth Featherweight Pen Company sold pens under the name “Safer” – not because they were less dangerous, but because “Safer” sounded a lot like “Sheaffer.” Daniel included this image of a Worth box, which was introduced at evidence during the trial:

I’m not sure how all of this fits together, and the only thing of which I am certain is that James Kelley and Nathaniel Worth both sourced these combination writing instruments with Gordon patent clips from the same supplier. Was that supplier Eagle? Maybe. Were Nathaniel Worth and James Kelley involved in some way other than buying stock from the same supplier? Maybe.

Good journalists, I was taught forty years ago, do not tell you what to think – they tell you what to think about.