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.

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 . . .