One Itch Down

This article has been edited and included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 6, now on sale at The Legendary Lead Company.  I have just a few hard copies left of the first printing, available here, and an ebook version in pdf format is available for download here.

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

As long as I have a picture, I don’t need to have the pencil, I always tell myself.

Sometimes, I’m lying.  In The Catalogue, one of the few pictures in the book I didn’t take showed this pencil:

Well, not this pencil exactly.  It’s just taken me ten years to find my own example, and it turned up at the Ohio Show last November.  The imprint tells the story:

“Arthur A. Waterman Co. / Modern Pen Co. Successor / Not Connected With / The L.E. Waterman Co.”   The picture of one of these on page 161 of The Catalogue was from a kindly online seller who allowed me to use his – I was excited to finally handle and be able to photograph one in person.

Arthur A. Waterman’s history is a convoluted one, told here at the blog back in 2013 (the full article is no longer online, but it is in the print version of The Leadhead’s Pencil Blog Volume 2, at page 156).  The Modern Pen Company was formed by agreement with Arthur A. Waterman in 1905, as a sales agent to sell A.A. Waterman pens.  Litigation with the L.E. Waterman Company culminated with a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1914, affirming an appeals court decision requiring A.A. Waterman to use the “not connected with” disclaimer on its products.

In 1921, the Modern Pen Company dropped the Waterman name altogether, renamed itself Chicago Safety Pen Company, and its pencils were thereafter named the EVRDA (that’s a goofy acronym for “Everyday”). 

That puts today’s pencil between 1914 and 1921, and it’s going to be on the later side of that range; in 1914, the Ever Sharp pencil was only just beginning its upward trajectory, and pencils such as these copied the Eversharp look after it became widely available after 1917.

Did the Modern Pen Company make this pencil?  Absolutely not - they were made for it by a third party supplier, stamped with the ungainly Modern name and disclaimer.  There’s a tell here that points towards who made these: that rib on the barrel, just above the imprint.  It appears on the Bonnwear, the Ever-Rite and others along those lines:

These pencils led me into one of the deepest quagmires I’ve explored here.  The series began with “Wear it Well” in October, 2014 (Volume 3, page 33), then blossomed into an exploration of the Ever-Rite and the similarities of these pencils to the Sheaffer Sharp Point (Volume 3, page 71) . . . which, in turn, led to Wahl, Sheaffer and the Race for Boston (that one is still online here, at https://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2016/12/wahl-sheaffer-and-race-for-boston-part.html).  Pencils like these make my head hurt trying to find and explain all the connections between 1920s manufacturers.

And today’s A.A. Waterman presents yet another wrinkle: although from the outside this pencil looks just like those Bonnwear and Ever-Rite pencils, with those eraser tubes that pull out of the barrel, when I pulled the cap this A.A. Waterman, it’s just an ordinary cap over an eraser.  No Sheaffer-like mechanism.

So that’s one itch scratched.  Another still has me climbing the walls.

I Take It All Back

This article has been edited and included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 5; copies are available print on demand through Amazon here, and I offer an ebook version in pdf format at the Legendary Lead Company here.

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

I haven’t said very nice things about the successors to the Camel Pen Company: the Newark Pen Company, Secretary Pen Company and Union Pen Company all produced cheesy metal advertising pencils with “floaty” sections in the middle -- which, don’t get me wrong, I love just as much – but which just lack the . . . dignity of an early Camel piece.

Even Marc Shiman, a devotee of all these related brands, commented unfavorably on Camel’s devolution into oblivion, once commenting that “Newark Pen Company made awful injection molded fountain pens which they branded Secretary.”

However, there is an earlier chapter in the Camel history . . . Secretary Pen Company was not only the successor to Camel, it also preceded it, with the company’s owner, Joseph V. Wustman (sometimes spelled Wuestman), founding the concern around 1925.  Shiman suggests that Wustman merged Newark and Camel.

This piece would date to before that merger:

This Eversharp-looking pencil caught my eye a while ago.  That rib up near the cap always has me looking closer to see if there are clues to tie them in to similar pencils marked Ever-Rite, Bonnwear and Keene (see, respectively, http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-evidence-continues-to-build.html, http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2014/10/wear-it-well.html and http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2013/02/a-couple-keene-bits-of-new-information.html).

On closer examination, this one has a really, really nice imprint:

This pencil is more like the Keene, lacking the Sheafferesque pull-out eraser.   At least now I won’t shudder when I hear “Newark Pen Company” and “metal pencil” in the same sentence.

Ever Slight

This article has been edited and included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 4; copies are available print on demand through Amazon here, and I offer an ebook version in pdf format at the Legendary Lead Company here.

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

This nifty little set caught my eye at the Raleigh Pen Show last June:

As the lid indicates, the set is a miniature Ever-Rite set.  The Ever-Rite brand is one I haven’t fully figured out yet, with it’s Sheafferesque and DeWitt-Lafrancelike features which had me thinking about the intricate connections between so many manufacturers that my head was left swimming (see http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-evidence-continues-to-build.html):

But on this crisp fall Saturday, all I wanted to do was show you this neat little set.  The pencil is unmarked with an enamel barrel, but the pen is marked on the “band” of unpainted metal:

The Matryoshka Herring

There was something in yesterday’s article that I promised I would get back to, and yet I didn’t. It concerned an offhand remark that the pencils advertised by Dunn & Rodenberg in 1919:

Bore more of a resemblance to these pencils, made by the American Lead Pencil Company of New York:

To learn more, this full article is included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 3, available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and everywhere else you buy books, or you can order a copy signed by yours truly through the Legendary Lead Company HERE.

The Red Herring

Note: this story grew out of research for yesterday’s article on the "Ever-Rite."

Out of these four "Ever-Rite" pencils, one is marked "patent pending," the other three are marked "Reg. U.S. Pat. Off.," and all four are made using DeWitt-LaFrance patterns and Walter Sheaffer’s mechanism, which was patented in November, 1918:

The "Reg. U.S. Pat. Off." legend indicated that a trademark had been filed for the brand, which led me to this registration:

Following up on the M.S. Rodenberg Company took me in a surprising and entirely different direction. Milton S. Rodenberg was a jeweler by trade. Prior to the formation of the M.S. Rodenberg Company, he was engaged in business in a partnership named Dunn & Rodenberg. The earliest reference I found to Dunn & Rodenberg was a listing in the 1907 Rhode Island Report of the Commissioner of Labor, showing that the firm was located at 14 Blount Street in Providence.

But Dunn didn’t always have top billing . . .

To learn more, this full article is included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 3, available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and everywhere else you buy books, or you can order a copy signed by yours truly through the Legendary Lead Company HERE.

The Evidence Continues to Build

The other day, as I was getting caught up on taking some pictures, I found myself looking for a pencil I just knew I last saw right over . . . there . . .ish. I don’t know what made me think that it might have been in this box, because I remembered it didn’t come with one, but that didn’t stop me from opening this up and forgetting completely what I was looking for:

This was in a drawer with other stuff I found at the Chicago Pen Show last May, and I remember I saw it late in the show on my good friend Presnall Wood’s table. Presnall is a great guy to talk to, and I know as usual I must have stopped to chat with him a dozen times or more over the course of the weekend, but whether I had been too wrapped up in talking with him or whether he had just pulled this set out from under his table late in the show, I hadn’t noticed it before.

I’d bought plenty that weekend, including other things from Presnall, and I wasn’t showing much interest in the set – after all, it included one of those pesky pens I don’t have much use for. Yet for whatever reason, Presnall was determined not to take it home with him. I don’t remember what his offer was, but I do remember that it was one I was powerless to refuse.

Now, in light of some research here at the blog, I’m glad I didn’t.

To learn more, this full article is included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 3, available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and everywhere else you buy books, or you can order a copy signed by yours truly through the Legendary Lead Company HERE.