The Weirdness of Coral

This article has been included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 7, now available here.

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One article in particular from Volume 6 prompted virulent discussion, and the general consensus that emerged from that debate was that my hypothesis was incorrect.  The tempest in our little teapot centered around the use and intent of the “X-Seal” on certain pens and pencils made by the Wahl Company:

My theory in that article (Volume 6, page 110) was that the circle around the X is actually the letter “O,” and that might stand for “Oxford,” Wahl’s budget line.  That suggestion was not well received, as several devotees of the brand offered their own theories.  

The front runner among these theories, offered by Syd Saperstein, was that these X-Seal pens and pencils were assembled from leftover parts in 1939, and those parts which had been drilled for double-check seals that had not yet been installed were filled with a different seal that would not commit Wahl to honor a factory warranty.   He further suggested that if it truly was the letter “O” surrounding an X, it could equally mean XO for “closeout,” rather than OX for “Oxford.”

Everyone agrees there is no documentary evidence to prove what Wahl was thinking when these X-Seals were implemented, and since no one alive today was working the factory floor when it happened, there is no surviving first-hand account of what was intended.

In fact, there’s no evidence that Wahl “meant” anything, or that these X-Seal items were marketed consistently in any unified way – given the probability that they were assembled from leftover parts from discontinued models, any marketing plan might have resembled a garage sale more than a slick campaign.

The argument, therefore, concerned which unsubstantiated theory had the best internal consistency.  My suggestion, “OX for Oxford,” took a beating because known X-Seal examples are marked Eversharp, not Oxford.  That is, the X-Seal examples known at the time I wrote the article . . . 

These no longer slip quietly under the radar when they appear.  I paid handsomely for this one, since the price included both a beautiful pencil and a shot at redemption.  Here it is, alongside the jade example from my previous article:

As is the case with the other example, this one is also built around a flattop Eversharp fitted with an Equipoised mechanism, originally introduced just prior to the rollout of the Doric line in 1931 - probably in 1930.  The top would originally have had a groove into which a gold band would separate the colored plastic from the black end, which was voided by machining down the top end slightly:

Also like the jade example, this one sports the slightly longer and later roller clip, marked “Wahl Eversharp”:

Then things get really interesting.  The jade example is imprinted simply with “Made in USA” on the lower barrel:

This coral example, however, has an imprint I haven’t seen on any other Eversharp – “OXFORD / Made in USA”:

I’m not saying that ALL X-Seals were marketed as Oxfords, but here is the hard, undeniable proof that at least this one was.  It fits as nicely into my theory as that last missing jigsaw puzzle piece that turns up under the couch months after you were trying to piece things together.  Here it is, next to the Oxford-clip coral pencil that caused me to come up with that theory in the first place:

Weirdness seems to coalesce primarily around the coral-colored examples in this series.  Here’s a family photo of all my coral “Tempoint-styled” pencils (or “Signature style, or whatever you prefer to call them):

This includes the “normal” ones - the top three are part of the regular line, although the longer, military-clip examples are harder to find.  The fourth one is an undocumented variant, which marries a 1924-or-so long nose onto what is otherwise the same pencil as the regular, full-length example right below it (what looks like a flared top end is actually one of the original price wafers which was snapped onto the top. 

(For the full story on the long-nose coral pencil, see Volume 3, page 14.  Those price wafers were detailed in a pair of early article posted here, now in Volume 1, pages 93 and 135.)

Next is the Oxford, and you can see how just a few modifications to a leftover from the regular line created a very different-looking pencil.

The bottom two show how the later, Equipoised-mechanism incarnation of this series was modified to create my Oxford “X-seal” pencil.  The flattop turned up at the Chicago show years ago, and its commemorative imprint doesn’t detract from its appearance to me, since it adds a bit more to this story:

The 25th Anniversary of Penn State’s Class of ‘09 would have been in 1934, so Wahl apparently had a supply of completed coral flattop pencils left over long after the line was formally discontinued in 1930. Perhaps the streamlining of the top end and addition of X-seals occurred after this pencil was imprinted and sold in 1934, using unfinished barrels lacking their top band.  That would be consistent with Syd’s theory that the X-seal pencils were hastily assembled from leftover parts in 1939.

Maybe we are all right.  Perhaps Wahl was unwilling to commit to warranting pencils made from parts that were 10 years old, so the “X” was just something different, more artful than just drilling a hole in a double-check seal to make it clear there was no factory warranty.  Perhaps if it is an O rather than just a circle, it was intended at some point to mean XO for closeout, although as of this writing no documentary evidence supports that.

Perhaps, as my pencil strongly suggests, Wahl associated these closeouts with its low-budget Oxford line as a less clumsy, more elegant solution to both of these.  At least we now know Wahl did so once.

I think Wahl might have done all of the above, and maybe I was just a little bit right, too.

An X-Seal Theory

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.

Weird Eversharps are something that I love to chase down.  By this point, with so many oddities lurking in the Eversharp section of the museum, they almost seem normal – until, I suppose, you head out into the wild and try to find another.

I referred to these as “Tempoint Pencils” in The Catalogue (see page 60):

That was a nickname I gave them, since they represented the first time Wahl attempted to style its pencils to actually match the looks of the company’s fountain pens, and Wahl didn’t give them a specific model name.  Critics pointed out that by 1927, when these were introduced, Wahl was no longer using the name “Tempoint” with respect to its pens, so I’ve come to agree that “Tempoint-styled” pencils is perhaps a more accurate way to refer to them.

This image provides the known range of available colors, but there’s a wider range of variations than shown here – the woodgrain hard rubber pencils come with and without those gold bands near the nose, and there’s actually four variations of the black: hard rubber and celluloid, greek key chased and smooth.

That coral example has what looks like a funky bell shaped top, but that’s actually an original price “wafer” that was pushed onto the tops.  They were easy to remove and very infrequently saved, so even though the lettering is worn off the top of this one, I’ve decided to keep it as is.  (That wafer, and the differences between the later, longer clips shown here and the earlier shorter clips was covered in https://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-long-and-short-of-it.html).

Although that wafer isn’t weird, it seems that weirdness does swirl around the coral-colored pencils along these lines, like this one:

I’ve written about this one here before, back in 2014 (the article is in The Leadhead’s Pencil Blog Volume 3, page 13).  This hybrid has a shorter clip, consistent with earlier production, and a 1924-1925 nose seen on earlier oversized Eversharps:

At the time I wrote that last article, though, I’d already been eyeing another weird coral Eversharp for more than a year:

I first learned about the existence of this one in August, 2013, when user J-F-O posted pictures of it in the old Fountain Pen Network forum.  I told him if he ever grew weary of it to let me know, and within the last six months or so he finally did.

When it comes to Eversharp, like most other makers, the differences between its flagship models and lesser priced and subbrands existed mostly on the company’s fountain pens.  These two, apart from a couple interesting and minor differences, are mechanically identical.

Note that the clip is marked “Oxford,” a name associated with Wahl’s cheaper subbrand of pens and pencils, and the terminus of the clip is a plain ball, rather than the more expensive roller clip.  And then there’s that top:

The top band is omitted, and the top has been streamlined slightly – likely to erase signs of the  channel in which the band would have been swaged.

And then there’s this oddity . . . a much more subtle one . . .

At first glance, it looks “normal,” but you might have noticed that this one isn’t quite flattop, and not quite Equipoised either, just like the coral Oxford.  The size isn’t quite right, either.

And neither is the trim configuration.  This pencil came my way from Jack Leone, who has a sharp eye for these things and actually had to point out to me what was special and different about it:

Instead of the usual Eversharp “double check” seal, this example has an unusual “X” seal, as collectors have nicknamed it.  There has been lively debate for years about what these seals were supposed to designate, with most of the discussion focused around whether it was some sort of a substitute for drilling small holes in the seal, something Eversharp did to void its lifetime warranty during the Depression in order to sell pens and pencils at a lower price, without that warranty.

I have another theory, backed up by physical evidence.  I’ve been looking at this pencil all wrong . . . the reason it doesn’t fit in with the Equipoised pencils is it isn’t an Equipoised:

Late in production of the “Tempoint-styled” flattop pencils, the line was redesigned to a middle-joint pencil; inside, these pencils had the same works found on the Equipoised line, but on the outside, the styling remained essentially the same.

My “X-seal” Eversharp isn’t an Equipoised, it’s a modified flattop.  In the same way my coral Oxford had a slightly rounded top, so too this late-production flattop was rounded in order to void that top ring and the channel in which it would have been seated.

And since the only other example I have is lacking this seal, but has a clip marked “Oxford,” I don’t believe it’s an X-seal at all.  If you look at the border surrounding the letter, it isn’t perfectly round:

I think it’s an “OX” seal, short for Oxford, designating a separate model line made from modified Eversharp parts.