Party On, Jack

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.

I’ll admit to having more fun than usual on eBay during this whole virus thing.  With no pen shows to go to, no flea markets to attend, no Springfield Extravaganza . . . gotta get my fix somewhere, I suppose.

I’ve taken a bit of lighthearted heat from the wife whenever a little pile of packages appears on my doorstep.  In the days when I would arrive home before Janet, it was easy to have all the packages opened, the boxes discarded and the pencils squirreled away into the museum before I’d hear the garage door go up.  These days, however, she’s working from home and whenever all my little packages don’t fit in our mailbox, the dogs announce the arrival of our mailman right outside her “office” window with every load of illicit goods.

Not that I’m doing anything wrong or spending all that much money . . . I’m just on the receiving end of a comment here and there regarding how many pencils one might “need” in order to survive a nuclear holocaust and repopulate the planet’s shirt pockets with adequate writing gear.

I’m relieved whenever I get to tell Janet that not all these boxes are crazy little trinkets upon which I’ve squandered the kids’ inheritance, and lately there’s been a lot of other packages arriving.  Without the usual socialization at shows, people have been sending pencils to fix, stuff to photograph – not everything that arrives is completing a one-way trip to Leadhead’s Leadquarters.

A couple weeks ago, however, one package arrived that was making a one-way trip – but it wasn’t anything I was expecting:

Apparently a few stragglers didn’t keep up with the march of the penguins, and there were a few other things in Don Jacoby’s stuff that Jack Leone wanted to catch up with the rest of the flock (if you're just now tuning in and that doesn't make sense, see "Penguins in the Barnyard").  “Party on!” Jack instructed.

“Party on, Jack” I titled the email to thank him, along with the observation that if I had not FINALLY  gotten a long, long, LONG overdue haircut the preceding day, I would be playing air guitar and headbanging to Bohemian Rhapsody right along with him.

For all you kids out there who have no idea what I’m talking about . . . sigh . . . just go ask your parents.  I keep forgetting what’s obvious to me is inevitably becoming the wisdom of the ancients.

There were a couple neat things in Jack’s care package worth sharing.  First is this pair of Eversharp “4 Square” pencils (these actually have the imprint on the caps) – see "Making Sense of the Square 4" for the full rundown on these:

Well look at that – this subseries came in both nickel plated and gold filled trim!  My example, in nickel plate, wasn’t nearly so nice, so both of these have found a comfortable place alongside their counterparts.  

The rest were a few lower-level Parkers - Parkettes and such.  Nothing much to write home about here, although I’ve had a single band example like that lower one which has been missing a clip:

I’ve had a green one just like that one which has that same clip, but I was never comfortable it was right.  Now that Don’s example has made it to me, with the same clip as found in the wild (or to carry on the theme of the weekend, waddling around in the barnyard), I happily invited this one into the fold.

And then there’s that Parker Liquid Lead pencil . . . there’s something a little bit odd about it.  It took me a while to find where I keep my other Liquid Lead pencils to compare it.  What I remembered them looking like was more along these lines:

I think the ones like that lavender example were later, though . . . or maybe for the lower tier lines, like to match the 21 or such.  I dug a little deeper and found a few Parker 51 Liquid Lead pencils, and they share that same shorter, ribbed tip:

And in the case of that lower example, a hefty price tag of $10!  

As you’ve probably guessed by now, I’ve settled into an uneasy peace with Parker’s grand experiment to load up a ballpoint cartridge with graphite paste and call it a “pencil.”  Yeah, I’ll keep them around the museum as “close enough to being a pencil” (after all, look how hard I stretched to accommodate those chalk holders the other day).  But no, I just haven’t been able to get too excited about them because the damned things never work (but then again, look how many goofy ideas that never worked well are proudly represented in the museum).  

I’ve come to adopt the Don Jacoby philosophy.  I like them just because I do, and I don’t like them just because I don’t.  So sue me.  

I will admit that on those rare occasions when you find one that works, they are kind of cool - lead flowing out of a pencil like ink and all.  Plus, that cartridge looks a bit shorter and different from the other Liquid Leads I’ve got around, so I thought this might have been some weird experimental thing Parker did that may have worked a bit better.  I turned Jack’s “Party On” instruction sheet over to see what it would do . . . 

Whoa.  It works, but I’ve never heard of a Parker Liquid Lead that wrote in purple!  Of course that meant I had to take it apart . . . 

From the other room Janet heard me burst out laughing.  Yes, Virginia, you can fit an ordinary Pilot ballpoint cartridge in a Parker Liquid Lead pencil and it will work just fine as a pen – thanks to Don Jacoby I finally have a way to bring all those dead Liquid Lead paperweights back to life!

Party on indeed, Jack.  Party on, Don!  Climb on into that blue AMC Pacer and crank it up . . . 

(Dooo do do doo do-do-do . . doo doo do dooooo... oh come on, I know you know this song.  Bang your damned head!)

What I Wasn't Expecting

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.

Since I’m on a “plug the holes” mission with my Eversharp collection, now that I can see where they are, I decided to throw in a bid online on this group:

The one in the center was the target of my affection . . . it’s one of the Square 4 derivative pencils, in a gray pearl I haven’t seen used on these before.

Of course, with a proper cap fitted, it is much more handsome:

It is also a little unusual to find these with advertising on them.  This one advertises the Englewood Electrical Supply Company:

And so, with that little tidbit photographed and tucked away in its proper place, I set about examining the other two items that came with it.  The upper one is a maroon Eversharp Skyline Press Clip I – the most common color in the most common series – in nice condition but one that went straight into the duplicates for sale box.  The other one is an Eversharp checking pencil with a typical mechanism for that middle generation made between 1922 and 1928:

(I ran down the differences between the first year checking pencils from 1921, these pencils, and the late-1928 and 1929 version back in 2013, at https://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2013/07/good-thing-im-crazy.html.)

I didn’t have much hope for this one, since even in the auction pictures, I could tell that there was some serious wavyness in the barrel:

But when it arrived, I was surprised to see there wasn’t a single chip in the paint.  That’s a little odd, since my other black second generation checking pencil doesn’t have any dents, but it’s got a few big chunks of paint missing:

It didn’t make any sense that one of these could sustain so many dents without losing any of the paint, and on closer examination, I learned why:

Those aren’t dents, and that isn’t paint.  This checking pencil has a thin plastic covering over a brass barrel, just like the English Eversharps along the same lines, which has become distorted . . . also just like the English Eversharps along these same lines:

Just last month, when I was showing off “My (Latest) Favorite Weird Eversharp” (https://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2017/06/my-latest-favorite-weird-eversharp.html), I commented that that all the other Eversharps I had seen which were built this way were English.  Now, within the span of a month, two American examples have surfaced.

There’s a reason I never say “all of these are this way,” preferring instead “all the ones I’ve seen are this way.”  I may have seen a lot, but I know I’ll never see it all.

A Bit of Red and Green . . . Well, Red Anyway

The last time I came around to these, I came so close to telling you what I meant to say about them:

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 Yang to My Ying

During the Friday trading at the Chicago show, I decided to wander around a bit while Michael Little was going through Frank Hoban's boxes behind the scenes, and I naturally tended to gravitate around to the front of Frank's table.  There I found a little box with a few pencils in it, and the more I looked, the more excited I got.  By the time I was finished, I'd taken about two thirds of the box.

What struck me the most was the Eversharp "Square 4" pencils that were in there.  I've got quite a few of them, as pictured on page 71 of The Catalogue, but from what I could tell, all the ones Frank had were ones I didn't have -- and all of them were in great condition.   So I had to bring the ying and yang together!

First, there was one in the same red "bumblebee" pattern as the dollar pencil I recently wrote about . . .
NOTE:  This article is now included in the print version of The Leadhead's Pencil Blog, available anywhere you buy books, or also from The Legendary Lead Company.

To order, here's the link:  Volume 1 at Legendary Lead Company

Eversharp Week Part 6: Square 4 in Triplicate

I've pictured a variety of Eversharp's "Square 4" pencils at page 71 of The Catalogue, and I'll admit the assortment is a bit of a mess.  In fact, that photo is one of the original photographs I shot for my online museum in 2009, before I was very good at either (1) photography and (2) organization.

The "Square 4" pencils, introduced around 1937, were utility pencils with exposed erasers, named for the lead they were designed to use:  four inches long and square in shape.  There are so many varieties that it's easy to put together quite a collection just of these, and they are still so reasonably priced that you can have a whole lot of fun for not a whole lot of cash.

Recently I've picked up a few that are worthy of note . . .

NOTE:  This article is now included in the print version of The Leadhead's Pencil Blog, available anywhere you buy books, or also from The Legendary Lead Company.

To order, here's the link:  Volume 1 at Legendary Lead Company