Last But Not Least

Two days ago, I started what I thought would be a quick introduction to a group of new old stock pencils in their boxes, which I had received from Gabriel Galecia Goldsmith.

The first pencil in that group told a longer story than I expected, so I adjourned to a second installment to run through the others; however, when I started writing about that last one, there was so much more than initially meets the eye . . .

The Christmas box is one I haven’t seen before, and there’s quite a wad of papers in here that we will delve into in a minute. But first, the pencil: it is a “Signature-style” Eversharp; as I discussed in Chapter Eight of Eversharp: Cornerstone of an Industry, in which I spent a few pages explain why “Signature-style” is a better collective name for them than “Tempoint” or “Tempoint-style,” as I referred to them in The Catalogue.

Strictly speaking, these were the “New $3.50 EVERSHARPS That Match the New $5.00 WAHL PENS” (see the Eversharp book at page 177). Wahl flirted with naming the pens the “Fivespot,” but it didn’t stick (page 179) – and Wahl never referred to the matching pencil as a “Threeandahalfspot.”

At least, that’s what they were called when the line was introduced in 1927, with the old-style Eversharp mechanism in use since 1924. Black and pearl was not part of the original lineup of colors, and was introduced after the 1928 Wahl catalog was printed. It is first shown in the summer 1928 edition of Eversales, Wahl’s internal magazine at the time (see page 177 in the book). The military clip version of the pencil was given model designation K4004SC.

But wait a tick . . .  these are not the pencils we have here . . . at least, not quite. That gold-filled tip and longer top are a giveaway that Gabriel’s new example is a later example, fitted with the same mechanism used on the Equi-Poise series introduced in 1929. At top in this next image is the original Model K4004SC (for short with clip), our new addition, and examples with Equi-Poise mechanisms in military clip and ringtop configurations.

Examples with the Equi-Poise mechanism are more difficult to find, and they may have been manufactured primarily to use up leftover celluloid stock. Wahl’s 1929 catalog includes the new streamlined Equi-Poise line and the flattop Signature-style line, identical to what was introduced in 1928 but with the model designation changed to 4004SC (dropping the K prefix).

The mechanism used on the new Equi-Poise pencils was apparently incorporated into the flattop line after the 1929 catalog was printed. It would make sense to conclude these were discontinued in 1931 with the introduction of the new Doric, since there is no mention of these in Wahl’s 1931 catalog. However, a commemorative imprint on a coral example shown on page 188 of the book indicates it was made in 1934 (the 25th anniversary of the class of 1909 - see the bottom example in this image from page 188 in the book).

Full sized examples usually have a seal above the clip, while ringtops with the Equi-Poise mechanism have a seal on the side. The military clip version has the seal on the top of the pencil, as shown on page 189:

Note that these rounder tops are thicker than what is seen on the new addition:

That is because Gabriel’s pencil does not have a seal: instead, it has a special-order top piece advertising “Hoffman 77 Valves,” a water vent valve for heating radiators which remains in production today. 

That might explain the unusual model designation on the price sticker on the back, and maybe not:

Model 4004ESC. I say maybe, maybe not because I don’t have any documentation to say what a “normal” Signature-style pencil with an Equi-Poise mechanism was called. With an old-style mechanism, this was Model 4004SC in the 1929 catalog; maybe all pencils later fitted with Equi-Poise mechanism had an ESC suffix – say, for “Equi-Poise,” and maybe the E was added to indicate it was “especially” made for a custom order.

Does the paperwork help? Not on that point, but it provides plenty of other information there to discuss. First, this one includes a warranty certificate:

"Gold Seal” pens and pencils was the name adopted by Wahl with the introduction of what collectors have nicknamed “Deco Band” models, with their elaborate greek-key center bands. When the Equi-Poise mechanism was adopted, the double-check gold seals were broadly applied to most models, so I’ll accept that this is the correct paperwork for this non-Deco Band model. 

Then there’s the instructions:

The Equi-Poise line shared the same pencil mechanism with the Doric, so it does not surprise me to see a Doric pencil illustrated in the paperwork. However, patent information printed in the lower corners might help to narrow down when these instructions were printed. On one side, the Doric’s design patents are noted:

Both of these design patents were issued on August 5, 1930 to Robert Back.

That is not particularly helpful, since we already knew flattop models were still in production in 1930. But wait . . . there’s more. On the back side, there’s some discussion about Wahl’s new patented “Kleen-Fill” ink bottles, along with some additional patent information:

The latter of these, patent 1,800,330, was applied for by John C. Wahl and Albert H. Stenerson on October 24, 1925, and it was granted on April 14, 1931.

Well crap.  All that patent information, and nothing conclusively establishes that Signature-Style pencils with Equi-Poise mechanisms were in production any later than what I already knew. One additional clue helps just a tiny bit more: the cap band on the Doric pencil that is illustrated:

“First year” Dorics have a split band, with part of the band on the upper barrel; according to Wahl’s advertising, production was simplified in late 1931 or early 1932 by incorporating the entire band into the lower barrel. This was discussed on page 216 of the book:

That pushes the probable date of production back to late 1931, given the Christmas box in which it resides . . . again, that doesn’t shatter anything I believed, since that coral example discussed earlier dates to 1934. Coral, though, might be a different story than black and pearl: bizarre variants abound in coral material, including some flattops that were made during the 1939 “garage sale” in which Wahl cobbled things together in preparation of the company’s reorganization as Eversharp, Inc. See “The Weirdness of Coral” (April 23, 2021: Volume 7, page 57) and page 190 in the Eversharp book.

All of the foregoing is ultimately a house of cards . . . or cardstock, I suppose. Yes, all of this - box, new old stock pencil, and paperwork appear consistent. Yes, when these artifacts are considered together, they all appear to prove that the Equi-Poise fitted Gold Seal pens and pencils were in regular production during the 1931 Christmas season, after the Doric was introduced and after they were omitted entirely from Wahl’s 1931 catalog. Yes, I am confident that this package came to me exactly as it came to Gabriel.

I am, however, assuming that this pencil was wrapped in these papers and placed in this box back in 1931. Colonel Mustard may be in the right room, but he’s still holding something behind his back.

An X-Seal Theory

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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.

The Long and Short of It

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.

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When this “Tempoint-styled” Eversharp came my way along with a bunch of other things, I was looking for an excuse to keep it:

I just love that coral color . . . even though I had another one . . .

The excuse I needed was at the top - what looks like a flared bit of plastic at the end is something I haven’t seen for some time, and never on a full sized model – it’s one of those detachable plastic price “wafers” Eversharp occasionally used instead of stickers or bands:

The numbers have worn off, but somehow the dark blue/purple wafer has managed to hang in there.  I wrote about these when the blog was first getting going (Volume 1, pages 93 and 135), but in both of those articles, the wafers were attached to earlier metal crown tops, not to these straight plastic caps.  I’ve only seen this one other time, on a military-clip example, second from the top on page 218.  The lettering is still intact on that one:

There was a second excuse for me to keep that coral pencil, which didn’t register at the time I was taking these pictures.  A few months later I was going over these with a fine toothed comb again, looking for any reason I could to keep both of these lapis examples after what looked like another duplicate came my way:

The celluloid on the lower example looks a little lighter and brighter, but that’s not what got my attention – it was the clips:

One has a noticably stubbier clip marked simply “Eversharp,” while the other clip is longer and has the word “Wahl” added.  There’s a reason for that.  In Wahl’s 1928 catalog, the company’s “New Style Pyroxalin Barrel Pencils” are shown with the stubbier Eversharp clips:

The 1929 catalog I’ve been able to find isn’t as good a quality, but there’s no question that for 1929, Wahl switched to the longer “Wahl Eversharp” clips:

So the shorter clips are earlier, dating to 1927 and 1928, while the longer clips are from 1929:

Knowing that little detail is what made it easy to spot what made this one so special in Raleigh:

On page 216 I wrote about how much more rare the celluloid (“pyraloxin,” in the King’s Eversharpese) black pencils are than their hard rubber predecessors – and I had assumed at the time that the celluloid models always had smooth barrels while the hard rubber ones were always machined with Eversharp’s “grecian border” pattern.  The longer clip on this one, though, had me zooming in for a closer look to see if it might be celluloid, even though the barrel is chased:

And yes, Virginia, celluloid examples do exist with chased barrels.

I Don't Feel So Silly Now

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.

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Jerome Lobner had this one in one of his auctions recently.  It's the top one in this picture, and the reason it interested me was the very subtle difference from the one I had in my collection:

Most of the time, when you see black “tempoint-style” Eversharp pencils such as these, the barrels are fabricated of hard rubber, chased with Eversharp’s “grecian border” design.  The smooth material is Eversharp’s new plastic, which the company marketed as “Pyralin.”

The auction for this one couldn’t have come at a much worse time, set to close on Valentine’s Day, squarely in the middle of a romantic dinner with Janet at our favorite restaurant - Molly Woo’s, a Chinese restaurant over in the big city of Columbus at Polaris shopping center.  We had arrived early, so as we were browsing the shops before heading to the restaurant I was able to surreptitiously check the status of the auction, and something strange was going on . . .

I kept getting outbid, and the price had gone from “might as well fill out this series” to “damn someone else really wants it.”  Usually I’ll put in one healthy bid when I want something – one big enough to assure that I’ll get something, at a price above which I can’t justify – but someone had blown past that bid and I was in the rare position of being the creeper, edging my bid up several times, each time saying to myself “ok this is stupid.  This is as high as I’m going.” 

Shortly before dinner, with a few minutes remaining in the auction, I was finally the high bidder.  I put my phone away and we settled down for a nice dinner.

But my mind was elsewhere.

Without a clock in sight, it was driving me positively nuts not knowing what happened.  At last I couldn’t take it any more, and I finally broke down and confessed that I’d been bidding on a pencil on the sly during our date.  I asked Janet if I could be rude and check to see if I’d won, and living up to her reputation as “the most patient woman alive,” she relented.

I pulled up the auction to see that there were still just a couple minutes left – and I had been outbid again.  I showed Janet the auction and how high the bidding had reached.  She gulped (just like I had been doing), and she asked whether I was going to bid again. 

No, I said. 

That was stupid money for one of these, I said. 

Only an idiot would pay that much for one of these, I said.

But as my lips were flapping these words, just as I was putting my phone away, this particular idiot threw in one last Hail Mary bid . . . a bid that said just how much it would drive me crazy to know there’s an example out there with a plain pyralin barrel that isn’t sitting next to my example with the chased hard rubber barrel.  At last, with that final bid, I was at peace with whatever might happen and we enjoyed the rest of our dinner.

On the way to the car, Janet asked what the high bid was, and I checked in to learn that my final bid stuck.  “Wow, that’s a lot of money.  Who got it?”  she asked.

“I did.”

“I thought you weren’t going to bid anymore?”

“Fingers must have slipped,” I said. 

The following day, after I’d paid for the pencil, Jerome and I were chatting by email.  I commented that I couldn’t believe how high it went, but I just had to chase it since it was about the only Eversharp in the series that I didn’t have.  And Jerome said something that made me feel a lot better: I wasn’t the only one who had told him that exact thing.  Apparently, the black pyralin pencils are much, much, MUCH harder to find than their chased hard rubber counterparts, and apparently I’m not the only idiot that appreciates that rather obscure detail.

Which means that the following picture means something to a wider audience than I knew:

The pyralin variant exists for the short military clip and deco band versions in the series, too.

And more than a few of you out there will also appreciate my agony over this:

I still haven’t been able to turn up an example in the lowly ringtop.  Here’s to hoping if one turns up in an online auction, it isn’t closing on the date of my anniversary!

My Philadelphia Distraction

When I traveled to the Philadelphia show last January with my friend John Hall, it was a long, cold drive from Columbus. Of course, any drive along the Pennsylvania Turnpike seems twice as long as it really is!

We decided to push through as far as we could on Thursday night after work, hoping that we would at least shave enough hours off of the trip that we could arrive at the hotel early enough on Friday to enjoy the sights and set up my book display. And push hard we did, all the way through to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, just a couple hours outside of Philly. By the time we reached the state’s capitol, we were DONE. D-O-N-E, get-me-the-hell-out-of-this-truck done, so we paid our three pints of blood at the toolbooth and wandered into town looking for something to eat.

Since I’d been hoping we’d make Harrisburg, I’d searched around a bit online to see what there was to do in town, and I’d found a place called Dockside Willie’s, on the west bank of the Susquehanna River. The view was more like looking out over the Susquehanna Glacier, with enormous chunks of ice accumulated along the banks, but I swear that first beer was in my top five best-tasting beers I ever had.

And as we waited for our food, weary from our travels and with hard earned-alcohol in hand, John and I did exactly what you’d expect a couple collectors on their way to a show would do: we checked out cell phones to see how our online auction bids were faring. I was delighted to see that I won the only auction I was hot and heavy after – and particularly delighted when it appeared that either no one else caught on to how unusual this pencil is, or just as likely that no one else was interested in another obscure Eversharp variant the way I am.

I’ll back up a bit first to give this one a bit of context. Here’s three full-sized Wahl Eversharp pencils from the mid-1920s:

The top example is the earliest of the three. When Wahl first began to dabble in barrel materials other than metal, the simplest way to add different materials was to replace the middle part with a straight tube, threaded onto ends machined using the company’s existing equipment. Eversharp catalogs available at the Pen Collectors of America’s online library are helpful in putting together a timeline: thin models the size of the company’s usual metal pencils were introduced in the 1924 catalog (the innards had to be shrunk a bit to accommodate the thicker walls of a hard rubber barrel); oversized models were catalogued beginning in 1925. 

There’s a bit of a gap in the documents available at the PCA, and I’d love to see the company’s regular 1926 and 1927 catalogs. All I know for certain is that by the time Wahl’s 1928 catalog was published, Wahl had developed machining to eliminate the large metal nose-cone and fashion attractive tapered barrels out of the new materials. The bottom example matched the pens in Wahl’s sleek new plastic line of pens, and all the examples I’ve ever seen have the tapered barrel and small tip to complement this slick new design.

All, of course, except the example that had me whoopin’ and hollerin’ over a beer in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania:

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