Troublesome Brazilians

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

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Someone sadistic person at Eversharp must have enjoyed tormenting people with OCD tendencies.  Consider, for example Eversharp’s “Brazilian Green.”  There’s one lurking in this group of Eversharp purse and clasp pencils, trying to look like it is working and playing well with others (as pictured in Volume 4, page 142):

Brazilian green is fourth from the right, in that green with bronze swirled into it.   Wherever that color appears, it doesn’t quite follow the same rules as all of the other colors.  A few years ago I shot a pair of deco band pencils to illustrate that point:

Both would qualify as “deco,” but every other color in the series has a greek key band.  The center band on the Brazilian green ones is narrower, with offset parallelograms - “rhomboid” bands, collectors call them:

The extra bands were also added to the short, military version of these pencils in the series, as shown in The Catalog on page 61 . . . and to my knowledge, this color wasn’t offered as a ringtop or full length, non-Deco band version:

When it came to the purse pencil line, Eversharp divided the line into “girlier” colors, with a single rhomboid band like the “Tempoint-styled” Brazilian Green models, and “manlier” colors, which had two plain bands.  The Brazilian green, however, fell on the “manlier” side and, for this series, got two plain bands rather than its usual rhomboid one.

A recent online auction brought this one to my doorstep, marking a grim milestone:

That slightly longer top end means this isn’t one of Eversharp’s “purse pencils.”  It’s a “clasp pencil,” according to the 1932 catalog – a more manly version of a smaller pencil:

Consistent with that non-purse designation, the clasp models are found in the manlier colors only, with their usual twin bands:

From this picture, it looks like all I’m missing is a clasp pencil in Brazilian Green, then the set would be complete, right?  That’s the grimness of the milestone – I’ve actually completed the set, according to Eversharp’s 1932 catalog:

These were cataloged in five out of the six “manly” colors . . . all but Brazilian Green, which was offered only as a daintier purse pencil, but with manly trim.  

I don’t know what is worse – thinking Brazilian Green clasp pencils exist and Eversharp’s catalog is off, or thinking my clasp pencil set is complete and Eversharp was . . . well, just plain mean.

Eversharp’s catalog is off, in one respect.  Pictured next to the clasp pencils are the “ring” models; while I’ve never seen one in the purse pencil size, they exist on the manlier line – in fact, they look even larger than clasp models:

They are exactly the same size as their clasp cousins in real life, and they are cataloged in the same five manly colors.  These are even harder to find than clasp models, and I’ve only been able to add two of the five colors to the collection.

With my luck, the next one I find will probably be in Brazilian Green.

What It Must Be

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.

When this Eversharp turned up online, it was one of those things I looked at, and looked at again, and came back again an hour later, because something just didn’t look quite right:

I think I’ve got it placed now, although the answer doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.  Remember the Equipoised “Purse” and “Clasp” pencils?

That’s ten out of the eleven known colors -- or maybe eleven out of the twelve (see http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2015/02/only-eleven.html).  The “purse” pencils, the five on the left in this picture, were in “girlier” colors and had a single, deco-decorated band.  The “clasp” pencils, on the left, were found in “maniler” colors and were distinguished by a pair of plain, thinner bands.   I think the clasp pencils are the nearest relatives to this one:

Note that there’s just one difference: on the ringtop, the break between cap and lower barrel falls below the bands, while the clasp pencils break in between the bands. So I guess this was supposed to be the ladies’ version of the manly part in the least manly line?

Speaking of purse and clasp pencils, I've got a nice set to show you as well:

The color on this NOS set is superb, and the only thing more I could ask for would be the lid for the box.  I fished around on Facebook and heard that the lid was cardboard, and if I see one, I’ll post a picture of it.

This is that mysterious color, which may or may not be what was called “Ceylon Pearl” in Eversharp’s 1932 catalog.  The catalog shows Ceylon Pearl, but the color is more of a greyish/pinkish hue than what you see here.  Unless the colors were wildly off in the catalog, this is an unnamed twelfth color.