The Footnote That Was In the Mail

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.

Call it “Leadhead’s Luck” . . . these little coincidences that seem to pop up as I’m writing things here.  Time and time again, just as I'm getting ready to post about something, something else I haven’t thought about jumps out at me and provides another missing piece of the puzzle I was working on.  It almost looks like I’m doing it on purpose, but I’m not.

At the time the ruler pencils series was publishing here, I was waiting for what I thought was an unrelated pencil from an online auction I had won on a lark.  I wasn’t looking for anything specific at the time, just idly looking at auctions for mechanical pencils sorted by those “ending soonest” –

The auction pictures were terrible and showed the pencil head-on, so I didn’t even know the barrel was square.  There’s no ruler on the side and there’s no telescoping sections if you tug on the nose, but it certainly calls to mind the ruler pencils from those articles.  Here it is, alongside the Cartier from part two of the series:

The reason I decided to throw in a small, last-minute bid on this one was because the seller had identified it as a Georg Jensen – a brand I haven’t thought about for a long, long time.  My one and only other article about Jensen ran here back in 2015 (the full article is still live and is at https://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2015/02/later-than-you-think.html).  Pencils marked “Georg Jensen Inc. USA,” my research found, indicates production between 1941-2 and 1950, although the company had offices in New York from the 1920s.  World War II had made importing silver from Europe impossible for the Danish firm, so Jensen added “USA” to the imprints.

And this little pencil is so marked, with what looks like remnants of red enamel in the lettering:

As I was unpacking this one on arrival, I found it wrapped in a little felt baggie that I almost threw out – sellers frequently ship pencils in all sorts of little bags for a bit of added protection, and I normally don’t see a need to keep unmarked packaging since so much more arrives here than departs.  Fortunately, just as I was about to pitch it I happened to glance down – and I noticed an added bonus that wasn’t shown in the pictures or mentioned in the description for the listing:

A nice, original Georg Jensen felt carrying bag with the company’s New York address of 667 Fifth Avenue, New York!

So, you may be asking yourself, neat as all this is, how does this tie in with “Leadhead’s Luck?”  First, I had no idea when I bought this one that it was square (the pictures were really THAT bad) . . . and I was just talking the other day about Edward Todd Junior’s design patent number 68,281 for such a design (https://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2020/03/everybody-and-their-brother-part-two.html):

Notice that Todd’s patent isn’t for a ruler pencil necessarily – it’s for a square one.  If Todd’s design patent had any teeth (and as I mentioned in that last article, that’s debatable), it’s a pretty good indication that my Georg Jensen pencil, sans ruler and small in stature, was nevertheless an Edward Todd product.

Or a progeny of Edward Todd, I should say – recall that Jensen didn’t start using this imprint until 1941 or 1942 . . . if Louis Tamis & Son acquired all of Edward Todd’s machinery and equipment after the firm closed in 1932, then perhaps LT&Son made my Georg Jensen.

Which means . . .

The middle two pencils in this picture are the Georg Jensen pencils I showed in my 2015 article.  Look at those clips . . . the upper one has that long, straight ball clip just like the top pencil in this picture, which is the Pen-N-Pencil Co. ruler pencil I just wrote about last Friday.  I characterized that clip as “Hutcheon-like” and I thought – but didn’t say out loud – that these were made by someone other than Edward Todd.  Now I’m thinking Pen-N-Pencil might have upped their game a bit for their ruler pencil production, sourcing it from either Edward Todd or LT & Son.

Meanwhile, the other Jensen in this picture, the broker pencil third from top, has a clip which is a dead ringer for the one on the bottom -- which is that “Victorian” from Monday’s article (see https://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2020/03/victorvictorian.html).  Score another point in the column for the Victorian being another brand manufactured by Louis Tamis!

Later Than You Think

This article has been edited and included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 3; 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.

There might have been something in yesterday’s article that bugged you a little bit – the notion that a Hicks family pencil with that upturned clip would have been made after 1940, and maybe even as late as 1962. Even though 1940 was 75 years ago now, that’s not a decade you’d normally associate with high quality when it comes to mechanical pencils. I for one used to associate these stockbroker-style, quality pencils with the Golden Age of the 1920s and 1930s.

Yet when I stumbled across yesterday’s Black, Starr & Gorham pencil and learned that the trade name was used between 1940 to 1962, I was prepared to accept those dates, because I’d already had some indications that these impressive pencils remained in production much later than I originally thought.

The realization came to me a few months ago, when this pair turned up in an online auction:

These are very similar to the Hicks family of pencils, with the exception of those straight (and in the case of the stockbroker, straight and bolted-on) clips, and both appear to be classic 1920s pencils. Both are a little bit rough, but I still thought they were worth investing a bit for two reasons: first, they are sterling, so the sheer amount of silver in this pair was nothing to sneeze at. Second, though, was the names found on them, which were absent from my stash:

"Georg Jensen Inc. USA." In the past, I’d resisted the temptation to buy Jensen pencils. Sure, the guy was a high quality silversmith, but a Danish one – and to the greatest extent I am able, I resist branching out into non-American pencils. This time, I caved: the "USA" mark was just too close to my perimeter fence for me to resist reaching through and snapping these up.

When I started poking around on these, though, I found that the USA mark was used only for a short window in time, from around 1941 or 1942 through 1950. Even though Georg Jensen had offices in New York since the 1920s, it was impossible to import silver from Europe during the Second World War – hence the sudden addition of "USA" to the company’s hallmarks.

But could these really have been made that late?

Yes. This advertisement appeared in The Rotarian. In May, 1947. Were these just a holdover? Leftover parts from Golden Age production of Hicks pencils, like this one?

You’d think this one was twenty years earlier, until you read the inscription:

"Stark Bros. C.J.W. 1922-1947."