Showing posts with label Gerlach-Barklow. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gerlach-Barklow. Show all posts

Saturday, May 5, 2018

Now I Can Quit Looking For 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.

If you don't want the book but you enjoy this article, please consider supporting the Blog project here.

Something has bothered me about the “Alexander the Great” pencils I introduced here during the first year of the blog (http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2012/08/sylish.html):



Some years ago, I remembered having one example of this pencil, with one difference: it didn’t have “Alexander” written on the clip.  Unfortunately, at the time I didn’t put it in a place separate from the plain ol’ examples, and after going through all the ones still on display I’ve concluded that at some point I must have inadvertently culled it out of my collection, along with the other Alexander duplicates.

What has bugged me was that I couldn’t remember what name was imprinted on them.  Thanks to Chris Egolf, I can finally get a good nights’ sleep now, since he had these three in an online auction recently:


The name that I couldn’t recall was Gerlach-Barklow, the advertising specialty and art calendar company located in Joliet, Illinois.  I did a rundown of the brand here awhile back at https://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2014/12/gerlach-barklow.html.


And I noticed something about these I didn’t tell you earlier.  If you pull out the eraser, these have kind of a neat feature:


The metal retainers are adjustable, so as the erasers wears down you can push it up.

Saturday, December 6, 2014

Gerlach-Barklow

Like a lot of these advertising pencil companies, Gerlach-Barklow specialized in making calendars. According to Joliet’s Gerlach-Barklow Calendar Company by Tim and Michelle Smith, the company was founded in 1907 in Joliet, Illinois by Theodore R. Gerlach, Edward J. Barklow and K.H. Gerlach.

By July, 1919, the Gerlach-Barklow plant was "the largest in the world devoted exclusively to the making of art calendars and direct-by-mail advertising media," as reported in Monotype: A Journal of Composing Room Efficiency Published by the Langston Monotype Machine Company:

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.