In Search of the Presto's Final Resting Place

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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I bought a collection from a guy who emailed me out of the blue a couple of years ago.  After swapping a couple of pictures, everything looked promising – I would have been much more leery of this kind of deal if he hadn’t volunteered to send me the whole collection on approval.

I approved.

A lot of what was in there were things that just sort of filled in some gaps in my collection - mostly upgrades of things I had in lesser condition, or minor variations such as a different color in a series . . . stuff that makes me smile, but doesn’t really make for much of a blog article.  Nearly everything I kept slipped quietly into my collection.

Still, there were a couple of surprises:

This one is marked “Everlast.”

What’s unusual is that this one, unlike all of the crappy nose-drive Everlasts you’ll find out there, is a repeating pencil.  From all outward appearances, it isn’t just any repeating pencil – it looks a lot like a Gilfred.

Samuel Kanner’s exploits have been an ongoing theme here at the blog.  He started with his Nupoint brand, then using Abraham Pollak’s patent for a repeater, went on to make the Nupoint Repeater, followed sometime around 1925-6 by the Presto, first in the same metal incarnation and then in those oversized bakelite models that are just too cool.

Later on, the Presto took on a more slender, decidedly cheaper incarnation as the “Everfeed,” although the Everfeed typically had a sterling clip stapled into that cheap plastic.  There were similar pencils marked “Nasco,” “Whitlock” and, as the title of this article suggests, the “Gilfred,” which unlocked for me the secret that the Gilfred Corporation made all of these later incarnations of the brand (Kanner’s association at that point remains unclear), and that Gilfred unsuccessfully sued Eversharp for infringement of the Pollak patent, which Eversharp appropriated for all of its repeating pencils from the late 1930s on (see “My Find of the Year” way back in 2011 at https://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2011/12/my-find-of-year.html - the images were wiped out but the story is still there).

I reposted this picture last September showing, from top, a later Presto, a Gilfred, an Everfeed and an Eversharp Doric repeater (“Presto Footnote Number One” at https://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2017/09/presto-footnote-number-one.html). 

This Everlast has some design cues taken from each of these - in particular, note how similar the trim band is to the Everfeed and Gilfred.  But that shorter nose . . . and what’s inside looks a little bit different:

In particular, that torpedo-shaped front end of the mechanism:

The Everlast name was the subject of two trademarks, found in American Writing Instrument Trademarks 1870-1953.  The earlier of the two, unfortunately, has not been preserved – all that remains is what was published in the Official Gazette, indicating that the name was in use beginning on September 2, 1933 by the Everlast Pen and Pencil Company of New York:

A second trademark, for a stylized logo, was filed for registration in 1947.  Since this one was preserved, we have considerably more information to go on here.  By this time, the company was known simply as Everlast Pen Corporation, and the President, Maurice J. Waldinger, said the company was located at 644 Broadway, New York.  Since the date of first use claimed for this second mark is the same date, I think it’s a fair assumption these were one and the same entity:

I didn’t find any newspaper advertisements for a repeating version of the Everlast - just standard twist mechanism pencils.  I widened my search to look for Everfeed pencils, and I learned something.  The common Everfeeds like the ones shown in the pictures above appear to have been made in the mid-1940s:

But when the “New Ever-feed repeating pencil” was introduced in 1940, it was fatter – and it had that same black nose and smaller tip:

Just like this odd Everlast repeater.

There’s a lot of research to do and much to learn about how all of these companies were related to each other.  Was the name “Everfeed” a tradename adopted by the Everlast Pen and Pencil Company?  No trademark was filed that I found, but the advertisements originated disproportionately from New York. 

Following up on the Waldinger lead, I found that a stationer by the name of the M.J. Waldinger Co. leased space at 48 West 47th Street, New York:

And just two years later, his creditors forced him into bankruptcy – including the Esterbrook Steel Pen Manufacturing Company, as reported in the December 29, 1922 edition of The New York Times:

Presto! A Revelation!

On the last day of the DC show, Robert Speerbrecher visited my table with a stack of slotter boxes he’d acquired from the collection of Bert Heiserman, the proprietor of Pen Haven who passed away a couple of months ago.  Was I interested in anything in there, he asked?  Among a few other things (more on those later), I saw this one and I had to admit that yes, I was:

The mechanism is a cap-actuated repeater mechanism – interesting, since it’s also a ringtop, so you have to push down on the ring to advance the lead.  The barrel has some intricate machining:

To learn more, this full article is included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 2, 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.

Welcome to Pencil Island

“Do you have a Decat?”  Michael Little’s email asked.  When the answer was no, my Arizona connection hooked me up:

The faceted clip matches those found on Eagles, Majestics and a whole bunch of other lower-tier pencils, and is marked “Made in USA”:

To learn more, this full article is included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 2, 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.

My Find of the Year

Today seems like the perfect day to bring out my top find of this year.  The series of impossible coincidences that have happened over the last couple weeks ended up bringing together three brands that I never knew were connected and led me to a conclusion that I never dreamed up: 

Eversharp stole the idea for its repeating pencil from someone else. 

This story starts innocently enough, with the article I wrote in early December titled "The Ferengi's Acfad."  After the article was published, I went back to Michael Little (the Ferengi in the article) and told him how excited I was to discover that his ACFAD was actually a pre-Moore pencil, from the days when Moore was known as The American Fountain Pen Co.  I didn't ask him to sell it to me - I just asked that if he ever did decide to sell it, to consider selling it to me.

Well, Michael did ask me how much I'd pay for it, and after I made an offer, we had a deal.  There was only one problem: 

he'd lost it.

He emailed me frantically after I'd sent him the check and said it just had to be somewhere in his apartment, that he was on the hunt for it and not to worry.  Fortunately, I know Michael well enough to know that he would find it - in fact, while he was looking, he might find some other cool things while he's looking for it.  From his description, his apartment sounds like Warehouse 13.

Sure enough, a few days later he emailed me to let me know he'd found it, along with about six other pencils he thought I'd like.   One of them, he said, was a "Gilfred."  Quite correctly, he pointed out that I did not list the Gilfred in The Catalogue.   He didn't send me a picture of it, but a little later in the day he sent me a link to a court case decided in January, 1942, captioned Gilfred Corporation v. Eversharp, Inc. (ok, the lawyer in me can't stop there -- the citation is 43 F. Supp. 645). 

I was amazed as I read the case.  This "Gilfred Corporation" claimed that Eversharp's design for its version of the repeating pencil infringed on Gilfred's patent.  Eversharp didn't defend by saying it came up with the idea first, and Eversharp didn't claim to have rights under its own patent.  Eversharp's entire defense was that Gilfred's patent claims weren't valid because someone else had thought of it before Gilfred, in 1896. 

Who won?   I'll give you one guess.  Ever hear of a Gilfred Skyline?   

(Now as an aside, stop here for a minute and ponder the irony of this.  Just three years after this case was decided, Eversharp was on exactly the opposite side of this argument, when the Reynolds Pen Company introduced the ballpoint pen and  Eversharp sued Reynolds for infringing on Eversharp's rights -- Reynolds, just as Eversharp had done in 1942, argued that the ballpoint pen had been patented in the 1880s and the rights to it had long since expired.    But I digress.)

To get back to our story, a couple days later I decided to dig a little deeper and look into the two patents that were mentioned in the case.  The "Clement Patent" from 1896 was number 566,444, issued August 25, 1896 to John Clement of Birmingham, England.

But it was the Gilfred patent that raised my eyebrows.  OK, it didn't raise them, it had them sailing off my forehead like in an old Warner Brother's cartoon, with a steam whistle blowing in the background.  The Gilfred patent was number 1,592,502 and was originally issued to Abraham Pollak.  The assignee was . . . Samuel Kanner.  Wow!  That's the patent for the Presto repeating pencil I wrote about just a few weeks ago.  Remember this?

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