A New Flavor

A few days ago, I mentioned that Paul Erano had sold me that last bag of John Holland pencils and parts. Now I’ll tell you why I was so eager to buy it. At the Raleigh Show a few months earlier, I bought a few other John Holland items from Paul, including this one:

That barrel looks like marbled celluloid at first, but I think it’s hard rubber that has been painted or stained to look that way - note at the nose end, the marbling stops where the material is stepped down:

As with many of the other items that came from Bob Johnson’s collection, this one has a nice price sticker indicating the original price was $3.50.

The barrel is stamped “John Holland” right above the clip, which has Holland’s tulip logo impressed into it:

Paul and I examined it together, and we agreed this one is a little off of the beaten path for a John Holland. I didn’t want to pay much for just part of a pencil, but Paul reassured me: he had a whole box filled with John Holland parts, and he would bring them to me in DC so I could finish putting this one together.

He forgot to bring them along to DC, but at the Ohio Show in November all those parts went from box to bag to Jon. There were a lot of great stuff in there . . . unfortunately, the pieces I needed to finish putting this one together were not among them. That left me trolling through my parts bins at home trying to find what I needed to complete it.  

I started with my stash of Rex Manufacturing Company parts, thinking perhaps it might be one of these with a different style cap and clip:

Nope, those parts don’t work at all. Rex patent pencils have noses that screw onto the end of a threaded barrel rather than slip over the end of an unthreaded one. I settled for taking the preceding pictures and filing it away. The answer will come to me at some point, I hoped.

It did – only because I finally got around to rearranging things at the museum. The addition of two printers’ cabinets gave me the chance to finally get all of my John Holland stuff spread out but in one place . . . it had previously been scattered – er . . . carefully grouped – in three areas, with the Victorian stuff in one place, the Rex patent pencils with the other Rex stuff, and the “everything else” part crowded onto the wall o’ pencils. As things went into the drawer, I noticed that I did have an intact John Holland pencil along these lines.

There’s that same cap and clip, and I know the pencil I got from Paul had a two-stage smooth tip – assuming, of course, that all John Holland pencils like this looked the same, but I think that’s a fair assumption. I started pulling things off the shelves in other areas of the museum, looking for things to compare.

Here’s the John Holland next to a maroon Grieshaber pencil at center, and a LeBoeuf “Unbreakable” parts pencil I picked up for peanuts at the Don Scott show because it is . . . well, it’s broken. Note that both of these have a very similar two-stage tip, and there is a reason for that: both the Grieshaber and the LeBoeuf were built around mechanisms supplied by Cross and used on the Cross Alwrite line of oversized pencils.

I was really hoping that LeBoeuf would be able to breathe its last making my John Holland whole, but when I attempted to transplant the nose I ran into a problem.

The tip unscrewed easily and fits like a glove on the threaded end of the John Holland, but I wasn’t able to wrestle the gold filled section from the LeBoeuf barrel. I was able to get it budge just a little, enough to see that the diameter of the stepped down section on the barrel is narrower than my John Holland. Even should I resort to barbaric means of parts removal, it wouldn’t fit my Holland.

I really didn’t want to scavenge a perfectly good Grieshaber, but I wondered if that might be the same nose . . . 

Nope.  Grieshaber sections screw into the barrel. No worries for now; most of my John Holland will reside comfortably in the museum, awaiting the day that the front half of the right pencil comes along . . . 

. . . or Paul finds another bag of parts.

A Name That's Closer to Right

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.

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Solomon Sager was an interesting character in writing instruments - his “Barrel of Ink” vacuum filled pens, made by Grieshaber, were accompanied by matching pencils.  Unfortunately, the pencils also carried the “Barrel of Ink” trademark – still cool, but as I suggested in The Catalogue, it might have been nice if he had a different trademark for the pencils, like “Bucket of Lead” or something:

Into the 1940s, though, Sager started a different company: the Graphomatic Corporation, through which he produced the Graphomatic Inkmaker pen:

The “Colonel De Luxe” pens were distinctly styled, with a ribbed band around the cap as well as the edge of the section:

The pens have “Graphomatic” stamped on the nibs:

What a pity – “Graphomatic” seems so much more appropriate for a line of pencils than a bunch of pens, I thought . . . and then, one of those pig-in-a-poke online auctions brought me a box full of pencils, including this one.  It wasn’t my target (I’ll write about that one later), and when I bid I had no idea what it was:

It is a Graphomatic:

With that cap, it looks almost like a combination pencil and fountain pen . . . but it isn’t . . .

Was it intended to be a combo, or was it always a double ended pencil?  I’m inclined to think it was built this way.  Sager had a flair for the weird, and the red stripe on that barrel in combination with the red pencil “section” point toward a very traditional red/black double-ender.  Perhaps an optimistic double ender, which presumed that you’d be leaving the cap on with the red lead stowed away more often than not when working on the books!

That means the Sager selection at the museum is up to four examples in two generations: 

The older Grieshaber-made “Barrel of Ink” pencils, and the newer style (and more appropriately named) Graphomatic.

Leftovers Are Good

The headline from this year's Triangle Pen Show in Raleigh, North Carolina was the staggering collection Ross McKinney brought to liquidate.  The frenzy that surrounded him for the better part of the day was an indication of just how good that stuff was.

One of the advantages to being a pencil guy is that while the pen guys are doing their thing, we are generally content to sit back and wait until the activity dies down, then we come in and pick over all the pencils, which are generally left behind.  Believe me, it's great for the blood pressure!

So that's what I did -- and I found some great stuff that I haven't gotten around to writing about just yet.  Joe Nemecek was over there a bit before I was, since I had a table to look after, and he got some great stuff, too.  But there was plenty to go around.

After a few hours, all of us predators had picked the proverbial wildebeast down to the bones, and what were full pen cases full of prizes were now mostly empty, with just  a few lonely stragglers that no one wanted left behind.  Mostly, the things that were left were things that should have been.  But late Saturday, as the show was slowing down, I had some time to peek around a bit and I swung back around the carcass of this collection, after everyone else had spent themselves silly, for some quality time looking at what was left.

One of the last remnants was this . . .

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