I Spoke Too Soon

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.

When I arrived home from the Baltimore Show, I’d already uploaded several articles to run on autopilot, one of which showed off an all-metal Guild pencil made by Mabie Todd (see 

https://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-completist.html).

Unfortunately, after I got back from the show, I was too busy catching up after a few days out of the office to get things photographed.  If that Guild article had run a little later, I would have included this one:

Marc Shiman, Mabie Todd maven, had this stockbroker pencil in his pocket at Baltimore.  He asked me what I thought about it and after we talked for a bit, I was surprised that he was willing to part with it.  He didn’t tell me about the box – later in the show he swung by and casually dropped it off at my table, much to my delight. 

I might regret posting this as an update right now, because at the Baltimore show Joe Nemecek turned up the metal Guild ringtop, identical to the one shown in David Moak’s Mabie in America and also shown in my previous article here.  I didn’t take my good camera equipment with me to Baltimore, so any cell phone picture I would have taken of it wouldn’t have been any better or told you any more than what I did before. 

I imagine come November, Joe will have his pencil in tow and we’ll get a group shot of all three of these.

The Completist

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.

My friend Richard Fernandez was a bit puzzled at the DC show.  He had a big baggie of pencils for me to look at, and while he knew there wasn’t much in there to see, he gave ma a chance to paw through it.  Out of everything in that bag, there was only one thing I had to have, and it was covered in more rust than a railroad spike. 

But I didn’t have one and I’d been looking for one for a long time.  Even if I couldn’t get it cleaned up, I was glad to have a placeholder on the wall o’ pencils.

Fortunately, attacking it with a buffing wheel yielded some pretty good results:

The pencil is marked “Guild” on the clip, and closer up you can see there’s still some substantial pitting left behind after the corrosion was removed:

Still, I’m pretty happy with it.

The Guild Products Corporation was a scheme in the early 1920s by the Mid-Atlantic Retail Stationers’s Division of the National Association of Stationers and Manufacturers to squeeze pen manufacturers into more “reaonable” pricing – the idea was that members would band together and sell only Guild Products, so that any pen or pencil manufacturer that wanted to sell products in member stores needed to supply “Guild” branded products.  The whole story can be found in “Back to the Drawing Board” posted back in 2013 (see https://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2013/08/back-to-drawing-board.html).

To my knowledge, only two manufacturers signed up to make Guild-branded pencils — Conklin and Mabie Todd.   Each made pencils which looked exactly like their regular lines, but with a flared cap squared off at the top to set I apart a bit.

When I wrote the last article, David Moak, the author of Mabie in America, allowed me to use an image from his book of a boxed example of the Guild, complete with the paperwork to establish conclusively that Mabie Todd was its source:

It was driving me a little bit crazy not being able to find a metal Mabie Todd Guild all this time. 

Now I just need to find a ringtop.

In Case You Doubted Me

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.

A while back I posted about a great Guild ringtop, in Conklin’s unique “imperial blue” celluloid, which I had indicated was clearly supplied to the Guild Products Corporation by Conklin (see 

http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2015/07/this-might-have-made-things-easier.html):

In case you continue to harbor any lingering doubts that Conklin made pencils for Guild, this one should resolve them:

This Might Have Made Things Easier

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.

I’m often in my own world at pen shows these days, with my portable photography setup in a quiet corner, snapping away shots of things people bring to show me, either for here at the blog or for the 

Pennant (in case you didn’t know, I’m editing the Pen Collectors of America’s magazine these days).
Such was the case at the Chicago Show a couple of months ago.  I was hunched over my lightbox, eyes pressed against the viewfinder as I tried to get in close with a 90mm macro lens to capture a very tiny detail on . . . whatever it was I was shooting at the moment, when suddenly my entire field of vision went blue.

Imperial blue, in fact:

For dramatic effect, my friend Jerry Adair had approached quietly while I concentrated, inserting the Guild between my lens and the object at hand.  Jerry had read my articles about the history of the Guild Products Corporation (http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2013/08/back-to-drawing-board.html) and had seen the conclusive proof that pencils such as these were manufactured by Conklin (http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-last-two-nails.html).  Jerry knew I would have to have this one.

First, it’s a ringtop; I haven’t seen one of those.  But more importantly, it is made from what is in my opinion one of Conklin’s most distinctive plastics, one which the company called “imperial blue.”  It’s quite a trick capturing the depths of the blueness, which looks black under nearly all light conditions.

I wonder if there are any Guilds out there in Conklin’s “halloween” plastic?

The Last Two Nails

"Back to the Drawing Board" (http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2013/08/back-to-drawing-board.html) was the second article I wrote in an attempt to identify who made a pencil marked "Guild" and owned by my friend John Coleman:

In the first installment, I’d incorrectly concluded that John’s pencil was made by Mabie Todd & Co., due to a few examples conclusively traced to that manufacturer. In the second, I had learned about the Guild Products Corporation, which purchased products from many different manufacturers, including Mabie Todd but not necessarily exclusively. With the field open to any possibility, I concluded that John’s pencil was probably made by Conklin, based on the similarity of John’s pencil to some Conklins in my collection:

In this article, we can scratch the word "probably." Insert "definitely."

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.

Back to the Drawing Board

It’s not all that unusual for me to learn that I’ve gotten something wrong here.  Most of the time, I’m throwing things out there in the hopes that someone out there will read what I’ve written and have the missing piece of the puzzle that says “nuh uh.”   I never mind.  This is all new stuff, and at the end of the day, I figure it was worth it if I learned something.

What is unusual is when I’m the one that finds that piece and I get to say “nuh uh” to myself (and therefore, to you).  This is one of those stories, and it begins with something that has nothing to do with pencils – or should I say, almost nothing.  The only thing today’s find has to do with pencils is the fact that I – a pencil collector – happen to collect other things, as well.  Those who have visited my pencil museum are often surprised to see what fills the display case under my lead displays:

That’s the back half of Truman the cat, my faithful companion at the museum, who had to swoop in for a closer look at my collection of vintage stapling machines the instant I opened the cabinet to take this picture.  I haven’t written a book about these things yet, but it’s on my bucket list.  A lot of ingenuity went into these things, and if it weren’t for the fact that they are so big and so heavy, I’d probably have quite a few more of them. . .

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.

One For the Fourth Edition

Here’s another one John Coleman is sharing with us:

Before you Autopoint guys get any ideas, no – the nose is not removable. This great flattop has "Guild" written in Old English script, both on the clip and just above it on the plastic:

And what’s more, John even had a lead container with the same script:

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.