Observe and Report

Step one: observe. Step two: compare what you observe to what you know. Step three: draw reasonable conclusions that flow from the first two steps. 

When step two is a big fat goose egg, my reasonable conclusion is that all I can do is throw out there what I have observed in the hopes that someone – maybe next week, maybe in ten years or so – can help me connect the dots.  Most of these images are several years old and have been sitting in the dead letter office, because I'm stuck.

This Victorian pencil is marked “J.A.B. & Co.” Unfortunately, the pencil is generic and is not marked with any patents that might be helpful.

This next one was my only purchase when Janet and I stopped in Lebanon, Ohio on our way back from that big Eagle Pencil Company purchase. It was two dollars:

The lettering on the side interested me – “Guys Dropper Lamp” didn’t ring a bell, but the Shanklin Manufacturing Company did.

The name Shanklin on a pencil reminded me of this Shanklin Sure Sharp pencil, which appeared on page 19 in A Century of Autopoint.

The Shanklin Sure Sharp was invented by George Bergen, an early inventive collaborator with Charles Keeran as Keeran developed the earliest versions of the Autopoint. Alas, the Shanklin behind Guys Dropper Lamps was a different Shanklin. Wrong city, wrong industry. The only marking on this pencil that resembles some sort of model or manufacturer’s name is above the clip – “Poor,” I think it reads, in script lettering? 

The best clue that might unravel this one is that distinctive cap. We’ve seen it before:

Here is our mystery pencil in the company of pencils marked “Thatpencil.”

That connection is only slightly helpful, though, because not much is known about the “Thatpencil” either - all I knew about it went into a very early article here, “No Really . . . ‘That Pencil’” (February 24, 2012: Volume 1, page 126), and I haven’t learned anything new about them in the years since. 

Up next is something that I had to buy in an online auction just to get my paws on it to see what was going on. 

The pencil is nested in that ringtop case.

Around one side of the cap are those tantalizing words, “Pat. Apld. For”:

However, the only other clue is on the other side - H.F.B.

I have been unable to track down any patent that was ultimately issued to someone with those initials. This one looks a lot like something Bates & Bacon might have made, but none of the principals in that organization had the initials H.F., either.

This next one might not be American, but it might have an American connection. 

The clip is a standard issue 1915 patent accommodation clip marked for the Eagle Pencil Company - while it looks like it has been there for some time, since it is a clip that just slides on, I’m confident but not certain that it came with this pencil.

An Eagle clip would be consistent with what is written around the cap: “D.R.P.” stands for Deutsches Reichspatent, meaning German patent. “Made in Germany” in English suggests that it was made for the American market. Eagle also sometimes stamped early Eagle Stop Gauge pencils with the German patent number. 

The cap pulls off, and underneath it is an odd mix of word salad: “Depose” suggests a French connection, as in “registered,” and there’s a specific German patent - number 331474, I think it reads.

I’ve tried to look up a German patent number 331,474, but all roads lead to some random Norwegian patent having nothing to do with pencils. There have been a few other examples of these pencils that have surfaced in recent years online, and in each case people have marveled about their weird mechanisms. Under that cap is a hole, maybe just a place for spare leads or maybe they were intended to feed automatically.

And on the top, both on and under the cap, the word “JACO.”

I’m sharing this next one as a second cry for help - one every seven years or so, I suppose:

It’s marked “L Pen Co.” on the clip, and it joins another example that turned up back in 2018 - see “The L Pen” (April 22, 2018: Volume 5, page 240). I fingered at the time that Diamond Point was the likeliest suspect to have made it. 

I didn’t know anything about the “L Pen Co.” then, and I haven’t figured anything else out about it in the years since.

Hard rubber pencils like this next one look European, and my eyes tend to glaze over when I see them.

This one, however, had a very faint but interesting imprint on the barrel:

“The Rosemady That’s For Remembrance” it reads - there’s a lot of excess China Marker on here, because every time I tried to clean off the extra white stuff it all came off and you couldn’t read it. I have no idea who or what “Rosemady” is.

Along those same lines is this “Rufford”:

That’s a very British-sounding name, and this one fooled me when I found it on Rob Bader’s table in Chicago a few years ago. It’s not even a pencil, I learned during shooting . . . it’s a stylographic pen. What the heck - it’s my blog and I’ll share a stylo if I want to. Besides, I’d like to know more about who made the “Rufford.”

Matt McColm pointed this next one out to me when it showed up in an online auction:

“Statter Bros. / Buffalo” reads the imprint. I did find one reference to Statter Brothers as a manufacturer of numbering machines in the July 1931 edition of the Rand McNally Bankers Directory, but I don’t know whether the company also sourced pencils to offer under their name as another line of business. 

I had this one photographed, but the images didn’t turn out very well the first time:

After a trip to the buffing wheel, the second photo session was more fruitful . . .

I’ve seen a few of these “M Co.” pencils over the years. My best guess is that M is for Morrison . . . except Morrison was never bashful about emblazoning its full name on its products. Was Morrison being uncharacteristically understated, or is this something else?

Myk Daigle bequeathed me this next one a couple years ago. I think it was keeping him awake at night, and he figured better me than him:

It looks a little bit European, but the imprint is partially in English:

“Skopeographe / Pat Applied For Bte S.G.D. . . .” something. Looks like it might end with another G. I hoped that I might learn more by taking it apart, but alas . . . 

Hmm. Looks like a continuity tester, sort of like the Kastar . . . although I’m not sure how you’d know if there was continuity without any window in the barrel. 

My internet searches were at the same time refreshing and infuriating. When I typed “Skopeographe” into a Google search, there were no best guesses, no random suggested result; only results akin to “Did you mean ‘waterbeds?’ Here’s a zillion people who might sell you one of those.” Just . . . nothing. Google Books yielded the same result. It’s rare that no intelligence, human or artificial, even hazards a guess, and I have fared no better.

This last mystery pencil – for now – is one of those that has me taking out my loupe to over and over. It’s such a high quality pencil that it should be marked somewhere.

Geez . . . it even has a “Pat. Applied For” imprint which will be impossible to track down without breaking a solder weld or two to tear it apart.

My best guesses, based solely on a flimsy comparison of external similarities, had me posing this one in between a Century at top, and a Henber at bottom.

“Dorothea” is the only name on it – if it’s a personalization, it’s the most elaborate, hand engraved personalization I’ve ever seen. 

Maybe like John Foley’s “Madeleine” pencils, it’s more than just the owner’s name. All I know is that it wasn't my mother-in-law’s -- that’s the only other Dorothea I’ve met.

Henber Wrinkles - Part Three

This article has been included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 7, now available here.

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

I’ve saved the most fascinating new wrinkle in the Henber story for last:

When I saw this one, I instantly recognized it as a Henber.  Of course it’s a Henber, right?  Here’s the ringtop Henbers from the article a couple days ago:

As was the case with yesterday’s installment, I was confident there was a mistake in the listing, but I knew this would be really interesting if the listing was actually right.

The listing was actually right:

“Keen-Point.”  Huh.

I pull Occam’s Razor out at every opportunity, mostly to regulate my wild imagination.  Occam’s Razor suggests that the far-flung Henber Company in Minneapolis pulled a cool-sounding name out of thin air, slapped it on a pencil and was quickly reprimanded by those who rightfully claimed the name to knock it off.

Occam, however, needs to pack that switchblade away for a moment.  Perhaps that is not the simplest explanation.

The “Keen-Point” name has (until now) been found in two, well-documented and apparently unrelated incarnations.  The earlier one was O.R. Johnson, who offered metal Keen-Point pencils in 1921 and 1922:

Johnson was marketing his Keen-Points at the same time Henber was active, between 1921 and 1923, so there’s a bright line between two possibilities: either Henber blundered into using the name without Johnson’s permission and Johnson put a stop to it, or Johnson was somehow involved with Henber.

And then there was Charles Keeran, who adopted the Keen-Point name after he was ousted from Autopoint the second time in 1924.  Keeran registered a trademark for “Keen-Point” in a distinctive font:

Keeran claimed in his registration that he first used the mark on November 21, 1928 – but that’s this specific mark.  He might have used the words “Keen-Point” earlier, and Keeran’s activities after he left Autopoint are difficult to piece together.  In Chapter 7 of A Century of Autopoint, I show how his patents filed after 1924 show that he first dusted off his “Keeran Products Corporation” to market “The Keeran Pencil,” in 1925, then affiliated himself with Julius Swanberg and Robert Chelton for a short time around 1926.

But there are holes in the story, and plenty of room in the timeline for Keeran to scoot up to Minneapolis for a bit to pick up the pieces of Henber after the company called it quits in early 1923 – perhaps after Samuel Kanner was finished playing around with it.

History is what floats to the surface when facts are assembled in chronological order.  The three wrinkles presented in these last three articles provide tantalizing new facts – the infuriating part is I don’t know in what order to put them:

1.  The Henber Company offered Henber pencils between late 1921 and February, 1923;

2.  O.R. Johnson Co. offered “Keen-Point” pencils between 1921 and 1922, and at least one pencil marked “Keen-Point” is identical to the Henber;

3.  The Louis F. Dow Co. offered sterling Dow pencils engraved with the same, distinctive chasing on the barrel as the Henber.  One of the examples sports a logo on the box lid dating it to sometime after August, 1923, but that doesn’t mean sterling Dows like this weren’t offered earlier;

4.  Whoever made Samuel Kanner’s “Nupoint” pencils, advertised between 1921 and 1924, also made at least one identical pencil marked “Henber”;

5.  There is a gap between the time O.R. Johnson Co. offered “Keen-Point” pencils in 1921-1922 and when Charles Keeran claimed he first used a stylized “Keen-Point” logo in 1928.  Keeran might have used the name (but not the logo) as early as 1924, when he departed Autopoint.

The artifacts themselves can only tell us so much.  One of these days, I’m hoping some documentary evidence will surface to make some sense out of all this.

Henber Wrinkles, Part Two

This article has been included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 7, now available here.

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

When this showed up in an online auction, I was convinced the seller paired pictures of the wrong pencil with the auction title. 

The listing title identified it as a Henber, but the pencil looked to be identical to something else in my collection:

That clip, with it’s exaggerated hump, is something I instantly recognized:

It’s what you often find on Samuel Kanner’s early line of “Nupoint” pencils:

But wait . . . there’s more.  Recall that the Henber has distinctive machining that extends farther down the nose, past where it begins to narrow down to the point.  On the Nupoint, that machining stops before the joint separating the nose drive from the barrel – Henbers, on the other hand, are rear drive. 

Even the engraving on these two pencils is identical, in that V-shaped pattern reminiscent of Superite pencils made by DeWitt-LaFrance:

Yet there it is, just like the seller said: it’s imprinted “Henber.”

This is a fascinating turn of events.  Samuel Kanner’s Nupoint pencils were advertised, just like the Dow, in late 1922; by late 1924, this particular clip was abandoned, and by 1925 Kanner dropped the “Nupoint” name in favor of Presto and switched to a repeating pencil design (the great granddaddy of the Eversharp Skyline, by theft and deception).

Henbers were offered as promotional prizes, while Samuel Kanner, from what I can tell, was a dedicated manufacturer.  If one supplied the other, in this case I would guess that Kanner supplied The Henber Company.  I can’t say, however, that Kanner manufactured all of the Henbers - but I can say with relative certainty that he did this one.

And another one, which has been lounging around the museum for God knows how long, without me noticing what was different about it:

That’s right . . . the Kanner-related Henbers also came in ringtop configuration.