A Couple More Tumblers Click into Place

It’s been a little more than a year (http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2013/09/it-would-have-been-so-much-easier-had-i.html) since conclusive proof surfaced that the Nupoint, Hi-Speed and Presto pencils all traced back to 1920s enterpreneur Samuel Kanner:

The plot thickens.

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.

It Would Have Been So Much Easier Had I Known This!

Sometimes you just know the answer is out there somewhere.  It has to be.  People didn’t just turn out these pencils by the hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands, work as hard as they could to sell them, and then vanish without a trace.

One of the shadowy figures I’ve been researching for years is Samuel Kanner, the assignee of the original patent (and inventor of the improved patent) for the “Presto” repeater pencils.  I even have his personal demonstrator Presto in my collection:

Doubtless it was Kanner behind the wheel, guiding his repeating pencils into the slimmer “Everfeeds” made by the Gilfred Corporation, eventually squaring off against Eversharp in the patent infringement case in which Gilfred claimed Eversharp stole his design for Eversharp’s repeating pencils (see “My Find of the Year” on December 31, 2011 at http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2011/12/my-find-of-year.html):

From the top, that’s a later Presto, a Gilfred, an Everfeed, and an Eversharp Doric repeater.  Unfortunately for Kanner, Eversharp won the infringement case in 1942, convincing the judge that since the Kanner mechanism wasn’t significantly different from a repeating mechanism patented in the nineteenth century, Kanner’s patent was therefore invalid.

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.

And Now, For an Intermission From My Break

You’d think, with the Blog being all quiet for a few weeks, that I’ve been sipping Pina Coladas poolside in some lush tropical resort. But while all may be quiet here, such has not been the case at Leadhead’s spread, where I’ve been so busy putting the finishing touches on my second book that "just" putting up a daily blog entry sounds downright relaxing.

That hasn’t stopped me from shopping and thinking. The 2013 Chicago Pen Show netted so many new and interesting finds that I’ve had to put them in a box in the corner of pencil central to keep them out of sight and hopefully out of mind long enough to get this manuscript finished. It’s been a challenge staying out of that box and out of George Kovalenko’s book!

However, I did feel the need to post one article during my "break." Nope, it wasn’t that I’ve gotten so fed up with editing that I needed to get back to my roots for a bit. And I haven’t quite got the manuscript done.  No, I need to write this article because if I don’t, I know I’ll be calling the publisher to say "stop the presses!!"

The trouble (ok, not the trouble, but the snag that eventually unknits the entire sweater) started when I was disassembling my Nu-Point Repeater to reshoot some pictures of the inner workings, and when I did, another piece fell out and I realized I hadn’t quite taken it all the way apart:

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.

You'll Flip Your Top For These

Joe Nemecek’s looking for one of these now, and I promised I’d keep an eye out for one for him. I have, but I haven’t found one that’s a duplicate yet. This one turned up in DC, and I just couldn’t part with it.  It’s a Nupoint, and this one is just cherry. The clip bears a strong resemblance to the clip used on early Parker "Lucky Lock" pencils . . .

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