Henber Wrinkles - Part Three

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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.