For My Amusement

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

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When Michael Krut sent me the black and pearl Eversharp Doric I wrote about a few weeks ago (see "My First Love"), he included a few stowaways – bits and pieces of things that he thought I might enjoy, just for fun.  One of them was this:

My initial thought when it popped out of the box was that it might be an unusual smaller version of the Autopoint Model 466 – from that awkward transitional period in 1931 when the noses had been changed from the long metal ones to Bakelite, but before the top end was redesigned to include a matching plastic cap.

These Autopoint transitional models are tougher to find, even though they were offered in Autopoint catalogs through 1936 – for more information, see A Century of Autopoint, page 112.

I’ve never seen a smaller model, and this one looked like it had a replacement cap, from a Dur-O-Lite.  Good luck finding the right cap, I thought . . .

But then I noticed the imprint, and this little guy went from amusing to fascinating faster than you can say Dur-O-Lite or Autopoint:  Keen Point (only two syllables – that’s why it’s faster).  

The Keen Point was also discussed in A Century of Autopoint, due to its connection with the inventor of the original Autopoint, Charles Keeran (see Chapter 7 in A Century of Autopoint).  After Keeran’s second ouster from Autopoint, he engaged in a series of associations with other manufacturers.  In 1927, he filed his trademark registration for the Keen-Point logo:

The earliest Keen Points were made by Dur-O-Lite, as illustrated on page 83:

On that same page, I illustrated a Dur-O-Lite (top) compared to a Keen Point (bottom) with their noses removed, to show how they are different inside.  As I noted in the book, very few Dur-O-Lites, probably very late production during the flattop series, share that same barrel end treatment:

This new example shares similar barrel end treatment:

As I mentioned when I restarted this blog, I’m writing these articles while I’m taking a break from writing a book about the history of Dur-O-Lite titled Dur-O-Lite: The Clandestine Company.   I delve more heavily into the Keen Point in its pages, and I now know that by the time Dur-O-Lite relocated from Chicago to Sycamore, Illinois in 1931, the mark no longer belonged to Charles Keeran.  It had been acquired by Dur-O-Lite, which was by that time marketing a lower priced “Keen-Point” line of pencils.

The cap on Michael’s pencil is probably correct: Dur-O-Lite did offer a thin model during the flattop era which used that cap.  Here’s an image showing that same cap on a slim model found in the Dur-O-Lite factory archive which will be included in the new book:

What I didn’t know until Michael’s example came along was that there were demi-sized thin models, and that the Keen Point changed out the tips from metal to plastic, then the cap.   All the other examples I’ve found have either both metal ends, or both plastic.  

I’m sure that Autopoint inspired Dur-O-Lite to change out the tips.  However, given that this is the only Keen Point I’ve ever seen which didn’t change out the top end as well, I’m wondering if Dur-O-Lite didn’t inspire Autopoint to change out the caps in return.

Too Keen to Throw Out

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.

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

We have become a throwaway society.  Go to an office supply store, and most of the products you’ll see weren’t built for quality – they were meant to be used once and disposed of.  Sure, I know there’s modern “refillable” pencils that are widely available, your Pentels and your Zebras, but hold one of these things in one hand and a vintage pencil in the other, and ask yourself which one would be some thing you’d be proud to give to a favorite grandchild.

No comparison in my mind, but I’m biased.  Plus, unless you’re going to doodle moustaches on microfiche copies of newspapers, I’m just not understanding how people get pleasure out of writing with .3mm or .5mm lead.  Heck, I find .7mm lead to be . . . sterile.  Give me a good old 1.1mm pencil – and call it .046 inches please, since the metric system has no place in proper conversation – fill it with a nice soft lead . . . ahhh. . .

OK, my prejudice is showing.  I’ll move on, but not before I summarize my thoughts by saying that most of the pencils being sold today are being thrown out, and they should be.

The trend started in the 1950s, when Americans were ready after years of war for anything that made life more convenient.  Pioneering the field of disposable mechanical pencils, believe it or not, was Dur-O-Lite, which revived a venerable name it had used for decades – Keen-Point – and applied it to a single use pencil.

This picture is from page 84 of A Century of Autopoint, and as mentioned in the book, the new pencil with that weird, fleshy-colored nose was patented by Frank J. Stoeberl, who applied for his patent on July 7, 1960.  It would take three years for the patent to finally be granted, as number 3,097,628 on July 16, 1963.

Yeah, they come in a few colors and a few variations, but in general I don’t get too excited about them.  They look cheap and feel cheap, because they were cheap.  Still, when this surfaced and it wasn’t too expensive, I thought it worth preserving:

Cheaper by the dozen, I suppose.  Since these were meant to be consumed rather than used, I thought it unusual to find a complete dozen of them, complete with a cardboard band to hold them together:

Now these next examples cost a bit more.  They went ‘round the horn on ebay so many times with me almost biting on them that I don’t remember whether I bought them because the price finally dropped, or whether I was that tired of looking at them:

The Eugene Dietzgen Drafting Company was set up as the Eugene Dietzgen drafting company at the end of the 19th Century; Dietzgen had emigrated to the United States from Germany in 1881, sent by his father, the socialist and Marxist philosopher Joseph Dietzgen.  Joseph was looking for a way to secure his papers and documents from the authorities in Germany, and Eugene may have been trying to avoid the military draft.

In America, Dietzgen prospered as a capitalist . . . although perhaps as a hat tip to his father, his manufacturing facilities included some forward-thinking innovations for the comfort of his workers, according to Wikipedia, “includ[ing] separate bathrooms for men and women, open windowsills with flowers decorating the air, and a general atmosphere of a healthy working community.”

Dietzgen is a company best known for making slide rules, compasses and other drafting tools, and you’d expect that company to relish in the sorts of skinny lead precision instruments you’ll find today, rather than a cheap throwaway.  And engineers being such a persnickety bunch, you’d think they wouldn’t need the guidance imprinted on these pencils:

Thanks, captain obvious.

There But For the Grace of God

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.

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

Loyal Knight Lawrence King emailed me the other day to tell me about a group of Dur-O-Lite pencils he had found:

This is an impressive array of early models, starting with the red and white swirled example, which has the bolted on clip and short nose indicative of first year production, in 1926-1927:

In addition, the cream/yellow example has an unusual bushing connecting the top end of the barrel to the cap, a feature that I haven’t seen on these.  Note also the different milling at the nose end of the barrel:

What’s interesting to me, and what caught Lawrence’s attention, was the name on the barrel.  Lawrence owns a copy of A Century of Autopoint, and he’s used it:

All these Dur-O-Lites are imprinted with the name “W.K. Bracken”:

Chapter One of A Century of Autopoint documents the early life of Charles Keeran, inventor of the Eversharp and later of the Autopoint (the original one that went defunct in 1922; Keeran had a hand in some improvements to the Autopoint that survives today).  Prior to getting into pencils, Keeran cut his teeth as an inventor in the food canning industry – his first endeavor, The Illinois Pickle Company, was incorporated by Charles Keeran, Julius K. Funk (a wealthy local businessman and real estate investor), and local Bloomington lawyer . . . William K. Bracken.

Bracken later assisted Keeran with the establishment of the Keeran-Funk Company, a moderately successful company which marketed Keeran’s new cardboard-backed wax seals for canning jars:

But when Keeran’s most familiar fruit jar innovation was introduced, the White Crown Fruit Jar which should have secured Keeran’s fame and fortune for life, things took a bad turn for Keeran:

Julius Funk apparently decided he no longer had need for Keeran (a theme that would recur throughout Keeran’s life, attracting wealthy investors who would later profit from his inventions).   Funk, Bracken and a few others set up a separate White Crown Fruit Jar Company in August, 1913, and it was that abandonment which left Keeran to think for the first time about inventing a new pencil – his patent application for the Eversharp was filed in October, 1913.

Keeran never held Bracken’s association with Funk against him, and he likely couldn’t – Bracken was related to the Funks by marriage (his wife was Grace Funk Bracken), and where family went, so went the Bloomington lawyer.   When Keeran established the Eversharp Pencil Company in 1914, William K. Bracken was again one of its incorporators, in addition to being a shareholder and director.

After Keeran was ousted from Eversharp in 1917, he set up Autopoint Pencil Company . . . and was ousted from it in around April, 1921, landing at the new Realite Pencil Company.  Realite then gobbled up Autopoint in 1923, and Keeran was made the new Autopoint’s president – and then he got ousted from Autopoint a second time, in 1924.  In Chapter 7 of the book, I’ve traced Keeran’s career after Autopoint – he landed, for a time and apparently as an independent contractor – at Dur-O-Lite during its early days.  In fact, after he registered a trade name “Keen Point” in 1927, he had Dur-O-Lite make pencils for him marked with that name:

It’s no surprise, given Bracken’s long association with Charles Keeran, that Bracken would have the inside track on some early Dur-O-Lite products, and Lawrence’s little collection of these bearing the Bloomington lawyer’s name fits beautifully into the Keeran/Eversharp/Autopoint story. 

William Bracken had a long and distinguished legal career in Bloomington, regularly speaking later in life to his Rotary Club about his collecting passions, including harmonicas and Abraham Lincoln memorabilia.  An account written after his death reported that he even built an addition onto his home on Chestnut Street to house his Lincolniana. 

Bracken passed away on December 10, 1947, and a brief death notice was published on December 14 in the Bloomington Pantagraph, in the pages of which he had appeared countless times, described only as “Bloomington lawyer and widely known collector of Lincoln lore”: 

In faraway Brookville, Indiana, notice of Bracken’s death appeared on December 18, 1947.  Passing mention is made of his law practice, but not even his obsession with Lincoln made it into  print there – his passing was noted only because he had “assisted with the publication” of the Brookville Democrat fifty years earlier, in the 1890s.

A shiver just went up my spine.  There but for the grace of God – I started my career as a journalist before I became a lawyer, before I developed an unhealthy obsession for mechanical pencils – and whatever I’ve managed to accomplish as a lawyer will likely be eclipsed by this weird little habit.

Sigh.  Guess I’d better at least go get my name stamped on some pencils.

Speerbob Is Doubly Keen

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.

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

Bob Speerbrecher is an ubiquitous online seller.  He’s got a great eye for pencils, and from time to time he’ll drop me a line to ask if I’m interested in something he’s found.  This was one of those times I said yes . . . thank you very much . . .

The one Bob sold to me is the silver one at the bottom of the picture.  These don’t come along very often – they are the “Keen Point Double Action”:

I’ve got a real affinity for these, because they have these interesting clips that don’t appear anywhere else in the pencil world:

These aren’t Charles Keeran’s “Keen Point” pencils, made in the late 1920s by Dur-O-Lite (and then by others, as detailed in A Century of Autopoint).  I explored these pre-Keeran Keen-Points here back in 2013 (the article is now only in the books, at The Leadhead’s Pencil Blog Volume 2, at page 93).  The Keen-Point name, as reported in the 1922 edition of Trade-Marks of the Jewelry and Kindred Trades, was held by The O.R. Johnson Co., of Providence, Rhode Island:

At some point since that last article, I stumbled across advertisements confirming that point in The Jewelers’ Circular, in 1921 and 1922:

Joe Nemecek and I talk a lot about our different collecting styles – he’s a “representative sample” collector who, once he has an outstanding example of the breed, is content.  I’m an “archival OCD” collector – once I observe two patterns, I’m inclined to try to find the other hundred that might be out laying in the weeds.  And if I find two in the same pattern in different materials?  Oh, that’s an itch I won’t scratch until I’ve either found or ruled out the possibility that the other patterns came in those materials.

But I have to say, when it comes to the hard-to-find Keen Point Double Actions, I’m finding the range that I’ve turned up to be satisfying . . .

Three different patterns, all done very artfully. . . one each in yellow gold fill, green gold fill and silver(ish). 

Thank God two of them weren’t in the same pattern.  Or the same material.

Keen Eye For Keen Points

At the Philly Show, I inevitably found myself at Richard Vacca’s table, pawing through tray after tray of pencils. It was inevitable that I would visit, and it was inevitable that I would find something that would interest me. After a bit of hunting, I turned this one up:

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.

Something Intelligent to Say

I've had these photographed for awhile, waiting for the day when I would have some thing more intelligent to say about them than "here they are".  Dur-O-Lite revived the "Keen Point" name for this series.  Shown here are two shorter "Scanner" pencils, one of which also has the designation "OCR", and the larger "Film King."

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

A Keen Pair

A few weeks ago I was the successful bidder on a lot which included a pair of Keen-Point pencils.  Keen-Point was a subbrand for Dur-O-Lite, and examples don't come around very often.  These were particularly nice . . .

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