Post Fifteen Hundred . . . Ish

A few weeks before I restarted the blog, I received an email from Ron Knapp, a collector of Pentel and slide-rule pencils. Ron had stumbled across my article titled “Post Number 1,000" (January 13, 2017: Volume 4, page 351). In that article, I had searched for an appropriate subject for the milestone, and what floated to the surface was the discovery of an archive of Ruxton Multi-Vider pencils, paraphernalia, and (gulp) prototypes.

At the time I wrote the article, all that was known about the Ruxton was its shadowy connection with its English inventor A. Gahagan and Wall Street tycoon W. V. C. Ruxton (who was named in the patent but was more likely the financier). The small hoard I had acquired connected the Ruxton with an unlikely personality: Leonard G. Yoder, whose company, Yoder Instruments, was headquartered in sleepy East Palestine, Ohio. The connection was supported by Ruxton letterhead, modified to add “Leonard G. Yoder, Prop.” at the top and the East Palestine factory and office, after the company’s prior quarters in New York’s Greybar Building had been vacated:

The provenance of the Ruxton items I displayed in that article was as good as it gets. Leonard Yoder was survived by two daughters: Anna lived in Rockville, Tennessee, and the online seller from whom I purchased this lot confirmed that she had acquired it from some people who cleaned out a house in Rockville. Leonard’s other daughter, Katherine, still lived in East Palestine at the time: I interviewed her, and she confirmed that her sister Anna had all that remained of Leonard’s involvement with the Ruxton Multi-Vider.

I noted in my previous article that the online seller was a little cagey about the details concerning how and from whom she acquired this lot, and I suspected she was reluctant to share information because she did not want me cutting out the middleman (either if or because there was more stuff in that house to be had). Whether that was true or not, Ron Knapp confirmed my suspicions: yes, there was more, and he was the one who had acquired it.

Ron sent me several images of the things he had acquired; the back story is that a person hired to demolish a barn in London, Tennessee had found these items and had the sense to get them into the hands of a local antiques dealer who Ron knows rather than throw it all away. I mentioned it would be nice to follow up “Post Number 1,000" with a “Post Number 1,500,” circling back around to the Ruxton brand for the occasion. After all, as the blog restarted it was inching closer to that millenium and a half mark.

It wasn’t that I forgot . . . it was just that I forgot to keep track of how many articles had been posted, and by the time I took a breath to think about writing this article, that 1,500th post had already run. This entry is post number 1,518.

What Ron acquired was ephemera rather than the pencils themselves. The first image he shared with me was this shot of some Multi-Vider labels: 

These were printed using the very printer’s block I had displayed in my previous article

Then there was routine correspondence, all dating to 1935. Many of these letters were follow up notes regarding repairs that Yoder had not yet completed or orders for more pencils. This one, from Harris Grand of the New York Department of Public Works, was dated March 15, 1935:

What is significant about this one is that it is still accompanied by the envelope in which it arrived, showing that Leonard Yoder was the man in charge in 1935, and he was still located in the Graybar Building:

There’s one other letter in here that provides some interesting leads . . . and a possible interesting connection. It is from Leonard Yoder to R.E. Phelps at Tennant Sons & Co. and is dated June 14, 1935. Yoder’s letter, however, is written on letterhead for Southland Chemicals, Incorporated of Nashville, Tennessee:

The letter makes no reference to Yoder’s title or status with Southland Chemicals, and Southland doesn’t appear to have been involved in producing any of the materials that would go into the manufacture of Ruxton pencils; the firm was established in late 1934, and only a month prior to this letter, Southland’s director of sales, H.O. Williams, was killed in an automobile crash on March 13, 1935. Southland was apparently dissolved in a legal action brought by the company’s creditors in 1938.

The simplest answer is that whoever typed this letter picked up the wrong letterhead, since Yoder was involved with Ruxton, Yoder Instruments, and Southland. 

Tennant Sons & Co., to whom the letter was addressed, was formed as an importing/exporting sales company in the metal trade, which makes sense in this context. Yoder also mentions that production “is pretty well set” after talking with “Bedford and Valverde,” with the latter being called on to “look after things during the day, such as buying brass, having plating done, etc.”

I didn’t find any evidence of a firm called “Bedford and Valverde,” and Yoder may have been referring only to two individuals by those names, but there is one other name that comes up: Yoder says that Valverde is not doing “actual production” since “Charlie has jumped into the harness and is really doing a job.” 

Yoder reveals on page two of the letter that Charlie’s last name is Klagges – that grabbed my attention, because it is not a common name and it has only come up in my world in reference to one brand: the Klagges-Essig repeating pencil:

I threw out everything I had been able to learn about the Klagges-Essig in “One Decade Down” (June 2, 2021: Volume 7, page 163). These pencils are scarce beyond scarce.

The pencils strongly resemble cap-actuated repeating pencils made by Esterbrook, and a patent for such a repeating pencil was applied for by one Henry C. Klagges of Collingswood, New Jersey on November 18, 1937 and granted as patent 2,216,780 on October 8, 1940:

I have not found any more examples of the Klagges-Essig since that article was published, but I did get to see one in burgundy pearl at the Raleigh Pen Show in June. My friend Dexter Mills stopped by my table (again) to tease me with this red pearl example (again) which I was unable to convince him to part with (again). At least I was able to take home a picture of it:

I am convinced that “Charlie” Klagges as referred to in Leroy Yoder’s 1935 letter is one and the same person as Henry C. Klagges, although none of his patents spell out his middle name. The Klagges name appears six times in American Writing Instrument Patents Vol. 2: 1911-1945: the earliest was Elsie Klagges of Glendale, New York, who applied to patent a screw drive pencil on February 21, 1928. 

The other five were issued to Henry C. Klagges; all of them (the Klagges-Essig repeating pencil patent and four fountain pen improvements) were assigned to the Esterbrook Steel Pen Manufacturing Company, and the earliest of the five was his repeating pencil patent, applied for as stated earlier in 1937. So what was Henry “Charlie” Klagges doing in 1935? Apparently he was doing general manufacturing work - Yoder inquires on page 2, “What does Charlie say about the possibility of making up more Multi-Viders from the slides we have on hand?”  

There is one last detail crammed into this letter that bears mention: Yoder comments that while he had not yet persuaded the Tennessee Eastman Corporation to do molding for him, he had made arrangements to acquire a supply of Tennessee Eastman’s special thermoplastic, which was developed in 1929 and was trademarked as “Tenite” in 1932. Unfortunately, Tenite warps and degrades over time; if Ruxton Multi-Viders were ever made of the stuff, they did not work for very long. 

Yoder’s handwritten note at the end of this letter asks about “the extra set of model patterns.” That might explain these, which were shown in my previous article on the Ruxton:

These were in a box marked “MV samples” and as I noted in the article, these test barrels appear unsuitable for use as Multi-Vider barrels.

Ron Knapp’s papers, combined with what we already knew about the Ruxton, fill in some important details in the story. Now we know that the Ruxton did not go the way of the dodo in the wake of the stock market crash of 1929, as previously thought. We don’t know when Leonard Yoder and his Yoder Instruments Company became involved, but we know that he was in charge by 1935, and Ruxton Multi-Vider did not move from the Graybar Building in New York until after 1935. We know that Leonard Yoder apparently had some components left in 1935 and that he was looking for ways to have new barrels molded to assemble them.

Did Yoder succeed? All of the advertisements I know of for the Ruxton Multi-Vider were published in 1929, and there’s a handful of stationer’s notices for “Multi-Vider” pencils – without the Ruxton name – in 1930 and 1931 (with one lone reference in December, 1932). Perhaps they were marketed under another name, although Yoder himself was still calling them the “Multi-Vider” in his 1935 letter. 

Hope springs eternal - when I wrote that last article about the Ruxton, I hoped that one day someone may stumble across it and have more to share of the story. Lightning has now struck once, and I’m looking forward to it striking again.

One Decade Down

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In the ten years since The Catalogue was published, you would think I might have learned more about the Klagges-Essig Pencil Corporation of Brooklyn, New York.  While I have learned a couple of tantalizing little tidbits, I haven’t yet pieced together enough to tell you the whole story, so it’s time to lay out everything I do know in the hopes that someone will stumble across this article and have some additional information to fill in the blanks.

The inspiration to send out this cry for help comes from Ben Mawhorter, who had stumbled across an example of the pencil in a beautiful black and bronze celluloid.

We both knew I was buying it, so he was holding it for me until we saw each other at the Raleigh Show last June.  That didn’t happen.  No worries, we thought . . . see you in Ohio in November.  

Yeah, that didn’t happen either.  

We finally gave up over the winter and came to terms remotely, in a sterile transaction that felt a bit hollow in comparison to our usual in-person dealings amongst friends at those things we used to call pen shows. 

Ben’s Klagges-Essig joins the only other complete example I’ve found (the one shown in The Catalogue), and another one that turned up missing its clip in that same grey plastic:

Ben’s example is very clean with a nice, crisp imprint; unfortunately, it doesn’t show up very well in pictures, given the colors in the barrel material:

I’d already highlighted the imprint on my gray one.  It’s identical:  “Klagges-Essig Pencil Corp. / Brooklyn, N.Y.”  

You would think this would be enough to go on, but I’ve never been able to find anything.  The 1933 and 1940 Brooklyn directories don’t contain any listings for a person or company with the name “Klagges”; there are a couple people named “Klages,” but none appear to have anything to do with pencils.  There are a few people named “Essig” in the 1939 directory, but by that time occupations were no longer included with the listings:

The best and most tantalizing clue I’ve found comes from American Writing Instrument Patents Vol. 2: 1911-1945, which includes a handful of patents issued to two people named Klagges.  One, Elsie Klagges, was from Glendale, New York when she received patent number 1,755,326 on April 22, 1930 for a screw drive pencil.  Since the Klagges-Essig is a repeater, and this was the only patent she received, all this does is put her in the same state, showing interest in designing pencils.

Elsie Fleisher was born in 1896 and died in 1984.  She lived in New York for most of her life, but by 1940 she had relocated to New Jersey.   One other detail, though, perked me up: she became Mrs. Klagges when she married a man named Henry C. Klagges.

Henry is the other Klagges listed in American Writing Instrument Patents Vol. 2: 1911-1945.  His residence in all five of his patents is identified as Collingswood, New Jersey, and all five were assigned to the Esterbrook Steel Pen Manufacturing Company.  Four of the five were various improvements to Esterbrook’s fountain pens.

The first one he received, though, was for – you guessed it – a repeating pencil:

Klagges applied for patent number 2,216,780 on November 18, 1937, and it was issued October 8, 1940.  

The Esterbrook connection is intriguing.  The Klagges-Essig does bear some passing resemblance to contemporary Esterbrook repeaters:

Even the plastic shown here is close – but not quite.  

The Klagges-Essig pencils I have found lack any indication that there were any patent applications pending for that particular design, so I’m left to speculate on what might have happened.  Perhaps, in the mid-1930s, Mr. and/or Mrs. Klagges cooked up a great idea for a new repeating pencil design, which was different enough from the Esterbrook design (derived from Robert Ingersoll’s old patents).  

Perhaps Esterbrook got wind of the pencil after they set up a Klagges-Essig Pencil Corporation in Brooklyn, and perhaps Esterbrook decided it made more sense to buy out the Klagges clan and bring them aboard at Esterbrook, so they hired Henry Klagges, who closed his pencil company, moved to New Jersey and lived happily ever after.

Perhaps is the best I have.