A Short Nine Years

These conversations I have with my fellow enthusiasts can take a long time. Last week, I published an article about Taylor’s Patent and its relationship to pencils made by William Lund (“Lund . . . ish” on October 10, 2025).

I had started the conversation nine years ago, with a rudimentary article about Lund’s spiral pencils and noting a discrepancy concerning whether the “Lund Patent” was issued in 1848 or 1856. 

Five years ago, Pam Sutton dropped pictures of her “Taylor’s Patent” pencils on Facebook.

I didn’t see Pam’s post until a couple weeks ago, when I was trying to learn more about a Lund-style pencil marked “Taylor’s Patent.” With Pam’s help, I found the text of the patent, issued in 1856, which mostly resolved that question. Lund was a “Patentee” only in the sense that he owned the rights to two patents: one issued to William Riddle in 1848, and the other for an improved version of Riddle’s patent issued to John George Taylor in 1856.

There were loose ends: I wanted to see Taylor’s patent drawings, but the research tools available in the United States don’t provide that information. Also, Pam had also posted images of a second pencil marked “Taylor’s Patent” that looked nothing like a Lund:

I’m used to playing the long game, and I fully expected that it would be years before I would be circling back around to tie up those loose ends.

It took five days.

Thierry Nguyen posted a comment at the blog that he had found the drawings for Taylor’s Patent 2823, which he then forwarded to me. The first image appears to be the original, and it is too faint to make out the details:

The other, however, is a republished version which uses the same images. It is much more clear:

Taylor’s Patent, these drawings reveal, covered two very different versions of his pencil: one has a spiral cut on the outside of the barrel, like a Riddle patent Lund, and the other has the spiral inside a smooth outer barrel – just like Pam’s second example.

Mystery solved.

The other lingering issue from that last article involved Pam’s comment that according to her notes, Taylor’s patent might have been patent number 1994, not number 2823. Terry also answered that one by providing a copy of the text for patent 1994 . . . or rather, patent request number 1994.

In England, applications are assigned one number and if granted, the approved patent is assigned a different one. Application number 1994 was filed by our man John George Taylor, but it was for “improvements in shaping and cutting conical penholders in wood and other materials.” It was filed on September 1, 1859 but apparently, it was never granted. Right man, wrong invention.

Lund . . . ish

One of my oft-repeated and frequently ignored mantras is that I avoid buying pencils that were not made in America or at least marketed heavily here. There’s two reasons for that, neither of which involves xenophobia or wearing a hat that says “Make American Pencils Great Again.” 

The first reason is that if I don’t draw a line somewhere – even if it is a line I frequently cross or blithely ignore – I know what will happen. “If at first you don’t drown in a huge pile of pencils, try try again by opening up the floodgates foreign-made pencils,” the saying goes. Or something like that.

The other reason is that my primary source of enjoyment when it comes to collecting mechanical pencils is researching the history behind them. I’ve got a few Pelikan pencils, but my Pelikan book is in German and so are the relevant patents – and I don’t know any German. There’s also an information availability problem: the United States is fairly unique in that our patents are fully digitized and freely available. In other countries, including Great Britain, patents are either not available at all or you have to purchase copies.

Notwithstanding all of these challenges, Victorian English “Lund Pencils” are something that I just have to have whenever they come along. I broke down and bought my first examples in 2016, acknowledging that I was long overdue to break my American-only rule in “And I Called Myself a Pencil Collector” (September 11, 2016: Volume 4, page 164). In the years since, I have added a few more examples:

Most of the time these are unmarked, but those top two examples have fantastic imprints on the barrels that read “Lund Patentee London.”

In that article, I was hamstrung trying to figure out exactly when Lund pencils were made, because the English, unlike we unruly Colonists, steadfastly refuse to make digitized copies of their patents freely available. The pencils are named after William Lund (see that earlier article for his biography), but I noted a discrepancy in reports indicating he had received his patent for the pencil in 1856: the only patent William Lund received in 1856, from what I could tell, was for a paper clip and not a pencil.

I also explained that notwithstanding imprints that read “Lund Patentee,” Lund apparently acquired the rights to someone else’s patent rather than receiving one in his own name. I had dug up William Riddle’s patent of December 21, 1848, the specifications for which were reprinted in the June 30, 1849 edition of Mechanics’ Magazine, Museum, Register, Journal and Gazette. The text of Riddle’s specifications, including the notation that his pencil barrels have a “spiral cut on its periphery, and extending from end to end,” clearly identify Riddle’s pencils as the same ones William Lund marked as his own.

Still, it made no sense to me that contemporary accounts of William Lund’s pencil operations would be so far off with respect to the year in which they were patented. With nothing else to go on I could do nothing but wait for these last nine years with that nagging, lingering question rattling around in the back of my head.

And then, as these things usually happen, the answer was revealed.

At the DC show in August, Dad and I had just pulled in Thursday afternoon when Rob Bader pounced upon me in the ballroom, before I could even pull my bottle of Jameson’s from my backpack. He had stumbled into a large collection of Victorian pens and pencils that he wanted to sell to me, all in one go. David Nishimura tagged along with me when I went up to Rob’s hotel room for a look-see, and yes . . . I agreed that I wanted to buy them, too. The problem was I didn’t bring enough cash to do the whole thing.

Nishimura piped up that he’d pay for half, and we could divide the things we each wanted between us and split the proceeds equally from anything we sold during the rest of the show. That sounds great, I said, as long as these two things wound up in my pile. I’ll tell you more about that whole deal tomorrow, because that’s an entire story all its own – for now, suffice to say these two landed at the museum.

I neglected to use my loupe to carefully examine them for flaws, partly due to the level of trust I have in Rob Bader and David Nishimura but mostly because I had never seen a sterling silver Lund and I wanted to write about it, regardless of whatever warts it might have. It wasn’t until late in the show, as I was showing them off to someone, that I pulled out a magnifier to see what was imprinted on them . . . and when I did, they were even better than I thought. The white one has an imprint, but it doesn’t say “Lund Patentee” . . . 

It’s marked “A.W. Faber,” something I never knew existed; the few people I’ve discussed this with never knew there were Lund pencils marked for A.W. Faber, either, and now I’m looking forward to hearing from the population at large now to see whether there are any others out there like this.

The main event, though, is the sterling silver one, which has features different from other Lunds I’ve seen. Although many Victorian pencils have crown tops with glass “jewels” set into the top, Lund pencils do not.

The other difference is the mechanism. The Faber example has a typical Lund setup, with the threaded exterior band locked between two tabs in the pushrod, so that the rod is both advanced and retracted depending on which way the band is turned. The sterling example, however, only has a tab on the front end – twisting it forward advances the rod, but it spins freely backwards, so a fresh lead must be used to push the rod back manually.

What dropped my jaw, though, was the imprint around the nose:

“Taylor’s Patent.” Now I found myself caught in the very researcher's quagmire I have tried to avoid: Taylor’s patent doesn’t appear in American Writing Instrument Patents 1799-1910, and I didn’t expect that it would – I was certain some guy named Taylor received a patent in England, and there are no resources comparable to what we have in the United States to track down British patents. I resorted to getting down on my knees and reciting my researcher’s prayer . . . “Oh Google, I beseech thee . . .” it begins.

I didn’t have to finish that incantation, because my first search result was a 2020 Facebook post by my Australian friend Pam Sutton, who had shared some images of her Taylor’s patent pencils. Pam has collaborated with me before here at the blog (see “On High Alert” on June 8, 2021: Volume 7, page 177), so I messaged her to request and obtain permission to share her images here:

Pam asked for my email address so that she could send me some more information she had found about Taylor’s patent. She found this reference published in The Practical Mechanic's Journal, Volumes 7-8, Page 190, Vol 8.

J.G. Taylor patented two improvements to Riddle’s 1846 design: first, it was made out of metal – not really a patentable difference from the prior art. The other, though, explains the differences I observed between Taylor’s patent pencils and Riddle’s Lunds: it “adds an ingenious contrivance for getting rid of the objectionable points of the traversing piece standing up, one on each side of the nut.” Taylor’s invention omits the rear tab and adds a collar on the front end, so those with delicate fingers don’t chafe their digits on the protruding tabs. 

The patent was undated, and when I checked the primary source, Google indicates it was published in 1855. I wondered . . . darn, that’s close to the mysterious 1856 patent date that has puzzled me all these years. After another researcher’s prayer, I double checked the source: yes, Google books reports that Volumes 7 and 8 of The Practical Mechanics’ Journal were published in 1855, but Google’s copy combines Volumes 7 and 8 together in a single scan. Volume 7 was published in 1855, but Volume 8 . . . 

. . . covers the period ending in March, 1856. Pam indicates that according to her records, Taylor’s patent was number 1994: I couldn’t verify this, because Hathitrust’s English patents library is missing a few volumes from 1856 – including the one that includes patent 1994.

I poked around some more. Patent 2225, for couplings and fastening connectors, was issued to John George Taylor of Glasgow, Scotland on October 17, 1856, according to The Engineer (page 566). The inventor’s full name and residence provided the details that made it easier to find patent 2823 in the Hathitrust library, which was issued on November 29, 1856:

Patent drawings are not included with the published specifications; however, the text describes the very improvements to the Lund pencil enumerated in the synopsis published in The Practical Mechanics’ Journal. Perhaps that synopsis was published when the application was filed in early 1856, before the patent was ultimately issued. Perhaps also there were two Taylor patents for related improvements, one issued as number 1994 and the other as patent 2823.

Either way, Taylor’s patent 2823 was issued in 1856, and all those references I found stating that William Lund’s pencil was patented in 1856 must relate to the date of Taylor’s improvements.

That solves one mystery, but Pam’s pictures raised another question: she also included this montage of images of another pencil marked “Taylor’s patent,” and it looks nothing like a Lund.

Sigh . . . I guess I’ll see you in another nine years.

Lund in America?

This article has been edited and included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 5; copies are available print on demand through Amazon here, and I offer an ebook version in pdf format at the Legendary Lead Company here.

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

Not too long ago, I posted an article about the Lund, pencils which have an external spiral to propel the lead:

The pencils are attributed to William Lund of London due to the English patent awarded to him in 1856, although many examples are unmarked.  In fact, of the three shown in that previous article, only one was marked:

Another example recently came up in an online auction, and I had to bite on it because it was just different enough from the others, and had just enough more design flair, that I thought it would look nice alongside the others:

The seller indicated in her acution listing that the pencil had some faint lettering on it, which she couldn’t quite make out.  I spent a good bit of time with a loupe under a strong light to see what I could see, and eventually I began to discern a few letters and numbers.  Of course, as hard as it was to make out on the pencil with a magnifier, it was next to impossible to catch a faint imprint on a black barrel with a camera.  Here’s the closest I got:

You can barely make out “AUG” in this picture, which is the clearest of the letters.  After a while, I was able to make out “PATENT AUG 10 __8    GD Y.”

Wait a minute, I thought.  That’s not a British imprint . . . that’s American (note that the only other marked example I have says “Lund Patentee”).  Since the only thing I was sure of was that we had an American patent from August 10, issued in a year probably ending in the number 8, there was only one resource I knew of that could help:

(P.S. – the book is still available at http://www.legendaryleadcompany.com/store/p14/American_Writing_Instrument_Patents_1799-1910.html).

I thumbed through the section organized by date and number.  Since patents are only issued on Tuesdays in the United States, that narrowed my search and within a minute, I had found my answer.  It’s a patent I’ve written about here before:

Austin G. Day’s patent for a method of making “caoutchouc,” or hard rubber, was issued on August 10, 1858 (see http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2016/09/that-third-interesting-holland.html for more on the Day story). The patent completes the puzzle nicely, and my “Lund” bears an imprint that reads “PATENT AUG 10 58 A.G.DAY.”

That’s one mystery solved, but another question raised.  We know from the history of Austin G. Day’s invention that it was issued shortly after Nelson Goodyear’s 1851 patent was posthumously “reissued” in 1858 and that a flurry of litigation between Day and Goodyear’s estate quickly resulted in a court holding that Day’s innovation was actually covered under the umbrella of Goodyear’s 1851 patent.

That means this pencil was made sometime between late 1858 and 1860.

In America.

While William Lund was awarded an English patent in 1856.  

Was there an American branch of the Lund operations?  Was there any relationship between William Lund and Austin G. Day (or whoever commissioned this pencil to be made from his compound)?  No patent appears to have been awarded in the United States for the Lund design:

I don’t know.

Yet.

And I Called Myself a Pencil Collector

This article has been edited and included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 4; copies are available print on demand through Amazon here, and I offer an ebook version in pdf format at the Legendary Lead Company here.

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

My futile attempts to limit my collecting to American-made pencils tended to exclude pencils like these from my shelves:

The pencil is generally referred to as a “Lund,” for the English patent issued to William Lund in 1856 - I don’t think that’s right, because I found an index of English patents applied for and issued during that year, and the only mention of Lund is with respect to a clip for retaining papers:

Another source indicated that Lund might have purchased his patent rights from a William Riddle, who patented the pencil in 1848; that appears closer to the truth, because I did find a listing for a pencil patented by William Riddle on December 21, 1848:

The index isn’t very helpful, but The June 30, 1849 edition of Mechanics’ Magazine, Museum, Register, Journal and Gazette picked up the Riddle patent and reprinted the entire specification:

If this comes off sounding particularly American, my apologies . . . but pictures would be helpful.  Midway down the left column, though, you can see it: “Or, a slate pencil or other marking substance is placed in the longitudinal groove of a stem which has a spiral cut on its periphery, and extending from end to end.”

Unfortunately, none of the sources I found included drawings, so I don’t have an image to share with you.   Lunds are distinguished by that external corkscrew: a metal band which threads onto the barrel surrounds a bracket, so twisting the band effectively advances and retracts the lead:

I did find a short history of the Lunds on a fan site for one of the company’s other products: corkscrews.  The following is posted over at vintagecorkscrewcenter.com (the full link is http://www.vintagecorkscrewcenter.com/some-famous-corkscrew-makers/the-story-of-thomas-and-william-lund,-london-16693072):

“Thomas Lund first established his business in 1804 . He moved to 57 Cornhill, London in 1814. His main business at the time besides boxes was manufacturing pens and importing filtering stones for water treatment. His profession was inherited from his father who died 1806. In the monthly magazine from 1806 his father was mentioned as the first ivory turner in York.  Logically, Thomas Lund entered the same profession. . . .

“By 1820 he added a copying machine business to the company. However, this seems not has been his main business. Furthermore, he was probably not making corkscrews at this time. At least not what we know of. He still made various boxes and diversified into making dressing cases. These cases usually included a very small corkscrew. There are known cases from around 1815.. . .

“William Lund joined his father 1835 and took over the whole business 1845. Unfortunately, there are not many personal records of the Lund family. In fact, there is nothing in the history books.”

The Lunds were famous for making several other things, including quality boxes.   Another website, http://www.antiquebox.org/lund/, explains that William took over the business in 1845 due to Thomas’ death that year:

“Thomas and William ran their businesses independently, but after Thomas’s death in 1845, William took over the running of both, whilst also expanding his own premises to include 23 Fleet Street. By 1859, the Fleet Street premises had again expanded to include No. 25.

“When William Lund died in 1872, his son Charles continued on the business under the name of William Lund & Son.”

There’s a picture of William Lund at both sites:

At the DC show, I had the opportunity to purchase an entire collection of Victorian pencils and, after reassuring the finance department of the family that yes, we would still be able to have dinner and maybe even some gas money to get home, I pulled the trigger.  Only about a third of the collection is going into mine, including these two:

The smaller of the two is unmarked, but the larger one has “Lund Patentee London” inscribed on the lower portion of the spiral.  I’ve been looking for an example with this detail for a long, long time:

Unmarked examples might have been made after the patent expired, and some commentators have noted that they may not actually have been made by Lund, either.  I don’t know.  

Until this one came my way, the only other pencil in my collection which approached a Lund was the W.P. Wallace “20th Century” pencil, a cheaper American knockoff (the full story. . . or at least as much of it as I know . . . is at http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2012/10/when-20th-century-was-forward-thinking.html).

Although I’m still not any closer to knowing more about Mr. Wallace or his 20th Century pencil, I’ve got a better answer to those who have said, “You call yourself a pencil collector and you don’t have a Lund?”