No Names of Significance

A “No Name” pen or pencil, in our collectors’ vernacular, is one which does not have a desirable manufacturer’s name. It does not mean that an item is entirely unmarked. “No Name of Significance” is more accurate.

I get a huge kick out of picking up these “No Name” brands. Sometimes one will turn out to be a subbrand of a well-known manufacturer. Other times there’s a neat back story about how or why they were made, or an interesting charlatan at work. 

Then there are those that just provide a good laugh. I don’t have much to say about the pencils in this article, other than I’ve enjoyed adding them to the museum.

This is a typical cheap, Welsh-style mechanism pencil, with “Old Fogey” on the clip.

If this next one is to be believed, I’m surprised I had not heard of it before:

There’s something strange going on at the nose - that mechanism had to be press fit in place from the front, since there’s no access from the rear. It either never made it all the way in or has worked itself back out. If it is indeed as “Famous” as advertised, you’d think I’d know the answer:

Here is the “Alwasrite,” with a cap reminiscent of the Eclipse-made Keene pencils, but a decidedly cheaper clip:

Is that a riff on “Always Right,” or was it “All Was Right” before this one came along?

This next one showed up in the online auctions with an opening bid of one cent and five dollars shipping.

I didn’t want to pay much, so I bid two cents . . . and I won for half that much, so I was $5.01 all in with shipping. I paid too much.

“Consolidated,” it says on the clip. Usually, people consolidate their strengths, but in this case, I think every bad design idea was consolidated into one pencil. Maybe the notion was to get all the bad ideas off the market in one fell swoop, from the crappy barrel material, cheap wartime plastic clip (or perhaps, one left over after the war), and lousy trim plating. 

Next up is a cigar figural novelty pencil. Louis F. Dow made these in large numbers, but they were made of wood; this one is plastic:

I don’t have any evidence to suggest that Dow was behind this one, but whoever was shared Louis’ campy sense of humor. This is the “El Pencillo”:

I’ve found two examples of this next “No Name,” although there are enough differences between the two that I can’t confirm the same characters were behind both of them:

Maybe the pens had a “Reservoir,” but the pencils at least had the name on the clip:

I have a couple clues to suggest these were made by Eclipse – nothing definitive, but suggestive. The same clips were used on some Eclipse pencils. 

And one example in my collection uses a cursive script that is very similar to one of the Reservoirs.

I also have a pretty good idea who might have been responsible for the “Supreme”:

I have two of these - the model that was already in my collection was missing that mysterious “B” in a circle above the name, and it has a tag from its previous owner indicating he (or she) had found it at a flea market in Rockville, Maryland in 1981. Good collector’s history there.

That wild green and white combination strongly resembles an example of the Nassau, which I believe was made by David Kahn (maker of the Wearever line) for that rascal James Kelley (see “All the King’s Horsemen Part 1, posted July 26, 2021: Volume 7, page 290). Kelley’s brands included letters within a circle above the name like this, and perhaps “B” is a throwback to the “Banker” line Kelley sold.  The celluloid also matches a Gordon that turned up recently.

Next in this parade of unknowns is the “Tokany”:

I have a notion about the source of this one, even if the meaning of the name eludes me. My example bears a striking resemblance to pencils marked “Monroe” (not the Eclipse ‘uberbrand,’ but the other one). It even has a knife inside like most Monroe pencils along these lines:

Last for today is the large red example in this next image. I think I shot it next to that great oversized Autopoint only because they were in the same lot, because there’s no connection between the two:

“York” is the name on the clip:

That is quite the English-sounding name, and I do believe this one was made in England. Inside, the mechanics are identical to the British “Lifelong” pencil:

Still, it is possible this is an Englishman’s American cousin . . . nowhere is this example marked as to country of origin:

Now that I have thrown out a bunch of new names on the backs of digital milk cartons, I am hoping this might yield additional evidence from the peanut gallery. I am confident that I’ll be circling back around to one or more of these as more information becomes available – maybe in a couple weeks, maybe in ten years . . .

All the King's Horsemen, Part One

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.

James Kelley, the self-described "Specialty King," was making good money and he wasn’t about to let smug Washington bureaucrats tell him how he was going to do business.  In his mind, if the Federal Trade Commission was going to try to stop him, he would find other ways to continue earning his living.  There’s a fine line between plausible deniability and obeying the letter of the law, and Kelley walked that fine line about as gracefully as a drunk being pulled over and ordered to walk straight and true. 

Let’s revisit this pencil, marked “Master” on the clip:

Above the word “Master,” there’s an M within a circle:

I wrote about this pencil in Volume 1, page 333, and I dutifully noted the connection between “Master” and the Bankers’ Pen Company - in an endnote on page 435, I indicated that matching pens were imprinted “The Master Pen / Banker’s Pen Company / New York.”

That endnote was partly right, but the pens I referred to were not “matching pens.”  As yesterday’s article establishes, those pens were made by the earlier “Bankers’ Pen Company” which folded before 1922 – much earlier than this pencil was made in the late 1920s or early 1930s.  In addition, these cheaper pens and pencils with a circle M mark, like most third-tier writing instruments, didn’t have imprints.  

Taking the evidence as a whole, it is obvious to me that this pencil is a James Kelley production.  If he was restrained from appropriating the name of other manufacturers, he must have reasoned, nothing in the order would prevent him from appropriating the name of a model used by a defunct manufacturer. Letter of the law . . . plausible deniability.

That conclusion is further supported by other details.  While the Federal Trade Commission’s injunction preventing Kelley from marketing pens or pencils marked “Waterson” was issued in April, 1930, that injunction didn’t happen overnight.  Inquiries and investigations by the FTC (and perhaps from L.E. Waterman) would have started months earlier, which explains this:

During the latter part of 1929, several newspapers out west ran this advertisement for “Genuine Waterson Self-Filling Fountain Pens” (this one is from the Great Falls (Montana) Tribune on July 2, 1929).  The advertisement states that orders are filled by mail order, but customers are invited to see Waterson pens in a window display:

At the “Nassau Pen and Pencil Corporation,” 311 Central Avenue, Great Falls, Montana.  The Nassau is another third-tier brand with which even beginning collectors are well familiar, and a connection between Nassau and Kelley’s Waterson explains something I’ve always wondered about.  Nassau pencils come in Welsh-style bell top models, just like the Banker and Waterson:

But in all but one case among those I’ve found, above the word Nassau is an M within a circle, rather than the letter N:

Transitional models and those with cutout bands that appear to have been supplied by David Kahn share that same anomaly:

Later models, however, universally sport an N in a circle above the word Nassau:

Something else is amiss with the Nassau Pen and Pencil Corporation: no, its offices were not in Great Falls, Montana – at least, not exclusively.  The earliest mention I found for the company was this advertisement in the Wilmington, Delaware Evening Journal on April 17, 1929, which provided an address of 814 Market Street, Wilmington, Delaware:

An advertisement in the Bridgewater, New Jersey Courier News on September 13, 1929 provides no address, but it looks suspiciously like one of James Kelley’s promotions:

On December 4, 1929, this advertisement in the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania Evening News identified a “Nassau Fountain Pen Company, New York City”:

The advertisement published by Inglehart’s Drug Store in the Oshkosh Northwestern on March 6, 1930 reprinted the company’s warranty papers, providing an address of 116 Nassau Street, New York:

Another advertisement in The Morning Call in Allentown, Pennsylvania on September 25, 1931 is revealing: no address is provided for the “Famous Nassau Pens,” but the text describes the large, clunky flattop pen as “the latest 1931 Balanced Master or Bankers’ size.”  Master, Banker, and another assault on Walter Sheaffer’s Balance, all rolled into one:

Since Nassau was running a mail-order operation, either the company was moving around rapidly or was opening storefronts across the country, literally as a front for where the operations were really located.  The Federal Trade Commission finally caught up with the Nassau Pen and Pencil Corporation on April 22, 1938, issuing an injunction to prevent Nassau from using the term “Life Time Guarantee” in an order nearly cut and pasted from the order against James Kelley.  The FTC apparently never figured out who was really behind the company, since orders typically named the principals involved.  I’m sure to a moral certainty, had the FTC done a little more digging, they would have found James Kelley behind it all.