Rekindled and Settled Once and for All

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.

Some five years ago, there was significant controversy and debate (by tempest in a teapot standards) concerning whether triangular pencils such as these are Triads:

The stakes are high.  Triads – the originals made by the Tri-Pen Manufacturing Company – are grail finds for pencil collectors.  Here’s the ones I’ve been able to find, augmented by the four that were part of a collection I purchased from Alan Hirsch in Raleigh:

These Triads are made in spectacular celluloids, with a nice imprint and a great clip marked “Triad.”

The later ones, however, don’t have a Tri-Pen imprint – usually they have advertising imprints instead, and usually for Providence, Rhode Island area businesses.  While the clips are shaped the same, only rarely are these marked Triad:

In 2013, I suggested that these later pencils couldn’t possibly be legitimate Triads, since Tri-Pen was gone by 1933, replaced by an outfit called the “Improved Pencil Company,” (see Volume 2, page 70) and that later red, white and blue models like these, apparently made during World War II, were probably made by a “Triangle Pen Company” formed in March, 1940 (Volume 2, page 75):

In the years since, there has been an uneasy truce about this issue; Joe Nemecek and I have a ritual where he refers to these later pencils as Triads, I say “you mean those made by the Triangle Pen Company,” and we have generally settled on the term “Lesser Triads.”

I’m not settling anymore.  There was one more pencil in that collection Alan Hirsch sold me:

Clearly World War II vintage – not just from the patriotic colors, but also from the (admittedly crappy) plastic tip and the monoplanes on one of the three sides:

And on the other side, all the evidence one needs that the argument is over . . . “Lesser Triad,” my butt:

There is one last piece of the puzzle in this story.  I have suggested that those later red, white and blue pencils might actually have been made by Ritepoint Company of St. Louis, and one other example I’ve found seems to have settled that argument, too:

Same clip . . . same cap . . . the V for Victory . . . and on the back:

It’s a salesman’s sample for the Newton Manufacturing Company, an advertising specialty company.  In an earlier article, I had suggested that one example of Newton’s pencils might have been made by Quickpoint – unless Ritepoint also made Quickpoint (page 120).  But thanks to this case that turned up a while ago, we know that at least one of Newton’s suppliers – if not the only one – was Ritepoint.

Don't Be Too Quick to Assume

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.

A glance at thisone in a junk box might cause you to dismiss it as just another Quickpoint:

It’s a habit of mine to read the clips, even when I assume I know what’s there, or should be there.  If I had a penny for every Quickpoint clip I’ve read . . . well, let’s just say reading this one is what keeps me in the habit of reading:

“Newton Mfg. Co. Newton, Iowa.”   A search of newspapers reveals that the company was founded around 1908; the earliest references I could find to the firm were in a burst of advertisements for salesmen which appeared in papers across the midwest in mid-August of that year.  The Company remained in business until 2015, when it filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy and was acquired in bankruptcy by HALO Branded Solutions.

This Newton dates to the late 1930s or rerly 1940s The Newton pencil raises a question which has led some in the advertising pencil collector’s circle to accuse me of heresy: I’ve never been fully confident that Quickpoint pencils were made by Quickpoint, and a pencil identical to a Quickpoint but bearing the name of another midwestern advertising specialty company indicates that either one was made by the other, or a third party made pencils for both.

Quickpoint is twenty years younger, founded in 1928 according to the company’s website.  Occam’s razor suggests that since Quickpoints are so common and distinctive, and this is the first Newton I’ve seen, that Quickpoint made its own stuff and for a time made a few pencils branded for Newton.  Yet Newton has “manufacturing” in its name, while Quickpoint does not, and Lipic and Ritepoint were in Quickpoint’s backyard . . .