Rather than Curse the Darkness

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.

April of 2020, the most hellish month most of us can remember, is over.  It seemed appropriate to light a pencil rather than curse the darkness, and there’s a few lighter pencils that have come my way recently that I’ve got to show you.

The first was this one:

This one came my way in a lot of junkers – my real target in buying the bunch was that bronze and black Gordon I wrote about a week ago.  I always carefully inspect everything that comes in the door, and this one was marked “Jugo” on the clip:

And since I also have to take everything apart that comes in the door, it wasn’t long before I found out it was a lighter pencil:

Complete with an unusual lighter assembly, built different from the usual cylindrical lighter unit that just slips down inside the barrel.  The lighter part just screws into the top end of the barrel, acting as a kind of cork on top of a barrel full of lighter fluid:

Trick pencils like this are something I enjoy, so I went to put it with the other lighter pencils in one of my drawers full of bad ideas.  That’s when I found something I forgot I had:

This wasn’t my first Jugo, and the other example is mint, boxed and with paperwork.  The silver one has a clip that’s actually built into the barrel rather than a washer clip:

The instruction sheet indicates that the Jugo Corporation was located at 600 West 52nd Street, New York:

While I was putting the new Jugo in its place alongside this one, I noticed another lighter pencil I had forgotten that I had. 

I vaguely remember buying this years ago, and it has a lot in common with those Osborne overlays I was showing off recently (see “Customer Number 600 at https://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2020/04/customer-number-600.html). 

What surprised me the most was that I apparently had never disturbed those tissue-thin instructions to see what was inside them.  At some point I must have put it away intending to get around to doing that, but for whatever reason I never did. 

Better late than never:

The instructions for the “Literpencil” are just wonderful, with nice comic book like illustrations, a great logo, and . . . wait a tick . . .

I’ll be darned.  I guess I already knew these were Osborne products, after all!  And it’s even dated, to 1934:

I’ve got one more lighter pencil to show you - I teased the audience on Facebook with it, along with a suggestion that it might make a Waterman fan’s head explode:

The clip is unmistakably the same one found on the Waterman Patrician - here it is alongside the Patrician from yesterday’s article, and flanked on the other side by a “Sta-Rite” pencil:

I’d written about the mystery surrounding how a Waterman Patrician clip wound up on a third-tier Sta-Rite in October, 2018 (see https://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2018/10/two-puzzling-details.html):

Did Waterman make a lighter pencil?  That is a tantalizing thought . . . especially given some sharp gasps heard when I shared a picture of this pencil without any explanation.  However, this one isn’t marked . . . and now that I’ve found both this and a Sta-Rite with that same clip, I’m less likely to think this is authentic Waterman; more likely is that Waterman sold off leftover clips, as unlikely as that sounds given Waterman’s propensity to use up old parts on closeout models.

The way this one is put together might provide a clue as to whom Waterman sold these clips.

 You’ve seen that here before, a long, long time ago:

Back in 2013, I wrote about this pencil (the article is in the books, in The Leadhead’s Pencil Blog Volume 2, page 18).  That one was marked A.M.W., an acronym for Art Metal Works, makers of the ubiquitous Penciliter.  Included in the article was the patent associated with this pencil, awarded to Louis Aronson (whose name formed the basis for the trade name he adopted - "Ronson") on June 8, 1920 as number 1,342,838.

And. . . Aronson did adapt this early design to something very similar to today’s mystery pencil – the “Lite-O-Rite” (see The Leadhead’s Pencil Blog Vol. 1, page 142):

But there’s something that doesn’t make sense here.  Every Art Metal Works product was marked to the hilt like an Egyptian obelisk.  I’m convinced if the company had stayed in business any longer they would have made the pencils an inch bigger to accommodate all the latest patent numbers!

So we have a completely unmarked pencil, with a Waterman patented clip and an Art Metal Works patented lighter unit.  Did one license to the other, did both of them license to some third party or did neither of them license to some huckster who pirated both of their designs?

Maybe.

Customer Number 600

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.

Fixing pencils is an entirely different discipline than fixing fountain pens, and over the years I’ve developed a bit of a following – even though my highly specialized toolkit consists mostly of paper clips and rubber bands.  At the Philadelphia show, Gary Lehrer asked if I would take a look at a pencils of his: a sterling silver, four-color Mont Blanc pencil.  Two of the colors worked just fine, and the other two just wouldn’t.  I took it home to play around with.

“Playing around with it” turned into hours of fiddling on the kitchen table.  This was no simple lead jam, as I was hoping . . . something mechanical was going on inside, and without any instructions on how to get the thing apart, I had to do whatever I could do from the outside, trying not to break the damn thing as I tugged and twisted.

Eventually, I was able to get things working again, and as usual with things like this, I’m not entirely sure how I did it.  Rather than mailing the pencil back, I called Gary and we agreed to meet up in Baltimore so I could return it to him.  We still hadn’t talked about how much I was going to charge.

Gary’s pencil is a pricey specimen – I’d asked how much he wanted for it knowing it was probably going to be more than I wanted to pay, and it was.  Before Baltimore, I’d asked Joe what he thought was reasonable for this sort of repair, and he and I were within ten bucks of each other.   At the show, I presented Gary with his pencil and the lower of the two numbers, and he was happy to pay it – it was far less than the difference between a broken Mont Blanc and one that is working beautifully.

You thought I was going to show you a picture of a Mont Blanc, didn’t you?  Funny thing . . . I didn’t take any pictures of it before I gave it back to him (Gary’s site is gopens.com - I”m sure you’ll see it there at some point).

Today’s story picks up ten minutes later, when Gary came back to my table.  He’d brought something to show me . . . it wasn’t much, he said, but maybe it was something he thought I could use.

Osbornes are the sort of flea-market fare that generally don’t get a lot of attention, because they are typically advertising pencils that don’t bring more than a buck or two.  They were, however, very well made, and this roll was fully stocked with salesman’s samples:

Gary asked me how much I’d be willing to pay for it, and I hemmed and hawwed.  Is there value to these more than a buck or two apiece?  I don’t know, but sometimes I’m more librarian than collector . . . I’d documented Osborne’s history in The Catalogue, and it would be a shame not to have the definitive word on the company, even if the brand doesn’t get a lot of attention.

In the end we made it simple.  I just gave Gary his money back and took the Osbornes.  If he was happy with the price to repair his Mont Blanc, I suspect he was happier still to have gotten it done in exchange for a roll of advertising pencils!

Osborne, as detailed in The Catalogue on page 108, was a calendar and advertising company founded in 1888.  The company moved to Clifton, New Jersey in 1932, and was sold to Kemper Thomas in Cincinnati in 1953 (that’s why some Osborne pencils are marked “OKT” on the clip).  Sometime in the 1970s, Kemper Thomas was absorbed into Hallmark, the greeting card company.

The pencils in this roll are from the Clifton era, and while there are no calendar pencils in here to help better date them, I suspect late 1940s production.  Included are a few flattops:

“Friendly Advertising” was the company’s tagline.  Note the lighter pencil at bottom, which lacks any markings other than the painted Osborne lettering on the side: these are ubiquitous, although until now, I’ve never been able to pin down who made them.  The top two examples are Osborne’s model 25 (one marked model 600-01-25), the next is a model 58 (600-01-58) and the lighter pencil is marked model 600-22-10:

There are three very Ritepoint-looking pencils in this roll, in different colors but all sporting identical imprints.  I love the lettering on these Model 45 (marked 600-01-45) pencils:

Then come the more traditional Osborne fare.  Collectors love it when they can put a model name on something they see often, and I’m proud to tell you that these are the Model 27 “Perfection” pencils.  Note that the plain plastic colors are designated 600-01-27 and the marbled one at the bottom is 600-03-27:

These two Osborne “Perfections” were a little different, sporting nicer lettering and a model designation of 600-01-37.   The top half has gone missing for the barrel marked 600-11-99.

Finally comes the real prize in this roll, and the reason I thought it worthy of a Mont Blanc repair:

The solid colors are on a sample tube marked 600-01-002, while the pearl samples are marked 600-11-500.  The “Hand dusted gold lustre printing” sample is an extra bonus indeed!

There was one last reason I found Gary’s roll o’ pencils so appealing: they fit in perfectly with another purchase I had made online at the tail end of 2019, from Bob Novak’s nycpens:

Bob characterized them as “new old stock,” but I believe “shop models” is a better description.  Were it not for the Osborne name on the clips of two of the silver examples, I wouldn’t have thought Osborne – although the ringtop has just beneath it very typical Osborne striping (with the addition of a stripe of grey pearl).   Unfortunately, none of these are shop marked, and they came as you see them, without any supporting documentation to explain what they are.

I can see the Osborne in all of these, when I view them in light of Gary’s sample roll – in particular, with the revelation that Osborne was offering those ubiquitous pencil lighters, which I’m sure at least inspired (if they didn’t contribute) the “overlays” you see here.

I frequently draw the line between who manufactured an item, versus who produced it.  Did Osborne make their products, or have them made?  Particularly in these shop pieces, I see strong Ritepoint overtones, especially with that pointy black cap and the gold one with that flattish top in red, blue and orange.

That would be consistent with the model designations in the sample roll: if, for example, Osborne offered a Model 25, what would be the point of imprinting one with “600-01-25?”  No matter how prolific Osborne was in producing pencils, I don’t believe they actually manufactured the pencils themselves – I think they were supplied with pencils and had the equipment to custom-imprint them for their customers.

And I believe the likely supplier was Ritepoint.