Brian Beat Me to the Punch

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.

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Several of the pictures I’m about to show you are a few years old.  A few others are from 2016, right after the Ohio Show and a fiasco over trying to find parts to fix a Parker Vacumatic pencil for Greg Proctor.  In the end, I never did anything with them.  Why?  My good friend and Vacumatic maven Brian McQueen posted a more thorough examination of the innards of Vac pencils, and it seemed redundant.

Now, some four years later, I figure I might as well throw my two cents’ in.

Parker Vacumatics are interesting because they straddle two of the three great epochs of Parker pencil development.  Those three are:

First Epoch: “Ignore them, they’ll go away.”  Parker, along with Waterman, disdained pencils – although Parker was a little less aggressive towards them. (One Waterman publication said that writing with a pencil only ruins one’s handwriting!)  Even with the introduction of the Eversharp in 1913 followed by Sheaffer’s introduction of the Sharp-Point in 1917, and the skyrocketing fortunes of both firms due in large part to offering companion pencils to match their pens, Parker went to its happy place and blissfully made nothing but what it was used to making.

Second Epoch: “Oh crap, we’d better get serious about this.”  In late 1921, Parker announced plans to introduce an original pencil of its own, but only after it was beginning to lose market share to pen companies that were offering pencils.  The “Non-Clog” pencil (later renamed the “Lucky Lock,” for the way the cap locked onto the barrel) came out in 1922, and Parker was playing catchup in pencil engineering trying to come up with something that was as reliable as what experienced pencil companies were making.  Most of the company’s ideas during this era were bad ones, but they are interesting to collectors today.

Third Epoch: “Screw it, as long as it looks like the pens on the outside, who cares?”  Beginning in the 1930s, Parker began outsourcing production of pencil mechanisms to Cross.  It’s no coincidence that the reliability of Parker pencils improved significantly around that time, but as far as variety goes . . . well, it’s darn near the same thing inside most Parkers from the mid-1930s on, dressed up on the outside with different-looking bits of plastic and metal.

Note:  no, Liquid Lead pencils don’t count as a deviation from the third epoch . . . those were just ballpoint pens that were supposed to use graphite paste instead of ink.

Here’s what the insides of Parker Vacumatics look like after the “Screw it” era began:

You’ll only see the spiral inside that chrome tube if something has gone wrong inside, as was the case with this one  – normally, these are pretty robust mechanisms, so you won’t get that chrome outer shell off to peek inside.

Before Parker went with these, the beginning of the Vacumatic era, from 1933 until about 1935, was the zenith of Parker’s attempts to come up with something that worked better than what other companies had been doing for a decade or two.  The high water mark, I believe, was those weird Autopoint-like prototypes I wrote about here back in 2014 (now in print, at The Leadhead’s Pencil Blog Volume 3, page 8):

Outside of esoteric shop pieces like these, though, there’s plenty of variety in Vac mechanisms before the company gave up and let someone else make them.  From what I recall, it was 2016 at the Ohio Show when  my challenge was to find a replacement mechanism for a pencil like this for Greg Proctor:

With the cap removed, you’ll see something typical on earlier Vacumatic pencils - a two stage top, where the topmost portion is the part that rotates to advance the lead, and the lower part acts to provide additional friction to hold the cap in place:

From what I recall, I saw Greg on Thursday, and he was hoping I’d be able to repair this early Vacumatic – I can tell it’s early because the nose is longer.  Since I commute back and forth Thursday and sometimes Fridays to the Ohio Show, I agreed to take it home because I knew I had one laying around that might be a suitable donor. 

Note: Vacs are generally plentiful enough that it’s usually easier to swap a mechanism out of a donor than it is to repair them.

Today was not Greg’s day though . . . the pencil I was thinking of turned out to be something quite different on the inside, although it looked almost identical on the outside:

By the way, Greg's did have three bands - there's a groove on the lower barrel for the third band which has gone missing.  Greg’s pencil is a rear-drive pencil, meaning that turning the cap at the rear of the pencil advances the lead.  The one I was thinking of using as a donor looks exactly the same on the outside, but it has a simple nose drive mechanism.  The screw-in top section’s only function is to hold the top half of the barrel on.

Huh.

So I started going through my other earlier Vacumatics, hoping I could find something that works, and from this small sampling I was noticing a trend:

The top halves all work the same, but you’ll notice that most of the time, the nose is much shorter like you’ll see in bottom example.  That reflects the fact that the insides are not interchangeable – the barrel opening was too narrow inside.

And there’s something else: most of the time there’s three bands, all on the top section, but every so often you’ll find one of the three bands on the lower section (these pictures are really old):

I didn’t have the right mechanism to spare for Greg, but he did get something else out of the deal.  I’d mentioned here that I had inadvertently outbid a friend for a Vacumatic Senior pencil I’d won in an online auction (https://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2016/11/one-out-of-three.html) – I didn’t mention who it was for some reason, but Greg was happy to add it to the series he was working on.  I also mentioned that he had let me photograph his other two examples as part of the deal, but since that image was still in my unpublished pictures folder, I don’t think I ever got around to showing it here:

Those slightly wider middle bands are what identifies these as Vacumatic Seniors.  Then, of course, there’s Eric Magnuson, who spared no expense acquiring this one:

From the days before Parker fully figured out how to get those lines straight, this senior-banded Vacumatic has an old Duofold-style top and washer clip, and the earlier Duofold-style imprint:

It took me forever to find these last few pictures.  When I was editing The Pennant, my friend Tsachi Mitsenmacher brought a few things to the 2016 Chicago Show for me to photograph, and I remembered taking some shots of his Ripley Vacumatics.  Alas, my days at The Pennant were shorter than my photo archive, and none of the pictures ever made it into print.

I looked everywhere on my laptop and my backup drive . . . nothing.  And then I remembered – I replaced my laptop a couple years ago.  Down into the catacombs I went, to turn the crank on the side of old faithful to see what might still be on her, and there it was: “Pennant - Pipeline,” a folder containing nearly 7 gigabytes of material I shot but never had the opportunity to use.  There they were:

Ripley Vacumatics have been the topic of a few articles here over the years, most recently in “The Class of 1939,” exploring among other things those 1939-dated Ripleys that surface from time to time (see https://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-class-of-1939.html?m=0).  Rare they are in red; numbered on maybe one hand are the known examples in grey pearl:

The pen is a nice compliment to this pencil, but it's not a Ripley.  Those narrower stripes, according to Brian McQueen, indicate it's a silvery blue Vacuum Filler pen:

The Class of 1939

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.

Companies are far more interesting when they are desperate.  I think that’s why Parker doesn’t interest me as much as so many other brands – rarely did they flail around in desperation, and with nearly everything they did, regardless of how goofy it was, they made it look like they meant to do it as surely as a cat calmly walks away after falling off the kitchen counter.

But 1939 was different for everyone, Parker included.  America was still in the Depression, and the late Thirties in general represented a time when pen manufacturers great and small alike were pulling out all the stops to introduce gimmicks to attract the largest share possible of a much smaller pool of customers. 

In Parker’s case, the answer was the Parker 51, which had just come out of research and was about to take the pen world by storm.  But there was a problem . . . the company’s flagship Vacumatic line was still in production, and apparently Parker had quite a bit of leftover stock of what would soon become an obsolete commodity.  Perhaps in anticipation of the 51s success, and with an uncharacteristic “waste not, want not” approach, Parker took some unusual steps to use up what was on hand rather than put it in a dumpster.

One example of this was the “Ripley” Vacumatic, about which I’ve written here a few times (see Volume 2, page 212 and Volume 4, page 48).  Nicknamed after the mock “Ripley’s Believe it or Not” cartoons used to promote the new Vacumatic when it was introduced in 1933, they are relatively easy to spot with their early trim configurations and wider-than-usual alternating stripes, but the acid test for whether an early Vac is a Ripley is to hold it up to the light and see if the dark strips glow blue.

At the Chicago Show, I had the opportunity to buy another Ripley and, partly because these came up so rarely, I didn’t mind a significant investment to add another to the fold:

I say “partly” because the bulk of my motivation was that the new example, the lower one in this picture, needs no light to confirm its Ripleyness.  It simply glows blue as if there were already a light inside it!

There was another reason for the purchase, though . . . this one has something you won’t find on a “normal” Ripley:

That 9 with two dots at the end of the imprint is a date code signifying production in 1939, long after the Ripley advertising campaign had ended.  Several Vacumatic aficionados, most notably Brian McQueen, have noted this anomaly, and several examples bearing a 1939 date code have turned up with advertising imprints, another thing you don’t see on the earlier incarnation of the Ripley.  Given the 1933-period correct trim and mechanism, abandoned after Parker outsourced production of its pencil mechanisms to Cross, the only plausible explanation for these is that Parker had stores of complete, assembled Ripley pencils somewhere in its warehouse that the company decided to sell rather than scrap.

Parker also used up leftover rod stock.  This one also came from Chicago, although I can’t remember who from:

This example is odd not only because of the lack of center trim bands (no, there’s no grooves where they have gone missing), but in the placement of the middle joint: the lower barrel is significantly longer than usual, with the break between the cap and lower barrel just a quarter inch or so below the end of the clip.  Also, even though this is a slender pencil that would usually have a black jewel on top, this one has a diminuative striped jewel, one of the smallest I’ve seen:

I consulted with a few Parker guys who confirmed this is a legitimate weird variant, which makes sense given the imprint, which confirms this one is also a graduate of the class of ‘39:

This last one I’ve been wanting to show you for awhile – it belongs to Joe Nemecek, and I photographed it at the Baltimore show when my skills with a camera were far more feeble:

This one lacks a date code, because it was a lower-priced line at the time: the Parker Televisor:

The Televisor was a Parker model made exclusively in and for the Canadian market.  According to Tony Fischer’s website, it was introduced in 1935 and came in two incarnations: the first, which he calls “MKI,” looks a lot like a Parker Challenger, but in 1938, he says the line was redesigned to include a clip with “Parker” on it, like this one.  The line was discontinued in 1940.

Tony doesn’t show any picture with this 1938-and-later clip, but I suspect Joe’s example is a prime example:

Instead of a straight clip, Joe’s example has a “waterfall” shape to it, and note that where the clip is sandwiched between the cap and that top button, the clip bulges out a bit from the plastic.  Was this a repurposed clip, bent out to fit a pencil with a wider girth?  I don’t think so.  By that time, Tony indicates you could have any color so long as it was black, and looks more like a last-ditch effort to add a bit of pizzazz to a dying line.

Up Close and Personal

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.

This lot of forty mechanical pencils showed up in an online auction, from the same seller who has sold me several other pigs in a poke – with great success, I might add:

There were several pencils in here that I thought looked very interesting, and I’ll be writing about them in the coming weeks, but my eyes were riveted to just one of them:

That Vacumatic pencil in the upper right corner looked just a little bit more red than a typical burgundy example.  The stripes looked a little wider than I’d expect to see, too, and the rings looked a little crooked.  I was confident from that tip – with the telltale ring around it – that it was a legitimate Parker and not some foreign knockoff.  What I was hoping it would be was a “Ripley Vacumatic,” like the example Joe Nemecek owns and I wrote about here a couple years ago, at http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2013/08/believe-it-or-not.html.

When I wrote that last article, I didn’t do a very good job of it: there were a lot of questions I didn’t answer, many I didn’t ask and unfortunately, at the time it was a direct result of my general lack of interest in the subtle nuances of Vacumatic pencils.  When I showed these fuzzy pictures to my friends online, one of them commented – and rightly so – that I wouldn’t know for certain whether this one was a Ripley until I was “up close and personal” with it.

Spoiler alert: it’s a Ripley.  And now that I’ve spent some time examining these in more detail, and comparing notes with Joe Nemecek, I’m able to articulate what a “Ripley” is and how easy they are to spot in a sea of Vacumatics.  No, they don’t all look alike.

Here she is, after restoration:

I should have taken before pictures, but I was too excited to dig into making this one look nice and work.  I cleaned it up, straightened the clip (which had a decidedly left bend) and fixed the mechanism, which had skipped the track and was jammed in the forward position – see the tutorial I wrote a few weeks ago regarding how to fix a stripped mechanism (http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2015/11/repair-tutorial-fixing-typical-stripped.html).  A paper clip pushed against the rod while I jiggled and retracted the mechanism, and it eased back into the spiral and works perfectly.  Good thing I didn’t have to pull the mechanism out and risk breaking the barrel – especially one made from such a fragile plastic!

Unlike most Parker Vacumatics, this one is not a rear-drive pencil.  It has a nose drive mechanism and unscrews in the center:

Note the very atypical imprint for a Vacumatic:

And the black top jewel – Vacs this big of a later vintage had matching striped celluloid top jewels, but Ripleys had plain black ones (a good thing, too: can you imagine trying to track down a striped Ripley plastic top jewel?):

Ripleys are pretty easy to spot, once you know what you are looking for.  Here it is shown alongside a typical “first year” burgundy example:

There’s five things to notice here, and the first three were what led me to think this might be a Ripley from a really bad picture.  Note how much redder the Ripley’s stripes are, how much wider they are, and how crooked they are.  The other two outward indications are the huge tip at one end and a different clip at the other – look how much shorter the “feather” section is on the clip.

Now I do have to stop for a minute and be a little critical of collectors’ lore on the subject.  We are told that “Ripley” Vacumatics got their nickname from Parker’s 1933-1934 advertising campaign, featuring mock “Ripley’s Believe it or not” cartoons extolling the virtues of the new pens, and picturing pens which look sort of like these.  Yes, it’s true that there was such an ad campaign – but no, the pens that were pictured didn’t look like they were made from the same plastic.

These look more like the typical, later burgundy plastic I’ve compared to my Ripley above.  However, the lore isn’t completely flawed: there is something in these advertisements to tell us what makes a Ripley a Ripley:

Later production Vacumatics used stacks of opaque black plastic and colored celluloid everywhere but on the visulated portion of the barrel, where the colored celluloid was alternated with clear plastic.  The “Ripley” pens and pencils used the same celluloid from end to end - and the “black” stripes would be see-through when held up to the light.   The only definitive way to see if a pen or a pencil is a Ripley is to expose it to bright light and see if you can see through the plastic, which should be a translucent blue.

My pencil, unlike later Vacs, lacked the brass tubes glued inside the barrel, so it was easy to put a small LED light inside for the definitive diagnosis:

There you have it.  That’s the acid test (no, never really use acid) to determine whether a pen or pencil is properly called a “Ripley” Vacumatic.

All of this being said, and bearing in mind that there aren’t very many of these to which I can compare mine, I think the first three clues that tipped me off -- deeper red, stripes that are wider and stripes that are crooked – are enough to tell you that you’re going to see blue when you hold it up to the light.

The light test is just pretty cool.

Believe It Or Not

Joe Nemecek called me excitedly a few weeks ago to tell me he’d finally managed to acquire a “Ripley Vacumatic.”   It would have been easier at the time for me to share his excitement if I had any idea what a “Ripley Vacumatic” was, but now that I’ve learned a little about them I’ve got to admit these are really neat.  At the DC show last weekend, Joe and I had a little time on Sunday to set up my lightbox and take a few shots:

To learn more, this full article is included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 2, available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and everywhere else you buy books, or you can order a copy signed by yours truly through the Legendary Lead Company HERE.