I promised yesterday that I’d be back with more information about Parker’s Vest Pocket (or “golf”) pencils. Back I am . . . with a mic drop moment from the Ohio Pen Show.
I move a little slower than I used to these days, conserving my energy rather than running around like a madman – even though I still have a bottle of Jameson on me. Were it not for the kindness of friends, I would have missed what Mike Conway brought in the door that Thursday morning in Columbus; fortunately, Nik Pang was right there when it arrived, and he made a point to acquire it and bring it down to offer it to me.
The story, according to Mike, is that Ruth Reuter was a Parker employee, and “Parker Desk Set” suggests there’s a desk pen and base inside. The “BDS,” however, indicates this is better than that – much, much better, especially for us pencil guys. I’m assuming the letters BDS stand for “Bridge Desk Set.” Inside the cardboard sleeve is a box containing four other boxes, each branded for one of the four card suits.
And inside each of those boxes were four perfectly preserved little desk pencil bases for the four suits, accompanied by a Parker Vest Pocket pencil.
Fortunately, I had learned my lesson at DC about not bringing enough cash, so all I needed to know from Nik was how much of it he wanted. For me, this concluded years of searching: in “The Silent Underbidder” (August 11, 2012: Volume 1, page 300), I told the story of how Joe Nemecek won a set like this at the Triangle Pen Show auction that year. Here is Joe’s set, photographed during that auction:
No, I wasn’t really the underbidder – we agreed that Joe would chase the set, because he’s a bigger Parker fan than I am. If he won, and I told him to be sure that he did, I said I would purchase his less complete set to help him defray the cost. Joe did win, and I did buy Joe’s. At the time I thought to myself, how hard can it be to complete the set?
Hard. Damn hard. In fact, I was only able to find a club suit in the box, and it took a few months to find another black and two red pencils, which presented its own unexpected challenges – there’s a few different variations of these pencils, and it drove me nuts trying to find all four that were exactly the same (see “Where the Sun Don’t Shine” on April 15, 2013: Volume 2, page 137).
Joe’s set was reputedly from a Parker salesman, which is why it was outfitted with pencils in Madarin yellow, jade, marine green and black; I suspect Ruth also wanted a little more variety in her set, replacing two pencils with the Moderne Black-and-Pearl and the burgundy pearl ones. Still, since I’m a preservationist first and I like to keep things as they came to me, and I knew this find would be the cover shot for this volume of the book. I played around with a couple rough concepts, and proudly I posted what I came up with:
Ooohs and aaahs were what I expected. What I got, however, was “get that pearl and black pencil out of there!” from more than one person. Whew, I thought . . . at least I hadn’t massaged that image enough to see that one of them was burgundy pearl rather than black.
One of the naysayers was Larry Liebman: I explained to him how this was how the set came to me, but he was unpersuaded. “Yeah, but it really should have two red and two black,” he replied.
I asked Larry if he had actual documentation of that, and he sent me pictures of two advertisements, one of which was in the Saturday Evening Post on July 26, 1930. I renewed my online subscription so I could get access to their archived issues; there it was, right inside the front cover:
Elsewhere in this advertisement, those stubby little pencils are called “Midget Vest Parkers,” but here the set is advertised as including “Midget Pencils in black and lacquer red.”
The set was advertised for a whopping $24, and the illustration explains something else. All of the complete sets I have seen are missing a lid for the outer box, but when David Isaacson shared pictures of his set in our online discussion, it had something I had never noticed: card suit stickers on the bottom of the box. I turned mine over, and whaddaya know . . .
There they are . . . or were, anyway, except for the intact spade. This didn’t make any sense to me until I saw that Saturday Evening Post advertisement: what I thought was the box base was actually the lid.
Anybody have a spare box bottom? It would be nice, but I’m not the least bit disappointed. To my knowledge, this is the only set known that still has the outer cardboard sleeve.
Larry shared another advertisement with me that answered another question I raised yesterday - my concern was that the more streamlined Moderne Black-and-Pearl pencil that came with my set may have been made later.
Here’s that other advertisement: it isn’t dated, nor does it say in what magazine it was published, but it also describes the bridge set as “new,” so it is reasonable to think it was also published in mid-1930:
The text doesn’t say that the pencils are red and black, and the black and white rudimentary drawing shows all four suits in black . . . but I agree that it’s reasonable to think the white pencils shown are the red ones (even though there’s a black one with the heart and a white one with the club – sigh . . . so it goes with advertising art). However, like the other ad, this appears to show the more squared off tops.
But did you notice the interchangeable ringtop for the desk pencil at the top of the advertisement?
It looks like the streamlined and squared off caps were in production at the same time, depending on a customer’s choice. Although I can’t rule out that eventually Parker gravitated towards the more streamlined caps, this provides the proof that if our friend Ruth Reuter wanted a different pencil in her set when she pulled it from the assembly line, a shorter more streamlined Moderne Black-and-Pearl was right there for the swapping at the time.
Although I’m ultra-cautious when I’m making changes to things when they have been undisturbed for so long, I agree that it’s acceptable to swap out the two pencils in Ruth’s set with the black and red pencils from “When Good Luck Is a Bad Thing” on October 31:
But I still keep the pencils that came with this set right alongside them.
And I’m still looking for the bottom of that outer box.
