The Wild Geese Come Home

I cringe and smile at the same time when I reread articles that posted during the first year here at the blog. The writing was crude – most of its rudimentary articles were dashed off in an hour or so just to introduce something I had found that wasn’t included in The Catalogue. The research tools were also crude: internet research tools were comparatively less developed than they are now, and I hadn’t yet written the patent and trademark books on which I rely so heavily. 

But I smile at the exhuberance. Everything was new at the time, and The Catalogue had just unleashed an avalanche of interest in mechanical pencils. That first volume introduces many of the people who are now old friends, and whenever I thumb through Volume 1, I relive the excitement of learning things that are second nature now, and meeting people that have become old friends.

Towards the end of that first volume, I was just beginning to engage in deeper research dives to learn the history behind these pencils rather than just showing off the pencils themselves. “One Wild Goose Chase” (November 1, 2012: Volume 1, page 401) is a good example of the transition from an update service for The Catalogue into the ongoing research project it is today. 

In that article, random observations about Selfeed repeating pencils led me to an eBay auction that had closed four years previously. At the time, eBay’s search tools still allowed random strangers to identify buyers and sellers in past auctions, and with the help of several new friends I learned that the seller was Michael Kidd, who had bought a group of Selfeed pencils from Rob Bader. I knew Rob, but Michael was a stranger with whom I forged a new friendship; he snapped this picture of what he had bought from Rob, which was included in the 2012 article:

A few weeks ago, Michael sent me an email to offer me a few pencils before he listed them in the online auctions. Although he has followed the blog all these years, it had been so long since we last conversed that I didn’t remember where I had seen some of them.

Michael mentioned that I had seen what was on that instruction sheet, but I thought he meant that I had seen a Selfeed instruction sheet – not this exact one.

I had forgotten that these were the very same pencils I had written about so long ago, and their addition to the museum is an ever-present reminder that none of us, myself included, really own these things. We are only privileged to be their caretakers for a time.

There were some other items in that care package Michael sent me that I will tell you about later, but one bears mention here: Michael said he was including a pencil that he had grown weary of trying to figure out. He didn’t send a picture of it, but when it arrived I was able to tell him exactly what it was:

The short ringtop is shown here alongside the “Rite Away” pencil I just wrote about here on September 30 in “A Long-Lost Cousin.” The two are identical – even the noses are interchangeable. I scoured the barrel with a loupe looking for any imprints, and there’s nothing there that I can see.

Perhaps this is another Rite Away, but without a barrel imprint. Perhaps, as I theorized in that last article, this is an unmarked Eagle Pencil Company product.

Perhaps, in another thirteen years or so, some random stranger will answer that question for me!

A Long-Lost Cousin

I believe this one arrived in a boxload of stuff from the “catch up” Chicago Show in September 2021:

It’s a good thing that I am so obsessive in examining newcomers as closely as I do; otherwise, this would have been cast off as a kinda nice but unmarked pencil and gone right back into a junk box full of remainders. Even with the assistance of a china marker I had great difficulty bringing out enough detail for a photograph:

“Rite Away” it reads, with a diamond in between those two words. There are no other markings that I can find, but that was enough to send me plowing through American Writing Instrument Trademarks 1870-1953, so I could share with you the wonderful story of the Rite Away pencil.

It isn’t in there. Therefore, I’m going to tell you the other wonderful story about it.

The features that make this pencil stand out in the crowd are that great mottled hard rubber and the unusual shape of the top. As I perused the rest of the museum looking for similar characteristics, I found one:

There’s the Rite Away posed next to a General Manufacturing Company “Kaligraf,” one of the mostest holiest of holy grails known to pencil collectors. Kaligraf pencils accompanied the company’s Snap-Fil line of fountain pens, and it is the only “lever filled” pencil design known.

Well, it wasn’t exactly lever filled. You pull the lever up, and as the lever is pushed down again it scoots the lead forward a little bit. If you have seen one example, count yourself lucky – I don’t think you’ll ever see as many of these in one place as when I shared an image of the examples Joe Nemecek and I had put together in “Back to Sioux City” (January 5, 2017: Volume 4, page 334):

Now there is one big difference you can see between my Rite Away and a Kaligraf: the Rite Away has no lever. That meant I needed to take it apart and see what was happening inside: the noses on both the Rite Away and the Kaligraf unscrewed easily, and it was clear at least to me that both were made using the same machinery.

With the nose removed, you can see there is a rod inside the barrel that moves up and down by turning the cap at the top.

Does that sound familiar? It should, and if it doesn’t, hold on to your hat. The other day, I wrote about my suspicion that hard rubber Lead-O-Graph pencils were manufactured by the Eagle Pencil Company (see “Welcome Distraction” posted on September 4, 2025). Even before I found one in what I believe is an intact portion of Eagle’s factory archive, I thought that, and I told you why:

Because that hard rubber looked so much like these hard rubber Eagle Pointer pencils. The Leadograph pencils were based on another Eagle product, the Simplex; guess how the Eagle Pointer works? 

Exactly like the Rite Away . . . and Eagle held the patent on the mechanism by virtue of Alfred Michael’s patent number 1,406,056, applied for on March 26, 1921 and issued on February 7, 1922. Michael’s patent was assigned to the Eagle Pencil Company.

That’s not all.

I mentioned earlier that no trademark for “Rite Away” appears in American Writing Instrument Trademarks 1870-1953. I know why:

These painted wood pencils were made by the Eagle Pencil Company, and guess what they were called:

Both of these lines were called the Eagle “Ritaway.” There’s no trademark registration filed for the “Ritaway” name either, which is a bit odd for Eagle – the company filed a LOT of trademarks, so the absence of one . . . in this case, in these circumstances, with this theory tumbling about in my head, tells me something. I’ve got some new theories now:

1. Did Eagle make the Rite Away? I think that is a reasonable conclusion.

2. Did Eagle make the Rite Away for sale on its own account, for the General Manufacturing Company, or for someone else? I don’t have enough evidence to draw any conclusions on that point.

But here’s the big one:

3. Did Eagle manufacture the General Manufacturing Company’s Kaligraf pencils?

I think that is a distinct possibility.