This Would Have Been Nice to Show You

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.

One of the biggest messes I’ve written about here was spurred by my research into a pencil marked “Bonnwear,” which led me into a tangled web of connections between several manufacturers, including Eclipse, Diamond Point and Sheaffer (the following day’s installment dragged the enigmatic “Ever-Rite” into the mix, as well - the story started at 

http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2014/10/wear-it-well.html).

No, I haven’t sorted things out any more clearly than I did at the time.  But I did find something that would have made for a more convincing visual aid for part of that story.

I don’t think I left any question that pens and pencils marked “Safety” on the clip were made by Eclipse – not with the trademark registration and advertisements included in that prior article.  But what I lacked was an example, such as this one:

This one turned up at the Ohio Show:

And when it is poised alongside a Fin-Sharp (named by the clever founder of Eclipse, Marx Finstone) and an Eclipse, these pictures could have accomplished what quite a few more words did before:

I know.  I need a gold filled Eclipse.  Sheesh - call me OCD, will you?

Wear it Well

This is one that I’ve had for a while, and I’ve been waiting for the day that I could write about it and say something better than "I don’t know."

The day has come, and yet as I started writing this, I went right back to "I don’t know" – as in I didn’t know where I’d put the darn thing, leading Truman the Cat and I to spend half an hour scouring the museum for this one! Fortunately, my recollection of what it looked like and roughly (very roughly) were I had seen it last eventually turned it up in the stuff-not-yet-photographed zone:

This fairly typical metal pencil, apparently from the early 1920s, has "Bonnwear" imprinted on it. I hadn’t seen the name before, and after a bit of poking around with nothing to show for it, the pencil quietly slipped into my dead letter office years ago. Until the other day, about the closest thing I’d ever found to that name was the "Bon-Ton," but I knew that probably wasn’t right. And it wasn’t.

Then I stumbled across that 1922-early 1923 volume of issues from The Jewelers’ Circular, the same bunch that unraveled J.C. Wood & Sons for me recently. No focused search took me down this road, and I was just electronically thumbing through old issues when I ran across this advertisement in the November 22, 1922 issue . . .

To learn more, this full article is included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 3, 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.