Dress Togs

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.

I don’t remember where I found this one, only that once I saw the box, I had to see what was inside:

Such cool styling proved to be the setting for a lowly Sheaffer pencil in “working togs”:

The clip is the earlier flat ball clip, the sort used on the series in 1940 or so:

Complete with sticker, referring me to some pretty serious technical instruction before I “attempt to operate” it:

. . . and, of course, no instructions . . . since I couldn’t pull up the floor of the box to see what was under it, I started looking around to see what I could see.  There was a clue on the bottom . . .

Patent number 1,838,102 is only for a means of attaching the padding material to the box, though, so that one was a dead end.

So I’ve got a lowly pencil in a pretty fancy box.  Sure, someone might have put an unrelated NOS pencil in a pretty nice box, but heck, I like to think someone decided to dress up a Sheaffer working togs pencil for a special occasion.

And speaking of Sheaffer pencils dressed up for special occasions . ..

This one is a later example, marked “Fineline” on the clip.  In fact, I can precisely date this one to 1952, based on what’s printed on the white portion of the barrel:

The Sheaffer Snorkel fountain pen was introduced in 1952, with what is widely considered today to have been the most complicated filling system ever devised for a fountain pen.  So excited was Sheaffer that it even pressed the Fineline pencils – known mostly as advertising pieces – into service promoting the company’s exciting new product.

Over the Top

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.

You don’t see these very often:

Sheaffer’s lowly “Working Togs” utility pencil line was sometimes dressed up a bit with a gold filled domed cap to cover the eraser, rather than the built-in exposed sort.  It’s taken me some time to find examples in good condition, since these caps are usually found dented:

Note that the chasing is different, with breaks between the lines on the version with the all-black barrel.  These were listed in Sheaffer’s 1940 catalog, found in the Pen Collectors of America’s website (what?  You haven’t joined yet?), as modlels JLE (with the gold center barrel) for $2.50 and KLE (with an all-black barrel) for $1.85:

But the catalog doesn’t show this one:

Dan Reppert has had this one, and I’ve admired it for years – I finally had to bite at the Michigan Show.  This pencil combines the deluxe cap treatment of the model KLE with an ordinary brown pearl-center pencil, an uncatalogued variant made specially for one significant cutomer:

W.E. Buhler, “That Sheaffer Salesman,” ordered a run of these, with his name and a picture of Sheaffer’s Fort Madison facility.

Joe Nemecek shared another uncataloged variant on the JLE at the DC Show:

In a demi size.  Maybe a JLEv?

And Then There Were . . . 7 1/2?

Categorizing Sheaffer Pearl Center Pencils (Pearlies) is the kind of thing that can drive you a little bit batty. I devoted pages 144 to 146 in The Catalogue – probably more than anybody cared to know – and in the year or so since the book came out, I’ve done a couple articles here showing off other variations that have come to light since. As it stands, there are seven distinct variations on the Pearlie theme:

From left, these are the flat ball clip, the flat broad Sheaffer clip, the flat broad Fineline clip, the humped Sheaffer clip, the ribbed horizontal Sheaffer clip, the ribbed vertical Sheaffer clip, and . . . whatever that last thing is.

At around the time I was picking up all these Canadian Sheaffers, I saw this one in an online auction:

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.