Dan Schenkein reached out to me in July after he stumbled across a little hoard of new old stock Biltwell pencils, most of which were still wrapped in tissue paper that was printed as instruction sheets.
He didn’t need all of them, he told me, and he wondered if I could use any of them. Sure, I said . . . one to keep preserved as it is, and a second one that I could unfurl the delicate paper to see if there was any information worth noting printed on them.
It was delicate work since the paper is in such poor condition. Eventually, I was able to get it flattened out enough to at least make out the words:
I was really hoping there would be a manufacturer’s name or address, but no such luck – in fact, I already knew more than this paper told me from when I stumbled across the Biltwell trademark registration in the course of writing American Writing Instrument Trademarks 1870-1953.
Edmund R. Rodriguez, a Mexican national doing business as the Biltwell Pencil Company in New York City, applied to register the Biltwell name on August 30, 1928 and he was granted registration number 260,408 on August 20, 1929. Rodriguez’s address was 1201 Broadway, New York, and he claimed that he first used the Biltwell name in May, 1928.
The Biltwell is enigmatic; so many have survived that you would expect to find a wealth of information concerning where and when they were sold, but I found only one solitary reference in newspapers, advertising “The 1931 Biltwell Pencil” in the Lincoln (Nebraska) Journal Star on August 31, 1931, without any helpful artwork or other information.
Other than a few directory listings between 1928 and 1933, I haven’t found out anything else about the company. Pencils were lower quality, with a “Welsh style” nose drive mechanism pushed into the open end of the barrel. Clips are ordinary z-clips, lead size is a normal 1.1mm-ish lead, and there’s enough slop in the mechanism that there’s always a bit of wobble.
Still, they occur in a wide variety of pretty colors and many of us had fun chasing them down when we were new to the hobby, myself included. I always keep the pencils I acquire for archival purposes, so I can show you a nice range of the Biltwell pencils that are out there.
The first image shows Biltwell pencils with the nose cone that slips over the stepped-down end of the barrel, while in the second image the nose is butted up against the end of the barrel. In my experience, the latter seems to be more common, but I don’t know which is earlier. The latter group also has the word Biltwell spelled out in the script matching the trademark registration.
This next group of Biltwell-marked pencils do not appear to beAmerican-made. The top three have a German look to them, and the example at bottom is made from a “howling souls” sort of plastic normally found on Japanese novelty pencils.
This next group is a little later. Rounded tops became fashionable after the popularity of the Sheaffer Balance took off in the late 1920s, so these might date to 1930 or a bit later.
Some of these are really nice, especially that burgundy and gold. At bottom, note the sample imprint for the Kemper Thomas Company of Cincinnati, Ohio. Kemper Thomas was primarily a calendar company that sourced rather than manufactured the pencils it offered - See “The Company I Misjudged” (November 29, 2014: Volume 3, page 120).
During the 1930s, the Biltwell evolved into something that strongly resembles a Parker Parkette or Parco.
Other than outward appearances, I don’t think there’s enough evidence that Parker was responsible for making these. Here is that bottom example of the Biltwell alongside a Parker Parkette and a Parco; the color is different, and note the absence of telltale Parker dimples around the nose cone. Also, what’s inside doesn’t match.
Who knows, though – maybe some evidence will surface later to implicate Parker in the manufacture of these later Biltwells. In the meantime, though, that green Biltwell provides a more solid lead: “Compliments of / Improved Pencil Co. / Providence, R.I.”
The Improved Pencil Company was an actual manufacturer, rather than a producer or reseller. In “”Two Puzzling Details” (October 20, 2018: Volume 5, page 279) I wrote about the Improved Pencil Company’s flagship production: the “Sta-Rite.” Earlier Sta-Rite pencils were metal crown-top affairs made to generally resemble an Eversharp, but in that earlier article I showed those as well as some slightly later plastic models – and those are so telling that I think they answer the question.
I think the Improved Pencil Company manufactured the Biltwell for the Biltwell Pencil Company. While the Improved Pencil Company is listed in a few manufacturer’s directories, the Biltwell Pencil Company is not. Improved clearly made the Sta-Rite, and those large, plastic Sta-Rite pencils are dead ringers for those earlier Biltwell pencils. I think that is enough evidence to reasonably draw this conclusion.
The Improved Pencil Company, as detailed in that previous article, was established in 1922. By 1926, the firm was located at 158 Pine Street in Providence, Rhode Island, and in 1933, the Improved Pencil Company moved into a factory at 581 Pawtucket in Pawtucket, Rhode Island – the former location of the Tri-Pen Manufacturing Company, makers of Triad pens and pencils.
In “Death and Transfiguration Part I: The Death of Triad” (February 28, 2013: Volume 2, page 70), I noted that when Improved moved in, Tri-Pen disappeared; the open question, however, was whether the Improved Pencil Company picked up the ball and made “lesser Triad” triangular pencils, like these:
Maybe . . . at some point between 1933 and 1940, when the “Triangle Pencil Company” was formed, announcements indicated that Triangle had been assigned all of the failed Tri-Pen Manufacturing Company’s patents, including Tri-Pen's design patent for its triangular pencils. That squares exactly with this patriotic World War II pencil in red, white, and blue marked with Triangle’s name – by then, both Tri-Pen and Improved were likely gone. See “Rekindled and Settled Once and For All” (October 15, 2018: Volume 5, page 269):
One last footnote in the Improved Pencil Company story: in 2018, I had to go through extensive gymnastics to piece together the information to be gleaned from snippet views of a 1926 advertisement for the Improved Pencil Company published in The Fourth Estate. That information is now in the public domain and I can share with you the full announcement:
What we had to deduce before, we can now see with our own eyes: the notice clearly identifies Improved as the manufacturer of the Sta-Rite. Although there wasn’t any other information about the Improved Pencil Company other than what I previously deduced, there was one curious other detail found on that same page in The Fourth Estate:
This is the only advertisement I have seen for the Rex Manufacturing Company – and it appears to advertise “four horsemen” Webster pencils for sale on its own account, before the Webster name was sold off to Sears, Roebuck & Co.
The only common denominator between this Rex advertisement and the Improved Pencil Company is the author’s freakish obsession with researching both of them. At least, that’s the only common denominator as of right now.
It is worth dropping here, not just because I’m a “Rexist.” It is a tremendous coincidence that two Providence manufacturers of writing instruments happened to advertise on the same page in a national magazine, and I don’t generally believe in such coincidences. This might lead to further evidence of connections between the Rex Manufacturing Company and the Improved Pencil Company that I’m not yet prepared to suggest.
