The Proud Rexist

These days it is fashionable to put labels on people ending with the suffix “ist,” and most of the time it’s not a positive thing. However, sometimes labels ending in “ist” are merely descriptive: in my early years I was a cellist, which wasn’t a bad thing. These days I suppose you might call me a “writist” should you be so inclined. Or a “historyist.”

One “ist” that I own unapologetically is that of being a “Rexist.” I am a huge fan of the Rex Manufacturing Company, and if I had to choose whether to spend my last hard earned dollar on a Rex pencil or something else, that something else wouldn’t stand a chance.

Rex has come up twice here in the last couple weeks, but I didn’t want to open the floodgates all the way at the moment – I have a boatload of updates to report to you. We’ll start with the oldest of my new finds:

It was very satisfying to find this one, since I already had the ringtop:

Both of these are marked “Compliments of the Season / Rex Mfg. Co. Prov. R.I.” That season was likely around 1922 or 1923, before McNary’s 1924 patent was a twinkle in the inventor’s eye.

This next one also sits on the early end of the Rex spectrum:

If you compare this to the 1924 McNary patent Franklin pencils from yesterday’s article, this one shares the same basic lines, except of course for that exquisite engraving on the nose and top piece:

The stamp near the top reads “Victor”:

This Victor is unusual, but I have seen this sort of nice metal work before; normally, though, it appears on pencils marked for the Artcraft Pen Company. Here’s my Rex-made Victor and Artcraft pencils together:

And, speaking of Artcraft . . . 

I shot these two together in preparation for a “Rexes Gone Wild” sort of piece, but the Corona at bottom was later included in the series of articles posted here recently concerning the history of the Corona Pen Company (see “As the Primordial Ooze Turns” on August 18, 2025). 

Today’s focus is that top pencil, which turned up in a junk box at the Chicago Show a few years ago. While it is unmarked as to the manufacturer, there’s no doubt in my mind that the Artcraft Pen Company was behind it. I’ve just shown you the proof that Artcraft sourced those black hard rubber pencils from Rex, and Artcraft used this same blue and bronze celluloid on some of its fountain pens – in fact, Artcraft is I believe the only company that did.

This Rex-made ringtop is from the “four horsemen” era, but the two patents relating to the clip have been omitted from the stamp:

This next pair came in one lot in an online auction, and they are both the earlier 1924 McNary patent Rex pencils:

The cap on the red one is marked “Supremacy,” a brand name used by the Supremacy Ink Company - for the background on the Supremacy name, see “We’ve Had It All Wrong” (April 13, 2018: Volume 5, page 230). 

I love these older, paneled Rex barrels. I’ve found the orange (or red) paneled ringtops made for others as well: here are the Supremacy at top, followed by a Webster and one marked “Y & H”:

That woodgrain paneled one, missing its cap, is later. The 1924 patent pencils had a single piece cap, but “four horsemen” era pencils had a two-part cap. Finding one to replace what is missing will be a tall order indeed; here it is shown with that great teal Supremacy from “Widest Range in the Narrowest Market” (May 22, 2020: Volume 6, page 124). 

Those slim, paneled barrels are also found in full-length Rex pencils, although they are much more rare. This next one added to the Rex patent family, marked “Whitney” on the clip:

This one has all four of the Rex patents on the clip, which I find unusual: by the time Rex really hit its stride and was marking pencils with all four patents, I thought that the slim paneled barrels had been discontinued.

I’ve only found one other pencil of any sort marked Whitney. It is shown at top in this next image, with a typical John Holland Rex-made pencil at bottom.

I also found a second “four horsemen” Rex pencil with a slim, paneled barrel. I clearly remember this one coming from an online auction, since for weeks I sat on pins and needles waiting for it to arrive while the post office repeatedly returned it from Columbus to whatever zip code they mistook the sender’s handwriting to read.

This one is marked for the Edison Pen Company, and it now sits proudly alongside the other examples in my Edison collection (see “A Pesky Brand” - June 7, 2021: Volume 7, page 174).

The other two in that earlier image just happened to be laying about when the Edison arrived, and they add a couple footnotes to the Rex story. The jade example is a Webster, and it is very unusual to find one with a price band.

As for the other, it is unmarked . . . but I’ve never seen that barrel color on a Rex before.

Speaking of the worthy and unmarked, here’s another great unmarked Rex pencil, shown here next to one marked “Ye Wm. Penn”:

In addition to that great woodgrain and paneled hard rubber, this one is like those earlier ringtops, marked only with McNary’s 1924 patent date, a feature shared with the Ye Wm. Penn:

I’ll circle back to Ye Wm. Penn in a second, after I show you another 1924 McNary patent pencil that answered a question I raised more than ten years ago. This one has a round barrel and is marked “Krest” on the clip.

The Krest made its one and only previous appearance here in “Another No-Name Heard From” (October 5, 2014: Volume 3, page 32), one of those articles that was destroyed by a Google mega-oopsie. The article introduced and discussed this nondescript pencil, interesting only for the Krest name on it:

In that earlier article, I was unable to pinpoint what retailer offered writing instruments under the “Krest” name, but the print version of the article contains a prophetic note at the end. “Note: since this article was written, I’ve also noticed that the diamond pattern on the crown appears frequently on Rex-made metal pencils.” 

So there. Move the Krest over from a suspected Rex production to the confirmed pile.

Now to return to “Ye Wm. Penn,” which you might recall from my earlier articles is the only brand name conclusively attributed to the Rex Manufacturing Company in connection with writing instruments Rex made on its own account (that is, made for Rex to sell for itself, rather than marked for and supplied to a third party). See “Ye Wm Penn” (May 19, 2020: Volume 6, page 118).

I have a footnote to add in that regard. This one showed up in another online auction:

It is another 1924 McNary patent ringtop, but in a fantastic paneled, robin’s egg blue barrel . . . and it includes a twist:

What else might one call the ladies’ version of a Ye Wm. Penn? Why, “Ye Ladye Penn,” of course! That find really made my day, giving me this nice shot of Ye Ladye amongst her brothers in the Penn clan:

I was well satisfied with what I found, until David Nishimura dropped this on me at the following Ohio Show in 2023:

Oh, my aching wallet . . . David knows I love these Rex pens and pencils, and he also knows that we are but two members in that exclusive club who appreciate how hard something like this is to find.

Nishimura got me again the following August in DC with this. I thought about including it in yesterday’s article, but I thought it made more sense to include it here:

There’s a lot more paneled, striated goodness with this earlier Rex set:

The lever on the fountain pen is marked “REX”:

The pencil, however, is marked with “Franklin,” further substantiating my theory yesterday that Franklin was an early brand name under which Rex offered pens and pencils for sale on its own account.

Last up for today is something that didn’t cost much because, after all, it is something only a true Rexist would appreciate:

A wood tube of pencil leads with a paper label for the Rex Manufacturing Company is icing on the cake in my collection. In my early articles here at the blog, I spent a lot of time and energy trying to conclusively establish that “Rexhold” was a trade name used by the Rex Manufacturing Company, and the final nail in the coffin did not arrive until 2021, and in a very circuitous manner - see “On Rex’s Own Account” (May 1, 2021: Volume 7, page 75). If only I had access to something like this when all that research started . . . 

Oh well. I went the long way around the barn to find the answer, but at least I wasn’t wrong.

The Widest Range in the Narrowest Market

This article has been edited and included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 6, now on sale at The Legendary Lead Company.  I have just a few hard copies left of the first printing, available here, and an ebook version in pdf format is available for download here.

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In April, 2018, I identified the producer of  “Supremacy” pens and pencils along these lines:

The article is still live and identifies the Supremacy Ink Company, successor to the W.L. Henderson Ink Company of Medford, Massachusetts as the company which used that very same Supremacy logo in old English-Robin Hood looking script (see https://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2018/04/weve-all-had-it-wrong.html).

And the Henderson Ink Company had pens and pencils made for and supplied to it by . . . drum roll . . . The Rex Manufacturing Company of Providence, Rhode Island.

Most Supremacy pencils are like those in that first picture; oversized, often bearing the “four horsemen” patents I’ve discussed here quite a bit (check out The Leadhead’s Pencil Blog Volume 1, at page 103 . . . and the sad part is I knew the volume and page without looking it up at this point!).  However, Supremacy was one of Rex’s earliest and best customers:

The lower pencil, a ringtop, has McNary’s early patent of February 19, 1924, which ranks Supremacy among the earliest Rex customers . . . I’m sure there’s an even earlier metal pencil out there somewhere, but I just haven’t turned one up yet.  The top example is what’s really interesting: it’s a thin model, but in the later incarnation using the “four horsemen” patented innovations.

After that last picture was taken, I managed to score a full length Supremacy in 1924 patent configuration - here it is, alongside that ringtop and the red full-sized slim model from above:

Note that the distinctive rib on the nose present on the black pencils, with the earlier 1924 date on them, is missing on the later red one. Note also that the red thin-model Supremacy sports that clip and cap that eventually got Rex sued by Parker in 1929, since there’s a washer clip hidden in that bulky mounting.

We’ll get back to that in a minute, but the other thing I want you to pay attention to is the caps – the 1924 patent pencils have short caps, while the later ones had more substantial top sections.  In fact, the Supremacy models appear to have been made before the 1924 patent was issued, since neither has that date stamped at the top:

Keep that checklist of characteristics in your head while I show you what I found at the Springfield Extravaganza last fall:

The dealer who had this set keeps a scale at his table on which he measures every bit of gold-plated junk he has and quotes you a generous fraction of his version of  “gold value,” so when he told me 25 dollars for the set I couldn’t pull the money out fast enough before he changed his mind.   This set is something special – I’ve never seen that color on ANY Rex product, ranking Supremacy right up there with John Holland as the only two companies who have merited special colors.

The pen, were it not be accompanied by the pencil, might be hard to peg.  The nib is nondescript:

But the lever does have that distinctive old English S:

There’s also some nice detail on the bands on the cap, and the faceting on the barrel and cap end with some really nice patterns, too:

Most of the time, it’s the pen that has the more detailed imprints, but in this case, it’s the pencil that clinches this one:

And it’s a McNary patent, but notice that it has the later, more substantial top and while the rib on the nose has been eliminated, there’s a ring of dimples.  Looks like this is a transitional set, somewhere between 1924 and 1925, exhibiting evolutionary steps in between the earlier models and the “four horsemen” era – and in a color I haven’t seen anywhere else.

And speaking of things I haven’t seen anywhere else, check this one out:

Without an imprint, it took a minute for this one to register with me what it was.  Until it came along, I was only aware of one other example like it:

It’s another slim model, “four horseman”-era Rex pencil.  Since the only other one I’ve found was marked Supremacy, that would be my first guess . . . except this one isn’t marked on the clip, as all other clip-model Supremacy pencils I have are.  As shown, the Supremacy cap is a perfect fit, in case you harbored doubts whether this was the same pencil.  Note also that the mystery pencil has the two-stage tip.

Many Rex models were marked on the cap only, including John Holland and Pick.  Finding another slim model cap will be a challenge, and if I do it will likely be attached to something I wouldn’t want to part out.