The "Leadies"

When I started this blog, the day after the end of the Ohio Pen Show last year, I set out with the goal in mind to write an article daily for a year and see how things stood at the end of it. One well-wisher commented that he hoped I could find enough material to write about.

Obviously, finding stuff to write about hasn’t been a problem. In fact, every time I dip my toes into the infinite pool of pencil history I usually end up doing a cannonball. Here’s just part of the pencils I’ve got waiting to be photographed and given their due here . . .

NOTE:  This article is now included in the print version of The Leadhead's Pencil Blog, available anywhere you buy books, or also from The Legendary Lead Company.

To order, here's the link:  Volume 1 at Legendary Lead Company

Leadhead's Tread: The Ohio Pen Show

It feels good to be home.

As it is every year, I’ve been running around across pretty big chunks of the country all year long, meeting people, talking pencils and even buying one or two . . . give or take a few. Each November, when I walk in the door at the Crowne Plaza hotel in Dublin, Ohio, it feels like crossing a finish line after a long, long journey home.

There’s more to that statement than it might sound. Yes, I live a mere forty minutes or so from the hotel – close enough that I usually commute back and forth for a couple days – so of course I’m home. But the more people I talk to at this show, the luckier I feel that I live here, because I think most of us that come to this show agree that it wouldn’t matter in what city this show is held. No matter how far away you live, this show feels like home.

People usually start trickling into Columbus on Wednesday afternoon. I picked up Michael Little at the hotel on Wednesday. We said hello to a few people in the hotel bar, but since we didn’t see any trading going on in the trading room, we scooted on home to Newark where, as Janet described it, we looked like a couple kids playing with baseball cards. By the time it was over, in the wee hours of Thursday morning, Michael and I each had a big pile of things we’d pulled out of each other’s stuff. The next morning, we started trying to figure out who owed money to whom, but after we horsed around with the math for awhile we decided we both felt like we’d gotten a good deal so we called it even. . .

NOTE:  This article is now included in the print version of The Leadhead's Pencil Blog, available anywhere you buy books, or also from The Legendary Lead Company.

To order, here's the link:  Volume 1 at Legendary Lead Company

Gilliam's

In two separate online auctions, I found pencils marked "Gilliam’s".  The small ringtop is marked "Gilliam’s EZERITE 14k Gold Filled Pat," and the larger one is marked "Gilliam’s True-Point Sterling." . . .

NOTE:  This article is now included in the print version of The Leadhead's Pencil Blog, available anywhere you buy books, or also from The Legendary Lead Company.

To order, here's the link:  Volume 1 at Legendary Lead Company

Worth The Price Of Admission

For the bargain basement price of 99 cents, I won a small group of tired pencils in an online auction, including this one.

It’s a leadholder, and the barrel is so thin that someone actually cracked it in a couple places just by tightening the clutch around the lead. But it has a few interesting features. Around the top is a name I hadn’t heard of before:  "Beegee." It seems that the only reason I hadn’t heard of this one is that so few of them survived (did I mention how thin the barrel was?), not that there weren’t many made. The earliest advertisement I could find for the pencil was in the June, 1914 edition of The Magazine of Business . . .

NOTE:  This article is now included in the print version of The Leadhead's Pencil Blog, available anywhere you buy books, or also from The Legendary Lead Company.

To order, here's the link:  Volume 1 at Legendary Lead Company

The Pencil Formerly Known as Prince?

I’ve had a few of these over the years, and sadly I let them all go, because the pencil itself is pretty unremarkable.  And the only marking appears to be what looks like the letter W, or maybe an M.

NOTE:  This article is now included in the print version of The Leadhead's Pencil Blog, available anywhere you buy books, or also from The Legendary Lead Company.

To order, here's the link:  Volume 1 at Legendary Lead Company

EVRDA

Here’s another great one from the "why haven’t I ever heard of this one before" file. 

Around the top is imprinted "Nickel Silver Pat. Applied For EVRDA" . . .

NOTE:  This article is now included in the print version of The Leadhead's Pencil Blog, available anywhere you buy books, or also from The Legendary Lead Company.

To order, here's the link:  Volume 1 at Legendary Lead Company

The Second Carey

The Carey pencil I scrounged up at the DC show and blogged about here on August 22 ranks right up there as one of the most significant things I’ve found this year. So imagine my surprise when I received an email from Tom Heath shortly after the article ran: he had another one!

With a last name like Heath and my discussion of the Heath clip and the pencil’s manufacture by the George W. Heath Co., I took his email as adding additional information to my knowledge of the pencil. But still, I remembered one of the rules of life one of my friends used to live by: "It never hurts to ask." That rule served me well this time, and a second example of the Carey made its one-way trip to Ohio. Here they are shown together, the smaller example from DC and Tom Heath’s full sized one with floral engraving . . .

NOTE:  This article is now included in the print version of The Leadhead's Pencil Blog, available anywhere you buy books, or also from The Legendary Lead Company.

To order, here's the link:  Volume 1 at Legendary Lead Company