A Specific Interest in a General Pencil

When this bland little pencil turned up in a lot of random items online, I had to bite:

This plain-looking pencil even has a generic name on it – "General":

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.

This One Doesn't Bug Me So Much

Maybe Joe’s right. Maybe I am a little bit Patrician crazy.

I mentioned awhile ago, while discussing the Sheaffer desk pencil, how desk pencils generally bug me. Heck, they don’t even fit on the same shelves or the same drawers as all my other pencils! But when this one popped up in an online auction, I just couldn’t resist:

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.

And Real Colorful, Too

Realite was a Chicago company established as a separate concern in late 1921. Here’s an Realite advertisement from the November, 1922 edition of Office Appliances:

As Autopoint fanatic Jim Stauffer recently documented, Realite purchased the Autopoint Company in 1923 and the combined company was renamed Autopoint Products Co. and later simply Autopoint Company. But that doesn’t mean the new Autopoint Company abandoned the Realite name entirely – in fact, it maintained the brand for decades after the merger and made some really interesting pencils in spectacular colors I’ve not seen elsewhere.

Take this one, for example – it was the last purchase I made at the Baltimore Show this year, and it was cheap since it was missing the cap (fortunately, I keep a few duplicates of these on hand just for such an emergency):

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.

At Least It's Where The Sun Don't Shine

Last August at the DC Show, Joe Nemecek sold me a Parker Bridge set, which included the bases for all four suits, one of which was boxed and included the correct pencil:

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.

Re-memo These?

Back in January, I wrote about a Ross-Memo pencil I’d picked up when I went to a boat and RV show ("Take a Memo – Pencils Are Everywhere," January 23, 2012):

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.

They Get Ugly

A while back, Matt McColm asked me if I wanted a couple more All-Rite pencils, one black and the other blue. I do get a kick out of the All-Rites, which were made in Hackensack, New Jersey and put out quite a few campy magazine ads in the middle 1950s (see "They Really Were . . . All Right, That Is" on May 13, 2012). The company was purchased by the Eagle Pencil Company around 1964 or 1965.

At first, I declined, because I have a black and a blue one:

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.

The Long-Awaited Laughlin Article

I’ll admit I’ve been dreading writing this article.

Back when I posted my report on the Michigan Pen Show last summer, I posted a picture of this Laughlin set I picked up as a teaser, promising to write more about it later:

I knew that Laughlin is a "cult" brand – a relatively obscure manufacturer whose devotees are really, really, REALLY fanatical. And what have I learned?:

Never tease a cult.

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.