Expensive Tuition: Part One

This article is really going to upset some people, so for now, I’m going to call this “part one” on the subject of Parker Imperial Vacumatic pencils.    When someone comes forward and explains to me why you can’t build a Parker Imperial Vacumatic pencil out of about $20 worth of spare parts, I’ll clarify that in part two.

But I wouldn’t be writing this article if I wasn’t pretty sure there wouldn’t be a part two.

The Imperial Vacumatic is pretty rare, and the pens cost hundreds of dollars.  I caught up with one of the pencils at the 2012 Ohio Show, but I don’t remember who had this one.  Forgive the quality of the pictures – these were shot in the dark, dark hallway outside the ballroom:

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.

Yammerworthy

I can’t remember which of my collecting friends once asked me why I’m always yammering on about Slencils.  I didn’t think too hard about the question – after all, I don’t want to risk having an existential moment during which I wonder why I yammer on about any of the things I write about here – but I think the answer is easy.  When it comes to the Slencil, there’s a lot to yammer on about, and no one’s really yammered about it before.

Carl Harris, inventor of the Slencil, supposedly came upon the idea when he was riding on a train, and his pencil kept rolling off the table.  What may seem today as a single idea – a flat pencil that won’t roll – proved to be fodder for Harris to invent and patent dozens of improvements, attachments and accessories over a period of decades.

In the Slencil’s last incarnation, Harris’ interesting mid-barrel knurled mechanism was abandoned in favor of a conventional nose drive, inserted into a plastic rectangular barrel which was intially marketed as the “Stag Slencil.”    The design patent, number 119,263, was issued on March 5, 1940:

A few months ago, this turned up in an online auction, and since I’m a sucker for pencils with a card-playing theme, and I was hunkerin’ to do some yammerin’, I 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.

Other People's Fair Children

A few years ago I read a book titled “I Hate Other People’s Kids” by Adrienne Frost, which was an amusing hundred-page or so rant about the things other people’s children (and the parents who fail to control them) do to annoy the author.   This book is a must read for parents who think it’s cute to let their kids run around a restaurant – or a bar – while they meet up with friends.

But that’s the people sort of kids.  Yesterday I wrote about my “Fairchildren,” four examples of pencils made by Leroy W. Fairchild that I’ve picked up recently.  At the DC show, I saw quite a few examples of other people’s Fairchildren, and they don’t annoy me at all (I even secretly wished they were mine).

Here’s one that Dave Glass had on his table at the DC show:

On the one side, “L.W.F. & Co.”:

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.

My Fair Children

Lately I’ve been getting more into Victorian pencils.  Here’s a few I’ve found recently:

All of these were made by Leroy W. Fairchild, the New York manufacturer who supplied nibs to the L.E. Waterman Co. early in Waterman’s history.  With the mechanisms advanced, they look like this:

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.

Joe Couldn't Lose On This One

Joe Nemecek called dibs on something in an online auction awhile back.  He was excited to acquire it – so much so that he wanted to personally write a guest blog article to introduce it.  So I snapped the pictures for Joe, and he went to work.  Without further ado, here’s Joe --

Several months ago I was doing my usual weekly search at an online auction site for mechanical pencils. Up popped a  beater Ingersoll with an accessory shirt clip imprinted Kant-Luz-It.

My jaw almost hit the floor.  I sent Jon a very polite 'dibs'. The clip looked eerily similar to the one found on my chased black hard rubber Crocker pencil.

I always assumed Crocker made this clip for its pens and pencils. This article will attempt to establish that the Kant-Luz-It Klip Company made this particular clip for Crocker.

The research started.  The patent date imprinted on the clip is April 12, 1921:

The date refers to patent number 1,374,515.  Sylvester M. Nathan of Fitchburg, Massachusetts applied for it on November 9, 1920:

The text of the patent describes a short shirt pencil clip, with hidden spring attached to a trigger bar. When a pencil with this clip is placed in a shirt pocket, the tension of the spring holds the trigger to the pocket. Pressing down on the trigger releases the clip and allows the pencil to be removed from the pocket. Hence the name 'can’t lose it'

This clipping from The American Stationer dated July 15, 1922 establishes the link between Sylvester M. Nathan and Kant-Luz-It Klip Company of Fitchburg, Massachusetts.  Sylvester M. Nathan was an incorporator of Kant-Luz-It Klip Company, along with Ubert C. Russell and Blanche R. Nathan. This clipping also establishes that the company at least initially produced paper clips.
 

So what happened to the pencil clip side of the company? This article from Typewriter Topics dated November 1922 establishes beginning production of the shirt clips.

Below is an advertisement from the November, 1933 issue of Popular Mechanics that provides some interesting tidbits about the sale of the clip.

So the Kant-Luz-It clip began production in 1922 and was still being produced in 1933.  By 1933, according to this, the company had moved to Pittsburgh.

You are wondering what happened to Crocker in this blog article? I've saved the high temperature best stuff almost for the last. The following excerpt from the article in the Fitchburg Sentinel dated January 9, 1926 is significant. There was a fire and ...

“The fire proved especially disastrous to the Kant Luz It Clip Co. as the Crocker Pen Co. of Boston had practically completed arrangements to move to this city and were expected to locate here next Friday. The local company had just shipped most of its finished product, thus reducing the actual loss at this time. Valuable plans were destroyed and much property so S. M. Nathan places the loss between $2500 and $3000.

“The Crocker Pen Co. had notified its employees that it was to move to Fitchburg and made arrangements to transfer its entire manufacturing plant to the Kant Luz It Clip quarters. Whether the fire will delay the move or not is unknown today. If the fire keeps the industry away from Fitchburg the loss will be hard to estimate as the Crocker company is a rapid growing concern which would give employment to a large force.”

Did Crocker ever move to Fitchburg? I do not yet know. Anybody?

The Crocker company started using this clip from 1923 onward, per Rob Astyk's article in the January/February 1991 issue of Pen World.  Crocker folded in the early 30s. The company was a smaller producer of quality pens and pencils that are highly prized by collectors today.  My Crocker is about one of my all-time favorite pencils.

For the Crocker crazy, here is a picture of the full company imprint:

“Crocker Ink-Tite / Boston / Pat. Jan. 30 ‘17 / Made in USA” (editor’s note: give me a break – Joe didn’t want the lettering highlighted on this one!).

(Editor’s note: the only patent with a Crocker connection issued on January 30, 1917 was number 1,214,310.  Stormont Josslyn applied for a patent for a fountain pen on September 18, 1916, and he assigned a one-half interest in the patent to Seth Chilton Crocker:

Huh.  No clip, and the patent has absolutely nothing to do with pencils.)

That's what I got.  No big period to my beginning proposition, but almost a complete sentence.

-Joe Nemecek

It Would Have Been So Much Easier Had I Known This!

Sometimes you just know the answer is out there somewhere.  It has to be.  People didn’t just turn out these pencils by the hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands, work as hard as they could to sell them, and then vanish without a trace.

One of the shadowy figures I’ve been researching for years is Samuel Kanner, the assignee of the original patent (and inventor of the improved patent) for the “Presto” repeater pencils.  I even have his personal demonstrator Presto in my collection:

Doubtless it was Kanner behind the wheel, guiding his repeating pencils into the slimmer “Everfeeds” made by the Gilfred Corporation, eventually squaring off against Eversharp in the patent infringement case in which Gilfred claimed Eversharp stole his design for Eversharp’s repeating pencils (see “My Find of the Year” on December 31, 2011 at http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2011/12/my-find-of-year.html):

From the top, that’s a later Presto, a Gilfred, an Everfeed, and an Eversharp Doric repeater.  Unfortunately for Kanner, Eversharp won the infringement case in 1942, convincing the judge that since the Kanner mechanism wasn’t significantly different from a repeating mechanism patented in the nineteenth century, Kanner’s patent was therefore invalid.

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.

Two's a Coincidence . . . Or Is It?

Frank Hoban had two of these at the DC show a few weeks ago, and I bought both of them:

What a great imprint these have: “Belmont Handy-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.