"Only The Rich Can Afford Poor Writing"

Here’s a group of some more recent Redipoint pencils, made by Brown & Bigelow of St. Paul, Minnesota:

To learn more, this full article is included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 3, 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.

Gerlach-Barklow

Like a lot of these advertising pencil companies, Gerlach-Barklow specialized in making calendars. According to Joliet’s Gerlach-Barklow Calendar Company by Tim and Michelle Smith, the company was founded in 1907 in Joliet, Illinois by Theodore R. Gerlach, Edward J. Barklow and K.H. Gerlach.

By July, 1919, the Gerlach-Barklow plant was "the largest in the world devoted exclusively to the making of art calendars and direct-by-mail advertising media," as reported in Monotype: A Journal of Composing Room Efficiency Published by the Langston Monotype Machine Company:

To learn more, this full article is included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 3, 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 Tops Both of Them

Back at the Chicago Show a couple years ago, one of the other dealers was offering this boxed Moore pencil set, complete with lead and erasers:

To learn more, this full article is included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 3, 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.

Oh Crap

That’s exactly what I said when I opened up the package containing this one:

"Vacumatic Desk Pencil" was the title of the online auction – words that are like ringing a dinner bell to me.

To learn more, this full article is included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 3, 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.

One Less Envelope in the Dead Letter Office

I first posted about this one back in February, 2012 (http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2012/02/have-you-seen-me.html), and it’s one of only three articles captioned in the "unidentified" category:

The pencil itself isn’t all that remarkable, but that logo on the clip has been screaming "find me" ever since I found that pencil.

Nearly three years later, I was following up on a lead that the "Sin Pencils" might have been imported from Japan . . .

To learn more, this full article is included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 3, 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 Jaw Wasn't The Only Thing That Dropped

I had to bite on this one, for a couple of reasons:

First . . . ok, it’s drop dead gorgeous. Good looks aside, I wanted to do an article about what’s imprinted on the top . . .

To learn more, this full article is included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 3, 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 Quandry Is Resolved

I wish I could say things at the museum are as organized as they look in the pictures I share here. Sure, most of what’s there is in drawers or on shelves, and I can generally find everything when I try. But there are also little piles of stuff laying about – pencils in the queue to be photographed, pencils pulled from the shelves and grouped together for comparison, and sometimes just groups of pencils I pulled from different places because I thought they would look cool together.

Here’s one of those little piles:

These are all Sheaffers in "ebonized pearl" – in my opinion, one of the most distinctive and beautiful plastics produced by any company during the golden age. Most of the pencils shown in this picture are too special to just be laying around like this, with double band, jewelers’ bands and "fishscale" bands in the mix. Yet they’ve been sitting there for several months: I pulled them out of several different drawers of Sheaffers (I group my Sheaffer’s by year and trim configuration, not by color) because I wanted to see them all alongside two very special additions I’ve been meaning to write about . . .

To learn more, this full article is included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 3, 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.