The Question I Hate to Answer the Most

This article has been edited and included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 5; copies are available print on demand through Amazon here, and I offer an ebook version in pdf format at the Legendary Lead Company here.

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I was determined to clear out my backlog of recent photographs before taking more pictures of things to write about, so I’ve been holding off on shooting the items I acquired at the DC Supershow last month - some 75 pieces added to the collection that I’ve been eager to tell you about.  With the last of those older pictures running in yesterday’s article, I let the blog tick along on autopilot for a few days while I finally got to spend some time behind the camera.  All the DC stuff has been shot, along with a few other things I thought were interesting, and the images are now sitting in the hopper just waiting for me to say something meaningful about them.

There are three questions people frequently ask me - one fairly simple, and two I hate.  The simple one: “What’s the oldest pencil you have?”  That’s easy.  My oldest American pencil is probably that Woodwards & Hale I wrote about recently (http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2017/05/an-unbelievable-stroke-of-luck.html), but I’ve got a couple English pieces that are a few years older still.

The first question I hate is, “What’s the most valuable thing you have?”  That’s a double hate there . . . I don’t really understand the question for starters, whether the person asking means monetary value or historical value.  I’ve got bits of junk laying around which I”d pay more for than a solid gold piece – but fortunately I haven’t had to do so.  Besides, asking what’s the most valuable thing in my collection is like asking me to show you my checkbook or my stock portfolio . . . it’s kind of rude and intrusive.

However, it’s that third question that really gets under my skin: “Which is your favorite?”  Even though on its face the question isn’t nearly as boorish as asking for a peek into my wallet, that’s the question that really, really, REALLY bugs me.

Because it makes me ask myself questions that I really don’t want to answer.

It’s not as though these inanimate objects are children I’m afraid to offend, so that I feel obligated to tell them I love them all equally.  The problem is that it forces me into this existential exercise of questioning why I like something and how much.  It makes me wonder whether I like the historical tidbit I found more or less than admiring a tiny work of art I found.

It also makes me stare into the face of my own greed.  I like to believe I can be equally happy taking a picture of something as I would be owning it, and I hope that’s true . . . there’s been plenty of times when I’ve had the opportunity to photograph things that weren’t for sale, or when the price tag is more than I can swallow, and I’ve satisfied myself (some would say “settled”) for that.  But the question isn’t what I have enjoyed seeing the most, it’s what I enjoy owning the most.

Besides, if there’s that one thing I enjoy owning the most, that means there’s something out there that I enjoy owning the least, which gives me a second crisis to deal with: if it's the thing I least enjoy owning, then why on earth did I buy it?

So far, I’ve only posted one article concerning something I acquired at DC – it was that sold gold Sheaffer with Craig Sheaffer’s name engraved on it, mounted on a card signed by Sheaffer and addressed to Edd Dawson, a pencil collector (see http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2017/08/craig-sheaffers-gift-to-edd-dawson.html).  Gritting my teeth, I’ve got to admit that is my favorite find from the show this year, and it’s probably in my top five finds of all time.

But as I sit here with a big pile o’ pictures of everything else I found at that show, I’m asking myself where I should start and the logical choice is which one out of all these is my favorite.  After much weeping and gnashing of teeth, I keep coming back to the one I picked up from Pearce Jarvis:

It’s not quite the Parker snake magic pencil I have only been able to admire from afar, but it’s darned close:

I could stare at that fantastic relief of a snake winding its way through the cattails all day long:

The artistry even extends to the top piece

and in the lower corner of that last shot, you can see who was responsible for this fine piece of art: Fairchild Johnson, represented by a shield with an F and a J inside it:

Fairchild Johnson was a partnership between one of Leroy W. Fairchild’s sons and Ephraim Johnson, Jr., sone of E.S. Johnson, which operated between 1898 and 1905.  The complete(ish) story, with thanks to David Nishimura and his excellent article in The Pennant, was posted here at http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2016/10/somebody-elses-news.html.

Whew.  The uncomfortable question has been asked and answered, and the ice is now officially broken.  Now I won’t have as much trouble figuring out what to write about tomorrow, and I’ll be showing off all the other great things which came home from DC with me . . .

in no particular order, of course . . .

I Get a Pixie Stick

This article has been edited and included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 5; copies are available print on demand through Amazon here, and I offer an ebook version in pdf format at the Legendary Lead Company here.

If you don't want the book but you enjoy this article, please consider supporting the Blog project here.

It’s a saying around our house . . . when you finish the job, you get a pixie stick.  The turn of phrase comes from my wife, who remembers from her days in elementary school if you finished all the food on your plate at lunch, they would give you a pixie stick (those cardboard straws full of flavored sugar). 

I’ve been trying not to add to my enormous file folder called “pencil pictures,” in which are housed all of the images I haven’t gotten around to posting here.  Instead, when I started things back up at the blog this time, I resolved to take a large batch of pictures and then not take any more until I had posted all of them.  In theory, that would keep me from taking pictures I’d probably never post.

These are the last two shots standing between me and sugary goodness:

This tin of leads showed up in an online auction, and I was doubly impressed.  First, I hadn’t seen a tin of Conklin leads like this one before.  Second, I thought there was a very practical reason for that:

I thought maybe John Wahl and the Wahl Company had a lock on making metal tins for pencil leads, by virtue of patent number 1,428,195 awarded to John C. Wahl and Peter G. Jacobson on September 5, 1922.   However, note that dovetailed system which is present on Wahl containers – that is the special feature which was patented, not the idea of a metal box itself.  Still, it must have been a sufficient deterrent to most, since square boxes like this are not usually seen.

And in fact, I ended up seeing more than just one.  After I paid handsomely for this one tin, the seller contacted me to let me know he had the rest of the box, and he asked if I wanted to make an offer on the whole bunch:

Why yes . . . yes I did, thank you very much.

For What It's . . . Worth

This article has been edited and included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 5; copies are available print on demand through Amazon here, and I offer an ebook version in pdf format at the Legendary Lead Company here.

If you don't want the book but you enjoy this article, please consider supporting the Blog project here.

A few months ago, I posted an article concerning a large flattop pencil marked with a W in a square superimposed over a feather, the hallmark for the Worth Featherweight Pen Company (

http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-one-pennant-rejected.html).  It was only because I had just written that article that this one grabbed my attention online:

The clip is marked “Worth,” with a W circled by a wreath above the name:

I’m not prepared to say that this is the same Worth, but I do think this one also has it’s origins in New York.  Unlike the one shown in my earlier Worth article, I don’t believe Conklin had anything at all to do with this one.  If this one bears similarity to anything, it’s to some pencils marked Morrison and Eclipse.

And also to these

These two, marked “Premo” and “Deluxe,” were introduced here five years ago (see http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2012/08/keeping-it-light.html) and, with the exception of a slightly different clip, they are the same as this “Worth,” pattern and all.

I’m noticing a pattern of names associated with value here . . . worth, premo, deluxe.  

Don't Be Too Quick to Assume

This article has been edited and included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 5; copies are available print on demand through Amazon here, and I offer an ebook version in pdf format at the Legendary Lead Company here.

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A glance at thisone in a junk box might cause you to dismiss it as just another Quickpoint:

It’s a habit of mine to read the clips, even when I assume I know what’s there, or should be there.  If I had a penny for every Quickpoint clip I’ve read . . . well, let’s just say reading this one is what keeps me in the habit of reading:

“Newton Mfg. Co. Newton, Iowa.”   A search of newspapers reveals that the company was founded around 1908; the earliest references I could find to the firm were in a burst of advertisements for salesmen which appeared in papers across the midwest in mid-August of that year.  The Company remained in business until 2015, when it filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy and was acquired in bankruptcy by HALO Branded Solutions.

This Newton dates to the late 1930s or rerly 1940s The Newton pencil raises a question which has led some in the advertising pencil collector’s circle to accuse me of heresy: I’ve never been fully confident that Quickpoint pencils were made by Quickpoint, and a pencil identical to a Quickpoint but bearing the name of another midwestern advertising specialty company indicates that either one was made by the other, or a third party made pencils for both.

Quickpoint is twenty years younger, founded in 1928 according to the company’s website.  Occam’s razor suggests that since Quickpoints are so common and distinctive, and this is the first Newton I’ve seen, that Quickpoint made its own stuff and for a time made a few pencils branded for Newton.  Yet Newton has “manufacturing” in its name, while Quickpoint does not, and Lipic and Ritepoint were in Quickpoint’s backyard . . .

In All Fairness

This article has been edited and included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 5; copies are available print on demand through Amazon here, and I offer an ebook version in pdf format at the Legendary Lead Company here.

If you don't want the book but you enjoy this article, please consider supporting the Blog project here.

I haven’t been terribly kind to the Camel brand historically.  Although collectors best remember the pens as high-quality pieces that “made their own ink,” when I wrote The Catalogue the only example I had was a Camel “Spaulding,” which appeared to be made by Eagle and wasn’t nearly as good.  Articles I’ve featured here have primarily documented Camel’s decline into cheap advertising pencils, later marked the Neark Pen Company, the Secretary Pen Company and (the horror of it) the Progressive Pen Company.  I’ve got a couple examples of the last of these I haven’t written about yet.

What can I say?  These companies are more interesting when they are failing than when they succeed.  Maybe that’s why Parker generally doesn’t interest me so much.

I did run a piece on a really nice deco Camel here at the blog very early on - see http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2012/02/couple-camels-for-hump-day.html.  In all that time, I haven’t had the opportunity to pick up another nice one until this one came my way just recently:

It doesn’t have all the deco flair of the one I ran in that previous article . .. But neither does it have that certain flair of desperation which fascinates me:

I do note, just as I did in that last article, that this also has hints of something that might have been made by Eagle.

A Memory Better Preserved

This article has been edited and included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 5; copies are available print on demand through Amazon here, and I offer an ebook version in pdf format at the Legendary Lead Company here.

If you don't want the book but you enjoy this article, please consider supporting the Blog project here.

This one appeared on Facebook several months ago, so to many of you it isn’t news:

This little gem is unmarked, which usually puts me off a bit, but it has a feature I hadn’t seen before:

The slider button is a snake, complete with tiny glass eyes and a little turquoise button.  As big a fan as I am about snake clips, a snake slider was something I just couldn’t do without.

If it isn’t news, why run it here?  Two reasons: first, not everyone is on facebook, no matter how heretical that may be.  Second, facebook is like watching goldfish shoot through a firehose rather than in an aquarium.  Without remembering who posted something and when, going back to refer to a picture you saw on that site is an impossibility; and even if you do, it is a royal pain sifting back through a timeline or a group’s page to find something.

So here this one is, tucked neatly away at Leadhead’s under a new tag: “Unmarked Victorians of note.”  Should be easy enough to find now.

The Kastar Mystery

This article has been edited and included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 5; copies are available print on demand through Amazon here, and I offer an ebook version in pdf format at the Legendary Lead Company here.

If you don't want the book but you enjoy this article, please consider supporting the Blog project here.

Here’s a pair of objects I’ve been meaning to write about:

Both of these are marked “Kastar” on the clips:

I say “objects” because while the longer of the two is without doubt a pencil, the other . . . while it may look like a bullet pencil or something . . . isn’t.  That nose doesn’t come off.

When I found that shorter one and started thinking about what it might be if it weren’t a pencil, that got me to thinking about something unusual I find on every Kastar pencil I’ve ever seen:

On the back of the barrel, there’s an odd slot, like a coin filler slot on a fountain pen.  It made no sense to see one on a pencil, but when I saw one on something that wasn’t a pencil, my first thought was that maybe these are electrical testers, used to test for electrical current.  Although I didn’t find any evidence of a Kastar electrical tester being made in the 1920s or 1930s, when I estimate these were made, I did find an advertisement for a Kastar Tester in the September 14, 1973 issue of the Waco News Tribune, and it looks suspiciously like my pencil and its cousin: