The Chicago Victorians

I found a few great Victorian pieces to add to the museum at the Chicago show this year. I know a few of these came from Mike Greaney, and it was great to catch up with him since I last saw him:

That top one is a convertible pencil - you can either keep it in the holder on a chain, or withdraw it:

The neat ribbed top had me thinking Edward Todd before I pulled out my loupe - but the Edward Todds I have along these lines are telescoping pencils that extend by friction as they are withdrawn:

The patent on the Edward Todd pieces is August 9, 1892; I wrote about these in “The Hicks Variation” (August 24, 2017: Volume 5, page 96).

The more I thought about that, the more I thought that wasn’t right. It wasn’t – I had the wrong Todd.

This one is marked Mabie, Todd & Co., and the patent date imprinted is March 10, 1891 – that’s number 447,879, issued to John C.W. Jeffreys and George Dickman of London, England and assigned to George W. Mabie. That patent got past me when I wrote American Writing Instrument Patents 1799-1910; it wasn’t filed in any of the usual patent categories for pens and pencils, but in Class 63, “Jewelry,” subclass 22, “Bar: Devices comprising means to be passed through a buttonhole to secure the chain to the clothing.”  See “Another Forgotten Corner at the Patent Office” (December 7, 2015: Volume 4, page 25).

Once I had the right maker in mind, it was easy finding that example I wrote about ten years ago, and another one with that same neat ribbed top.

This next one, if I remember right, came from Pete Kirby. It has a patent date I remembered:

I remembered having another one along these lines, too. Fortunately it was with a different pattern, and they do look very nice together:

And, I remembered the trick about these from the last time I wrote about them, in “Three Interesting Hicks Patents” (September 22, 2016: Volume 4, page 181). There’s something on the other end of that pencil, I thought . . . 

Well, there should be, anyway. The one I had in my collection is intact, with a nice John Holland No. 6 dip pen nib. The pencil part of the new addition works just fine, but the band that secured a dip pen nib has gone missing.

The next Victorian that came home from Chicago with me was this hard rubber example:

It is also a Hicks, but there isn’t a patent associated with this one.

What makes this one unusual is its large pencil mechanism, operated by a simple slider. By this time, in the 1870s or 1880s, the slider function was usually reserved for dip pen nibs, with pencils advanced by some sort of spiral or twist mechanism.

The fourth pencil in this group is another Mabie Todd, and with that fat front end where the nose comes out I knew exactly what it is:

The barrel imprint reads “Pat. Mar. 16, ‘75 / Mabie, Todd & Co. / 1664":

These have come up a couple times here over the years, in “Mabie’s Other Patent” (June 14, 2021: Volume 7, page 194) and “Something I Never Knew Was There” (November 30, 2016: Volume 4, page 276). The reference is to George Mabie’s patent number 160,924:

The nose pulls out of the barrel and reverses for the dip pen nib.

Usually these are much bigger than this example, which fits well with the ones that were pictured in David Moak’s book, Mabie in America. It’s in better shape than my other hard rubber example – and it’s in a different pattern, too.

The last of my Chicago finds will have to wait until tomorrow. As I poked around for more information about it, an amazing story emerged . . . and when I’m finished telling it, you are going to think I did this on purpose.

The "Striped" or "Wartime" Duofold

This post was substantially rewritten for the print version of Volume 8 - so much so that I've taken the original post down.

At some point, I'll edit it to match the print version.  

The Second, Third, and Other Shoes Drop

My only complaint about the DC Supershow, held every August, is that so many of my friends are there that it is a challenge finding more than a few minutes to talk with each of them. Things only slow down to a reasonable pace on Sunday, by which time everyone is so thoroughly exhausted and “peopled” out that we are collectively ready to return to our normal, quirky lives.

I don’t even bother to set up on Thursday, so I can see everyone and share things we brought to show each other; I’ll typically have a backpack containing only a case of things I brought to show people and a bottle of Jameson’s. Both are typically empty by the time festivities end on that first day.

As I wandered about the room, my old friend R. George Adams flagged me down. R. George, you may recall, found that weird Stylofede pencil for me (see “The Pencil and the Tramp” on August 5, 2025), and he’s got a great eye for the unusual and the weird. 

This time, R. George wanted to offer me some wonderful pieces out of his collection of Carter’s pens and pencils. Two of his fountain pens enamored me; usually, I’m too cheap to spend big money on fountain pens, particularly in the first few minutes after I arrive at a show, but I was unable to resist these.

At the time, I assumed one of these was a duplicate of the DeLaCo example from yesterday’s article because I couldn’t remember what the imprint read. I didn’t mind adding a complete and intact example, even if it proved to be a duplicate, but I was pleasantly surprised when I got home:

Yesterday’s DeLaCo pen is now in the company of identical pens marked Superite (DeWitt-LaFrance’s later flagship brand) and Laughlin, of Detroit, Michigan. As for the nibs, the Superite has one of those “S” marked nibs I was telling you about yesterday, and the Laughlin has a number 5 size Snapfil nib.

That Snapfil is an unusual nib, typically found on the General Manufacturing and Houston Pen Company’s Snapfil lines of fountain pens (General Manufacturing also produced those grail “Kaligraf” pencils). By the time these were made, around 1920, Laughlin was sourcing pens rather than making them; I don’t know whether the company sourced nibs and pens separately and put them together or whether this is a random replacement.

R.George had a few pencils to show me, too. They are the four examples in the middle of this next image:

Before I get to R. George’s pencils, a word about that black hard rubber example at top. It is one of the earliest of the Carter-branded pencils, a rebadged version of the hard rubber Superite pencils. The Carter Ink Company purchased DeWitt-LaFrance in 1925, but I wouldn’t discount the possibility that Carter’s was sourcing pens and pencils from DeWitt-LaFrance before the sale.

This one came to me from an online auction that closed shortly after I got home from the DC show – it’s a duplicate that’s both an upgrade in one respect and a downgrade in another:

My other black hard rubber example has badly discolored hard rubber and corroded trim . . . but it has a price sticker. Both of my black hard rubber examples have groups of lines on the barrel. DeWitt-LaFrance made identical pencils for the Rexall Drug Stores under the “Signet” line; Signet pencils had gold filled trim, and the black hard rubber ones came either with or without those groups of lines. See “Chasing and Fixing Signets” (July 8, 2021: Volume 7, page 246).

All but one of these Carter’s pencils have nickel trim rather than gold-filled, but the existence of that red hard rubber Carter with gold filled trim suggests that there’s no reason all of these others might also come with that trim . . . and the Signet line was also offered in mottled hard rubber, too. 

The first of the four Carter’s pencils that came from R. George is that great pink and white oversized pencil; these were student or utility models, I believe, and to my knowledge there were no comparable fountain pens. With an exposed eraser, I’ve only found these in black or red hard rubber, and the crown tops found on these student models are unique to this series.

I wrote about that blue one during the first year of the blog – see “If Only All ‘Student Pencils’ Were This Nice!” (March 30, 2012: Volume 1, page 159). While larger, these are also lighter since it’s a thinner plastic barrel rather than the more hefty Coralite or hard rubber.

The second R. George Special was that Pearltex pencil in blue . . . or blueish, anyway. Pearltex shades vary from one pencil to the next and no, that’s not discoloration, which comes from exposure to rubber ink sacs, ink, or a combination of the two, something that typically doesn’t plague pencils. When I bought it, I had checked my notes, and I thought this one would fit nicely into my collection, which included what I thought was a short grey and the short and long models in blue. However, when I got them all together under the strong lights in my photo setup, it isn’t so clear.

My “gray” ringtop looks more pink, and the “blue” ringtop looks more gray. Colors on the Pearltex series are so often a matter of degree, though, and in this case I’m just content that R. George’s addition is clearly different from what was already represented in this series. 

The third R. George Memorial Carter is in lapis Coraltex – it’s very close to a model I recently wrote about in “Duly Twisted” (October 2, 2025). In that earlier article, I noted that I already had three Lapis Carter pencils, but this one is a variation I didn’t have:

Carter pencils with a single band at the top are earlier; Carter’s fountain pens are shown with a single wide cap band in newspaper advertisements from 1926 through mid-1928, while advertisements beginning in late 1928 illustrate double cap bands like these. While these advertisements do not show the matching pencils, I don’t believe it is a stretch to say that the banding on the pencils matched fountain pens made at the same time.

The two white Pearltex examples at the bottom are a story all their own: the oversized model was the fourth R. George Special from the DC Show, and Terry Mawhorter had the ringtop. I was happy and a little irritated at the same time to find these, because I had to reshoot a picture that was a real pain in the neck to stage. Here’s the original image, taken to commemorate the addition of a ringtop identical to the one I got from Terry:

This shows Carter models in white Pearltex, which evolved on a slightly different track from the same pencils in other colors. The top three examples are not a match for any other Carter’s pens or pencils of the era.

I had planned an article months ago about why  streamlined ringtops in white Pearltex have a single trim bands at the top, while all the other colors have twin bands.

Later versions in white Pearltex match the same models in other colors . . . mostly. The last of the full-length Carter pencils blended elements from the flattop series with the cheaper Carter products made in the 1930s.

Carter eventually abandoned the distinctive LaFrance clip; these later models sport very unusual colors, but I haven't found one in white Pearltex.

Later Carter ringtops are unmarked and were not made in as wide a range of colors, but the distinctive Pearltex and trim are unmistakable. Note the shorter caps on the grey models – this is too small a sampling to draw any conclusions, other than that there were two different cap lengths.

During those sad last days of Carter’s writing instrument production, not even the side clip models were marked with the Carter’s name.

In fact, it wasn’t until 2018 that I was able to confirm that these were made by the company, established by indirect means in “Settles the Issue in My Mind” (February 25, 2018: Volume 5, page 164) and from scant newspaper advertisements in  “Chapter and Verse” (October 9, 2018: Volume 5, page 263). Formal confirmation arrived after I acquired a 1931 (or so) Carter catalog from Rob Bader (see “The Inconvenient Question” on June 12, 2021: Volume 7, page 190).

As Carter’s Ink Company prepared to throw in the towel with the production of writing instruments some time in the early 1930s, there were some final modifications – or debasements, depending on how you view it – to the designs, including the addition of a standard black and pearl to the lineup and the deletion of the domed tops.

I haven’t yet found a flat top Carter pencil like this in any Pearltex color. If I do, however, I’ll be reshooting that white Pearltex spread yet again.

The Graf Bader's Ballast Box

I had to check with those who were involved in this story to be sure everyone thought it was as funny and worth retelling as I did. They do.

A few weeks before the Chicago Show, I had purchased a huge collection of . . . er . . . high quality ballpoints and pencils from the estate of a collector in Kansas. I didn’t make the trip out west, though. Dan Schenkein lives in Kansas, and he was my boots on the ground. I sent Dan some money to spend, and spend it wisely  he did - eleven large priority mail boxes landed on my doorstep packed to the brim with stuff. For a couple weeks, you couldn’t see our kitchen table while I sorted through everything.

After I had neatly packaged everything by brand and taken what I wanted for my collection, I texted Rob Bader to see if he wanted to buy everything else. “Should I bring a trailer?” he asked. I told him he should bring a Zeppelin. A grand purchase warrants a grand entrance, I said. 

That Thursday morning in Chicago, Rob docked his Zeppelin on the roof of the hotel and came down to the ballroom, where we did our thing – he took piles and piles of stuff, and I took a few pieces of paper from him.  

This year’s Chicago show was the busiest I can recall – so much so that I was pinned down at my display by a frenzied crowd of pencil folk for almost the entire weekend. I didn’t have much time to get around the room, but during one of my brief excursions around the room, I saw that Rob had a box full of big, colorful flattop pens on his table, dumped unceremoniously out on the table in true Baderesque fashion.

I really wanted to do a deep dive into that pile, but it was causing quite a stir; I couldn’t get close enough to Rob’s table to see anything with the frenzy of buyers, and I didn’t have time to wait. By the time things quieted down, Rob had said his typical Irish goodbye and the Graf Bader turned south and floated away before I had the chance to see what I was missing.

Raleigh (the Triangle Pen Show) came a few weeks later, and Rob was back with what was left of that big, beautiful box spilled out in a smaller but still enticing pile awaiting a thorough pillaging. This time it was quiet enough that I could spend some quality time seeing what there was to see. Most of it was parts only – caps and barrels without nibs, sections or feeds, but this little guy leaped out of the pile and into my hands:

Rob and I share the same sickness that keeps us perpetually buried in pens and pencils. The reasonable and normal thing to do when you find something you like in a pile of stuff is to ask for a price on that one item. Rob and I are neither reasonable nor normal: when we find one thing we like in a whole mess of stuff, we assume there’s got to be a whole bunch more good stuff in there and we want to know how much to buy it all.

At least Janet knew I was wired that way when she married me.

Usually, Rob and I don’t use money in our transactions. When I find things on his table, he’ll tell me to take it with me and he’ll swing by later to pick out some things to take in trade. This time, however, he was fully laden with the things I sold to him in Chicago, and he wanted to lighten the load a bit and get back some of those pieces of paper he had given me the previous month.

How much would I offer? I threw out a number – five hundred bucks. You have to start somewhere, I figured. The Graf Bader must have been sagging pretty low at that moment – done, he said. Everything was dumped back into the box, and back I went to my own table. I hadn’t set anything out yet, so I spent the first couple hours sorting through everything to see what I wanted to keep and what I might leave out on the table during the rest of the show.

I pulled a few things out of no real significance - there were quite a few large Waterson pens in there, just caps and barrels, but I’ve got a soft spot for that rascal Mr. Kelly (see “The Banker and the Specialty King” on June 25, 2021: Volume 7, page 285). There were a few other odds and ends I kept, but most of it I laid right back out on the table.

In my mind, I got my money’s worth just out of the couple enjoyable hours I spent going through a fresh box of stuff. As for the initial object of my affection, it remained the first thing I had pulled out of that box. I didn’t look at it very close, but I knew from the clip it was made by DeWitt-LaFrance, one of my pet obsessions around the museum, and on closer examination it had an imprint even better than I had hoped:

DeLaCo was one of DeWitt-LaFrance’s earliest trade names: I know from the pencils, all of which are marked Patent Pending – the ubiquitous Superite pencils came later, when the imprints were changed to “Pat.” on both the barrels and clips. As with nearly everything else in that box, it was missing a few parts – there was no nib and the top piece had gone missing.

I knew that these parts were missing when I bought the box, but I didn’t think it was a big deal - Superite nibs are still relatively easy to find, and I figured any old generic black plug would finish it nicely. On that second point, I was wrong. On closer examination, the plug on the barrel end isn’t black – it’s a dark olive green with black zebra stripes.

That’s a tall order to find a correct replacement, although hope is always springing eternal that the peanut gallery might help me out with finding that part some day. I still thought I got my money’s worth. 

I didn’t know how right I was.

I had an appointment at the Raleigh show to meet Robert Speerbrecher (“Speerbob,” for those who have seen his listings on eBay). Bob was running low on inventory, so I had told him the Graf Leadhead would be landing in Raleigh with a few of my own ballast boxes and we could help each other out. Bob came looking for pencils, but when he saw a few rows of big, colorful flattop fountain pen parts, his focus shifted immediately. 

Bob asked what I wanted for the pens, and I invited him to make me an offer for what he wanted. He offered an amount per piece for all of the flattops, and that number was low – at that per unit price there was plenty of money to be made, if like Bob you have the parts needed to make complete pens out of them. For a moment I thought about whether I might do the same thing, but I don’t have a stock of spare fountain pen parts and heck . . . there were so many of them that when Bob’s unit price was multiplied by the sheer number of them, I would triple my money on what I paid for the entire box. The Graf Leadhead jettisoned that box of ballast in exchange for some much lighter pieces of paper. It was a good day for both of us.

Later in the show, Rob Bader asked me how I made out with his box, and I couldn’t resist telling him a good story. Rob laughed, because he had an even better one: “I paid a hundred dollars for that entire box, and I sold nine hundred dollars out of it in Chicago before you bought what was left,” he said.

I didn’t want to write about this until I shared the punchline with Bob Speerbrecher – fortunately, he thought it was as funny as Rob and I did. Everybody came out a winner on this one, and Bob is already well on his way to recouping his investment, too.

It’s like my father-in-law used to say: that’s why they put the backs on playing cards.

And then, just two months later, I would have even more reason to be thrilled that I had been involved in the grand Zeppelin flotilla of 2025 . . .

A Short Nine Years

These conversations I have with my fellow enthusiasts can take a long time. Last week, I published an article about Taylor’s Patent and its relationship to pencils made by William Lund (“Lund . . . ish” on October 10, 2025).

I had started the conversation nine years ago, with a rudimentary article about Lund’s spiral pencils and noting a discrepancy concerning whether the “Lund Patent” was issued in 1848 or 1856. 

Five years ago, Pam Sutton dropped pictures of her “Taylor’s Patent” pencils on Facebook.

I didn’t see Pam’s post until a couple weeks ago, when I was trying to learn more about a Lund-style pencil marked “Taylor’s Patent.” With Pam’s help, I found the text of the patent, issued in 1856, which mostly resolved that question. Lund was a “Patentee” only in the sense that he owned the rights to two patents: one issued to William Riddle in 1848, and the other for an improved version of Riddle’s patent issued to John George Taylor in 1856.

There were loose ends: I wanted to see Taylor’s patent drawings, but the research tools available in the United States don’t provide that information. Also, Pam had also posted images of a second pencil marked “Taylor’s Patent” that looked nothing like a Lund:

I’m used to playing the long game, and I fully expected that it would be years before I would be circling back around to tie up those loose ends.

It took five days.

Thierry Nguyen posted a comment at the blog that he had found the drawings for Taylor’s Patent 2823, which he then forwarded to me. The first image appears to be the original, and it is too faint to make out the details:

The other, however, is a republished version which uses the same images. It is much more clear:

Taylor’s Patent, these drawings reveal, covered two very different versions of his pencil: one has a spiral cut on the outside of the barrel, like a Riddle patent Lund, and the other has the spiral inside a smooth outer barrel – just like Pam’s second example.

Mystery solved.

The other lingering issue from that last article involved Pam’s comment that according to her notes, Taylor’s patent might have been patent number 1994, not number 2823. Terry also answered that one by providing a copy of the text for patent 1994 . . . or rather, patent request number 1994.

In England, applications are assigned one number and if granted, the approved patent is assigned a different one. Application number 1994 was filed by our man John George Taylor, but it was for “improvements in shaping and cutting conical penholders in wood and other materials.” It was filed on September 1, 1859 but apparently, it was never granted. Right man, wrong invention.

A Stainless Unicorn and Schröedinger's Platinum

The Wahl Company got into the writing instrument industry backwards. While Parker, Sheaffer, and Waterman were fountain pen companies which later added pencils to match their pens, Wahl started out making pencils first in 1915, when it was known as the Wahl Adding Machine Company and started making pencils as a contractor for Charles Keeran’s Eversharp Pencil Company. Later, after Wahl acquired a controlling interest in Keeran’s company, Wahl went into the pen business with the purchase of the Boston Fountain Pen Company in 1917.

Wahl’s origins in the industry as a pencil manufacturer would influence the company in the decades to come, and that is what makes its products particularly fascinating to pencil collectors: there are many Eversharp pencils that do not have a matching fountain pen.

Except, of course, when it comes to those pesky Eversharp Skylines with sterling caps and other Skylines with clips marked “Wahl,” as shown in yesterday’s article. Those are a rare frustration for pencil collectors, because matching Skyline pencils are not known to exist. 

It is reasonable to conclude, given Wahl’s history, that no Skyline pencils were made with Wahl-marked clips: beginning in 1917, it was “The Wahl Pen and Eversharp Pencil,” and it wouldn’t be until much later that Wahl would mark a fountain pen model as an “Eversharp.” For that reason, I’ve resigned myself to the fact that there probably never was a Skyline pencil marked “Wahl” on the clip. Prove me wrong, as they say.

Hope springs eternal, though, that one day a Skyline pencil with a sterling silver overlay will be found: it is one of those things that “should” exist, because there is no reason it should not exist and everything we know about Wahl suggests that it would exist.

When Pat Mohan went home from the Raleigh Pen Show to check the cap imprints on his Wahl-marked Skyline fountain pens for me, I’ll admit that I held out faint hope that Pat would return to the show with that knowing smile on his face I’ve seen so many times and a conversation starting with “I’ll bet you haven’t seen one of these” as he handed me a Wahl-marked Skyliine pencil.

Pat did return to the show with that exact expression on his face, and our conversation began exactly that way. No, he didn’t have a sterling Skyline pencil on him, but he had this:

There’s lots to unpack with this pencil, starting with the derby and clip assembly. This has what Eversharp called a “Streamliner” top end - instead of a buttressed clip, Streamliners lack the upper mounting.

The Eversharp Streamliner was a lower-priced version of the Skyline, designated Model 198 in the demi size and Model 199 as a full-length pencil, all as discussed on page 341 in Eversharp. Until Pat’s example surfaced, every Streamliner I have seen has sported a plain barrel, with no overlay or trim bands.

Now let’s pile on that stainless overlay. The Eversharp Skyline in stainless is the third most rare variation in the series – behind sterling silver and that mythical platinum version. I’d rate the solid gold Skylines as fourth most rare, at least when they were made, but their numbers continue to dwindle with the skyrocketing price of gold. The temptation to scrap 14k examples poses an unprecedented threat to their survival, particularly when it comes to badly dented or worn examples.

Within that subset of third-place stainless Skylines, Pat’s Streamliner has other unique characteristics. Note that the overlay is significantly shorter than “usual”:

The two examples in the center are the most commonly encountered Skyline Stainless variants, featuring either gold filled or the slightly less common stainless clip assembly. The example at bottom came from the late Fred Krinke’s auction – see “I’m Gonna Drive (500 Miles)” (April 3, 2021: Volume 7, page 4).

Whenever something comes along that isn’t supposed to exist, I always have to take into account the possibility that someone may have “made” it by combining parts that aren’t supposed to go together. I’ve considered and rejected that possibility.

First, transplanting derby and clip assemblies from one Skyline pencil to another is a huge pain in the neck. Repair instructions at the time directed repairmen to crush the entire derby assembly with a pair of pliers, pull it out, and press fit an entire new derby and clip assembly. The decades have not been kind to Skyline plastics, which have become so brittle that this procedure – labor intensive and risky even when these were new – is nearly (but not entirely) impossible now. I successfully performed the operation in “Radical Surgery on a Skyline” (February 21, 2013: Volume 2, page 58), but it took quite a bit of time. The experiment was only worthwhile because I was grafting a 14k solid gold overlay and derby onto a barrel from an ordinary Presentation example.

Also, the upper portion of the barrels of these overlay Skylines are milled down a bit so that the overlay is flush with the diameter of the lower barrel. If Pat’s weird Streamliner Stainless began life with a plain barrel, someone would have had to turning the top portion of the barrel on a lathe so that the stainless sleeve slides over it. Did I mention how brittle these Skyline plastics have become over the last eight decades?

Let’s assume that a hobbyist with above-average machining skills was willing to spend the time to precisely mill down the upper portion of an ordinary Skyline barrel, remove the derby, slip a shorter tube of stainless steel of the exact diameter into position, and install a Streamliner derby and clip assembly. 

That didn’t happen.

No Skyline I have ever seen has a “Made in USA” stamp on the barrel, and Pat’s example has that stamp just below the end of the overlay. Without question, Pat’s variation is factory.

Now I need to circle back around to that full length metal barrel from Fred Krinke’s auction. I took this picture of it before the auction started in case I didn’t win it:

This shot didn’t come out the way I hoped it would  – “Skyline Noir,” I called it when the image ran in Volume 7. It didn’t convey all the detail that I had hoped, but it did convey the mysterious and dramatic nature of the beast.

I have assumed that Fred’s Skyline was a prototype with a full length, stainless steel barrel. That’s how I reported it here at the blog and also in Eversharp: Cornerstone of an Industry. On page 317 in Eversharp, I noted “[t]he 1940 price sheet lists the Presentation Stainless as Model 178W, but a full-length stainless model is unlisted. It might have been Model 178S.”

Or . . . 

Recall from yesterday’s article that this same 1940 price sheet does list a Skyline with a platinum cap and barrel – the ultimate unicorn in the Skyline series, with no surviving fountain pens (Model 78P) “and – gulp – a platinum pencil (Model 178P).”  

Can platinum be mistaken for stainless steel? Yes it can, and it often is . . . but I’m not about to subject Fred’s pencil to scratch testing or other intrusive means that will damage it in any way, so I researched how else to distinguish the two metals. One way is the color of the metal: platinum is a deeper gray than stainless, which is brighter and has more of a modern feel. Have another look at this closeup of the tips:

I’d already noted the absence of the typical band around the nose found on other Skylines, and that almost matte, darker finish.

Platinum is also heavier than stainless steel: I had thought that Fred’s pencil was heavier just because the metal overlay is full length, but now that I’m wondering whether it might be platinum, I can feel more heft than I would expect. Of course, that’s not a reliable indicator, without a full length stainless barrel to weigh for comparison. 

As I explored non-invasive ways to test for platinum, the primary lesson I learned was that there are a lot of seriously weird and stupid people on the Internet. “Read the hallmark and see if it says platinum,” said one intellectual giant. There was one suggestion I thought was helpful, although I don’t know whether it is true: one source claims that hydrogen pyroxide will fizz dramatically when a few drops are applied to platinum, but not to stainless steel.

Janet looked at me a bit sideways when I came into the master bath, raided the first aid supplies, and put a few drops on the barrel of Fred’s pencil. Some context likely would have been helpful before I did that.

No fizz, for whatever that is worth, but that same source that had me doing weird things with a pencil in my bathroom also said it isn’t a particularly reliable test, depending on the purity of the platinum.

I’m torn between which is better: being able to introduce to you the first documented example of a Skyline Model 78P in platinum (and having to correct something I wrote in Eversharp), or having a wholly undocumented full stainless example.

I suppose until I have a more definitive diagnosis, I have both.