Come Together

At the DC show a few weeks ago, this set caught my eye on Jean Buchser’s table.  The price was fair, but since the price included one of those pesky pens I don’t collect, I asked if I could borrow it for a few photographs:

The clip on the pen reads “The Union Pen,” while the matching pencil is marked “Unity” crowned by the letter U in a wreath:

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.

Underrated

Joe Nemecek sent me an email directing me to this one in an online auction and told me that I needed to get one of these, and he promised me that it wouldn’t cost me very much:

By the time I got around to reading his email, the auction had closed, and no one had even made the measly opening bid of $2.99.  I had to agree that the pencil was pretty neat, so I emailed the seller to see if he planned to relist the item.  He did – and I immediately placed a twenty-dollar bid on the thing.

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.

Eversharp's Symphonies

The Eversharp Symphony is discussed on page 77 of The Catalogue, and it is usually found in three flavors:

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.

Back to the Drawing Board

It’s not all that unusual for me to learn that I’ve gotten something wrong here.  Most of the time, I’m throwing things out there in the hopes that someone out there will read what I’ve written and have the missing piece of the puzzle that says “nuh uh.”   I never mind.  This is all new stuff, and at the end of the day, I figure it was worth it if I learned something.

What is unusual is when I’m the one that finds that piece and I get to say “nuh uh” to myself (and therefore, to you).  This is one of those stories, and it begins with something that has nothing to do with pencils – or should I say, almost nothing.  The only thing today’s find has to do with pencils is the fact that I – a pencil collector – happen to collect other things, as well.  Those who have visited my pencil museum are often surprised to see what fills the display case under my lead displays:

That’s the back half of Truman the cat, my faithful companion at the museum, who had to swoop in for a closer look at my collection of vintage stapling machines the instant I opened the cabinet to take this picture.  I haven’t written a book about these things yet, but it’s on my bucket list.  A lot of ingenuity went into these things, and if it weren’t for the fact that they are so big and so heavy, I’d probably have quite a few more of them. . .

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.

Nice Threads!

Stuart Hawkinson stopped by my table with this one during the DC show.  He warned me that he was keeping this one before he showed it to me,  but he said he thought I might want to have a look at it.  You are correct, sir!

Doesn’t look much like a pencil, does it?  That is, until you unscrew the top and pull out what’s inside:

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.

Speaking of Parker . . .

At the DC show this year, George Rimakis didn’t bring anything for me to buy.  He did, however, bring me something droolworthy to photograph:

The pattern on this cap is known as the “Coronet,” and it’s on the uberrare end of the Parker 51 spectrum:

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 Most Expensive Pencil I Ever Saw

No, I didn’t buy it.  Let’s just get that out of the way right up front.  I don’t even know what the price is.

On page 16 of The Catalogue I included some pointers on how to use the price guide the book includes.  Of course, the cautionary text has largely been ignored (every so often I receive an email from someone with a pencil I listed as “unique” and assumes that means their pencil is worth meeeeelyuns of dollars).

But another part of what I wrote hasn’t been ignored – the part in which I described “pen to match syndrome”:  when an otherwise ordinary pencil is accompanied by a highly collectible pen, the pencil will command a premium just because collectors who own the high-dollar pens want to put sets together.

So what happens when there’s a stratospherically spectacular pen out there and a matching pencil turns up?  Say, for example, one of the fabled Parker “snake” pens from the 1910s?

You could stop me right there.  “Parker didn’t make pencils in the 1910s,” you could say, and you would be right.  Parker’s first pencils were the “Lucky Lock” pencils introduced in 1922.  But . . . remember that Parker had the silver work on the company’s snake pens done by George W. Heath & Co.  And Heath not only made Parker snake pens, they made these:

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.