The Leadhead's Pencil Blog

Saturday, August 13, 2016

The Ford's DeLuxe / New Yorker Connection

This article has been edited and included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 4; 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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The Ford’s DeLuxe line of pencils appears on page 81 of

The Catalogue, while The New Yorker appears on page 106. At the time the book was published, in 2011, all I knew was that these two pencils appeared to be identical, an observation that isn’t particularly earthshattering when the two are placed side by side:

Since then, my friend John Hubbard from Birmingham, Alabama has established that the “Ford” in Ford’s DeLuxe was Ford Cromer, the founder and owner of the Artcraft Pen Company - Artcraft is a passion of John’s, since it was one of the only pen companies from Birmingham. More recently, in the Spring, 2016 issue of The Pennant, John revealed an advertisement in which Artcraft marketed the “New Yorker” brand of pens and pencils in the December 20, 1932 edition of The Birmingham News:

But if you think that wraps up the story all neat and tidy like, think again. I would have circled around to the Ford’s DeLuxe and New Yorker connection at some point to tell you what John found, but that’s not what brings me back to the story right now. As I was browsing around looking for matches to my strange pearl Sheaffer, I thought the Ford’s Deluxe and New Yorker pencils appeared very, very close:

So, with the all the determination that was required to pull apart the Gold Bonds, Gold Medals and Diamond Medals shown here over the last few days, I set about yanking apart a Ford’s DeLuxe and a New Yorker, and there you have it:

What remains to be proven is whether it was Sheaffer which made the Ford’s DeLuxe and New Yorker pencils, or whether Sheaffer supplied the mechanisms to C.E. Barrett in Chicago, who in turn made the pencils to be sold by the Artcraft Pen Company.

Friday, August 12, 2016

Maybe Big Three Out of Four?

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Note: this is the fourth installment in a series - it might make more sense if you start here.

Montgomery Ward’s Gold Bond brand took a markedly different evolutionary path than did other store brands, such as Gold Medal, Diamond Medal and Webster, the latter three of which evolved directly from Rex-made (or at least Rex patent) mechanism to rebadged Parker products. Some Gold Bonds, other the other hand, are just as clearly rebadges made by Eversharp and Waterman:

At the top, we have three examples which, for the time being, I attribute to the Rex Manufacturing Company of Providence, Rhode Island. The bottom three are clearly rebadges of the Eversharp Doric, the Eversharp Junior, and a Waterman (the Eversharp Gold Bonds I’ve written about a couple years ago at http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-answer-that-raises-question.html, and the Waterman I wrote about just yesterday).

Side note: I theorized last year that “National Pen Products” wasn’t the grand puppetmaster behind everything flattopish and Chicagoish, but was instead a wholly owned subsidiary set up exclusively to supply Montgomery Ward’s writing instruments, incorporated by a Montgomery Ward executive, C.E. Barrett’s sister-in-law and a third person about whom I haven’t found anything yet (“What About the Boogeyman,” at http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2015/07/what-about-boogeyman.html). The fact that post-Rex Gold Bonds were made by different companies than contemporary Gold Medals, Diamond Medals and Websters supports this.

But . . . I’m getting off topic. This article is about the “middle children” from that first picture, and particularly that grey marbled example. It just doesn’t match the profile of either the Eversharp Junior rebadges (the closest Eversharp-made relative I can find) or the Waterman rebadge:

Yeah, it has three bands like an Eversharp, but much thinner. And both the Eversharp and Waterman models are nose-drive pencils, fundamentally different inside regardless of outward appearances. If you can look past those outward appearances, in fact, this weird Gold Bond looks a lot like the other middle child from that first picture:

Both are middle-joint, rear drive pencils, and note how similar the tips are? As I was trolling around the museum comparing that very odd Sheaffer pencil to Diamond Medals and Gold Medals, that caught my attention . . .

and sure enough . . .

There’s no question in my mind: no matter what you see on the outside of these Gold Bonds, what’s inside is all Sheaffer. Sheaffer also might be the answer I never thought to look for when it comes to that bizarre clip, which I haven’t seen on anything else:

It clearly isn’t derived from either the Eversharp or Waterman clips, but when I turned my attention to the Sheaffer wing of the museum, I noticed something from which it might have been derived:

That plastic, whether you call it “birdseye,” “screaming souls” or what have you, is a Wasp (acronym for W.A. Sheaffer Pen) Clipper pencil, a Sheaffer subbrand which falls chronologically into the exact same slot as when I suspect the Gold Bond was made (1933-1934).

Note that both clips are the same length, both have a flat face, and the tops of each share a gothic arch sort of profile. A few minor modifications to existing tooling would turn a Wasp clip into a goofy Gold Bond one. And while I’ve never been able to wrestle a lower barrel off a Wasp Clipper before, I was now determined to see exactly what was inside one of these. A few choice words (and a bruised knuckle) later, I had my answer:

I believe my goofy grey Gold Bond was made by Sheaffer, outer appearances notwithstanding, and Montgomery Ward was being supplied with writing instruments made by Eversharp, Waterman AND Sheaffer – everybody BUT Parker.

Thursday, August 11, 2016

The Waterbonds

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If you haven't read the last two days' posts, you can start this story here.

About four years ago, I wrote an article about a goofy Gold Bond pencil that I couldn’t fit neatly into either the Rex family of oversized flattops or the Eversharp Doricesque or Junioresque lines (“Neither Dis One Nor Dat One” on September 28, 2012 at http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2012/09/neither-dis-one-or-dat-one.html):

In that article, I’d noted that while this one is made of a plastic vaguely reminiscent of a Parker Zephyr and it has thin bands vaguely reminiscent of a Wahl Junior and bands that might be Parker (I had incorrectly noted that Parker might have made some Gold Bonds, an assumption derived from lumping together everything under the National Pen Products umbrella), it didn’t directly match any known manufacturer’s fingerprints.

At the time I wrote the article, I didn’t know that there was a third family to consider. A couple examples appeared on the cover of the fall 2013 issue of The Pennant:

The golden colored Gold Bond shown in the box is obviously a Waterman, and the pen directly to the left of it appears to be another Waterman-made Gold Bond based on the Lady Patricia - and apparently made in the same grey plastic as my “Udder One” from that article I posted four years ago. There’s also two pens with the same goofy clip as my pencil, one in marbled burgundy and black like you’d see on a Parker (hmmm... and with thin gold bands like my goofy pencil, too), and the other in what looks very similar to Eversharp’s “cathay” celluloid used on the company’s Doric line.

I haven’t posted an update about this development for two reasons: (1) the picture mixes things up even more than they were before, and I was even less sure than before what was going on with my weird Gold Bond, and (2) I had never seen an example of a Waterman-made Gold Bond pencil.

Tackling these two problems in reverse order, Myk Daigle solved the latter of these issues when he made this one available:

The wide, poorly-plated band is anomolous for a Waterman, but otherwise I had no doubts about who made this one - it even featured the same sprung tip that kept falling off! The imprint is located on the back of the cap, in exactly the same place you’d find a Waterman imprint:

Here it is shown with the closest Waterman relative in my collection:

Note that the comparable pencils were stamped “Watermans” on the clip:

Now that I’ve introduced the Waterman Gold Bonds, I’ll be able to delve into the brand’s development tomorrow without getting sidetracked . . .

The story continues here.

Wednesday, August 10, 2016

The Middle Children

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Note: it might be helpful to start by reading yesterday's post first. The link is here.

Diamond Medal was a Sears brand which collectors have lumped under the “National Pen Products” umbrella – technically not true, since National Pen Products was a wholly-owned subsidiary of Montgomery Ward (the incorporators included a Montgomery Ward VP and C.E. Barrett’s sister in law: see http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2014/11/out-of-shadows.html and http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2015/07/what-about-boogeyman.html). C.E. Barrett, the man associated with National, also ran C.E. Barrett & Co., which I believe supplied the Sears products, including both Diamond Medal and Gold Medal.

Sometime around 1934, the Parker Pen Company began supplying Sears with obviously rebadged Parker pens and pencils marked “Diamond Medal.”

As I wandered through the museum with yesterday’s odd-looking Sheaffer in my hand, I came to the Diamond Medal section and I noticed something:

The top example was probably made by Rex Manufacturing Company, which also manufactured at least the insides of what I call “4 horsemen” patent pencils under a variety of names.

Probably. I’ll get to that later. And I think that top Diamond Medal was made after 1929.

I’ll get to that later, too.

The second and third examples from the top are a lot more like that top one than first appearances might suggest, so I’ve lumped them tentatively in the Rex pile, as well.

Maybe.

The bottom example is a Parker Parkette rebadged as a Diamond Medal. But what about that one right above it? It has the same plastic, but that nose cone looks to be a match for our mystery Sheaffer, and wait a tick – the one above it looks to be made from the same distinctive cream-pearl celluloid:

I wrestled for awhile with the burgundy and black Diamond Medal, and I couldn’t get it apart – even though I’m dead sure what’s inside it is identical to my pearl Sheaffer. However, when I browsed through my Gold Medal collection – Gold Medal being another brand marketed by Sears, and attributed to C.E. Barrett & Co. – I found this one:

And inside:

Tomorrow's article, introducing Waterman-made Gold Bond pencils, is here..

Tuesday, August 9, 2016

What Lurks Within

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When I arrive at a show these days, John Hall and I are wheeling in a cart loaded up like the Grinch’s sleigh, usually with two layers of totes topped by shelving, photography equipment and such. And also these days, I never get to my table to unload it all before someone comes up to me and says they have a pencil to show me.

At the Chicago show in May, it was Rob Bader who flagged me down and had me abandoning my cart mid-aisle on the way to my table. He showed me four pretty spectacular things (three of which I’ll tell you about later), but this one had several of us really scratching our heads:

When Rob handed it to me, it was with the clip facing away for dramatic effect, since he knew from the shape and color of the pencil the first words that would come out of my mouth would be “Why are you showing me an Arnold?” And those were my first words exactly, after which he turned it around . . .

What what what? There’s so much about this pencil that doesn’t make sense, and Occam’s razor had me trimming this one back to a Sheaffer clip installed on something else -- anything but a Sheaffer. For a Sheaffer Balance, the shape is wrong, the color is wrong, the three thin bands are wrong . . . and what’s inside looked unfamiliar, too:

As several of us were looking at this one, none of us – myself included – recalled seeing a Sheaffer mechanism that looks like this. Both of us knew I’d have to bring it home with me, but we both had some difficulty figuring out what was fair. The price we eventually came to was expensive if it proved to be a Sheaffer clip mounted on something else, and cheap if it proved to be the real thing.

Now that I’ve done my homework, I know I got off cheap this time.

When I got home, I was so befuddled by this goofy looking thing that the first thing I did was compare this pencil to others in my collection to see if it matched anything else – more on that tomorrow. Then I pulled out my patent book to see if Sheaffer patented a screw drive pencil mechanism with that big bushing. Sure enough, there it was:

Craig R. Sheaffer and William R. Cuthbert filed a patent application for this mechanism on April 1, 1929, and the patent was issued on March 7, 1933 as patent number 1,900,669. The inside of this pencil and the clip are both all Sheaffer after all.

My next step was to dig out a "typical" Sheaffer Balance pencil from the flat ball clip era, so I could show you how different this new one is from the norm:

Note how the new addition is chubbier, with a more steeply tapered top and more pointy end. The tip is shorter:

The clip appears to be a cheap gold wash rather than they typical heavy gold fill, and as I mentioned earlier, three thin bands is a trim configuration unknown in the Balance series:

But what I really wanted to show you was what a “normal” Balance mechanism looks like. Removing Balance mechanisms is a real crapshoot, and I’d compare it to arguing with an ex-wife: whenever I’m finally successful, it feels almost like the pencil wanted me to win. Sometimes the tip unscrews easily, but when it doesn’t want to budge, if it’s absolutely necessary to take the thing apart I normally end up destroying the tip and replacing it. Then there’s the matter of extracting the mechanism - if it’s going to come out, once it budges a little bit it usually comes free. If that first budge doesn’t free it, I usually chalk that one up to a stubborn one that isn’t going to come free.

The problem I was having was that every single one of my flat ball clip Sheaffers appeared to be in the stubborn category, so I finally picked this one – since the tip came off easilly – to wrestle with. After considerable persuasion, this is what I found:

How embarrassing. It would appear that whenever a mechanism proved difficult to remove, it wasn’t because of random crankiness – the older, bushing-style Sheaffers are just a lot harder to remove than the later, straight bore kind. That was why I’d never seen one before. Once I had the hang of getting these things loose, I found that all of the earlier Balances had them. For example, here’s a ringtop in jade, one of the initial colors used for the Balance line:

There is a bright side in this. If I had already known the mechanism inside this odd Sheaffer was genuine Sheaffer, I probably wouldn’t have started comparing it to other things in my collection to figure out what it was derived from. And if I hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t have found something really interesting . . .

The story continues here.

Monday, August 8, 2016

The Backlog

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It’s been awhile since I’ve had time to post here, since my gig as editor of The Pennant has taken a pretty big chunk of my available hobby time. Now that the clouds are starting to lift and my last issue under contract is approaching, I was browsing around in the museum taking stock of all the wonderful things I have to show you. I may have stopped posting, see, but I haven’t stopped acquiring stuff.

I have reached the point where if a new addition is just another color in a series, or just another minor variation on a theme I’ve already told you about it, I’ve filed it away without photographing it. All the others waiting to be photographed and discussed here have generally been landing in one printer’s cabinet. I thought it would be fun before I delve back into things to show you what’s been accumulating during this last hiatus.

Starting from the top drawer, these are things that showed up in my mailbox after a few weeks on eBay over the winter:

Next are mostly Dur-O-Lites on the left with some random German stuff, while on the right are some things that came from online auctions and a couple items from the Chicago show – that’s the 2015 show:

The next drawer has a few things which came from a collection that was offered to me online:

Here’s more from that same collection on the left. On the right are things which came from the “mother lode” I picked up at the Philadelphia Pen Show – again, from 2015:

On the left are some online finds. On the right is the 2015 Baltimore show stuff:

Some random online finds:

I don’t even remember where this next drawer of stuff came from. On the right I’ve been grouping together some Ever-Rite and Sta-Rites:

More online finds;

I should get stock in eBay:

Here’s Chicago 2015 on the left, and I’ve been loosely pulling together Rite-Rites on the . . . rite:

On the left here is Philly 2016, and Chicago 2016 is on the right:

Here’s Baltimore 2016

I got on a German pencil kick at the beginning of this year, so that’s mostly Pelikans on the left. On the right is more online finds and the things I brought home from the Springfield (Ohio) Extravaganza last month:

And then there’s the stuff that hasn’t made it into the cabinet yet. The stuff on the left is a mix of show and tell stuff I took to Raleigh a few weeks ago and the things I found there. There’s some online finds piled hastily on top, and the rest of my Raleigh stash is under that flap.

Add to all this unphotographed stuff all of the things I’ve managed to get photographed but haven’t written about yet, and fear not – I suspect if I never bought another pencil, I’d have enough to write about for many years to come.

What’s nice is that out of all these, I know exactly which one I’m going to write about first . . .

That first article is here.

Saturday, July 23, 2016

A Tantalizing Lead for Waterman Historians

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As I prepare to fire things up here in the next couple weeks, I’ve stumbled into something that might be nothing . . . but it might also be something fairly important to students of the early history of the L.E. Waterman Company. Since there have been several articles written by people who have researched this early history heavily, I thought it would be best to lob this one out there and see what others think. It involves this pair of magic pencils, which I’ve been meaning to write about for some time:

The only thing about these which is unconventional is the unusual name they share, imprinted on the extenders: Ray Mfg. Co.:

I’ve only been able to learn a few details about the Ray Manufacturing Company, but the few that I have found are fascinating. The earliest reference to the company is from 1874, when a young Frank T. Pearce left his job at Richard Cross & Sons (before the latter was known as A.T. Cross, after Richard’s son Alonzo) to become Ray’s western sales representative. According to Pearce’s obituary, Pearce worked for Ray until 1880, when he started his own firm, originally as a partnership under the name of Pearce & Hoagland:

But then there’s this: a small narrative in the August, 1884 edition of The Jewelers’ Circular and Horological Review, which shows the Ray Manufacturing Company’s addresses at 94 and 96 Nassau Street, as well as 129, 131 and 133 Fulton Street, New York:

Hmmm.... the Fulton Street address, right across the street from a cigar store at 136 Fulton, might provide an interesting new detail in the L.E. Waterman story. Those who have been read The Pennant will recall a series of articles written by Daniel Kirchheimer and George Rimakis, “Blotting Out the Truth,” in which they established that a man named Frank Holland, from Manchester, Connecticut, abruptly set up shop in a corner of that cigar store in 1883 to sell his new Holland Automatic fountain pens. Frank Holland then abandoned the enterprise just as abruptly, leaving behind his salesman, Lewis Edson Waterman, to tinker with Holland pens and come up with what would become the Waterman feed.

Holland’s choice of location doesn’t seem nearly so random when one considers that it was directly across the street from a manufacturer of hard rubber tubing.and gold pens. And if Waterman, left in a lurch, needed hard rubber tubing in a hurry imprinted with his name rather than Holland’s, where better to find these parts than a place just a few yards from his front window, which supplied hard rubber parts “drawn to order at short notice”?

It’s an intriguing possibility – especially since Ray appears nowhere in New York Directories of the time.

My friend George Kovalenko posted an article over on his blog, fountainpenhistory.blogspot.com, in which he indicates that Waterman placed an order for his new feeds with a man named Herbert Fisher – but Fisher promptly turned around and applied for a patent for the new feed in his own name, causing years of patent complications that wouldn’t be resolved in Waterman’s favor for many years (George’s article was posted at http://fountainpenhistory.blogspot.com/2016/03/watermans-v-shipmans.html). Would Waterman have placed subsequent orders with Fisher after this treachery?

There’s more . . . maybe. It comes in the form of the Ray Manufacturing Company’s obituary:

According to this reference, the Ray Manufacturing Company was dissolved in 1888.

The year 1888 is equally important in L.E. Waterman’s history. Waterman’s former partner, the stationer Asa Simpson, had a mortgage interest in Waterman’s patents, and in April and May, 1888 he began making a competing pen using Waterman patents -- only to die later that year. Waterman, for his part, founds the L.E. Waterman Company.

Ray disappears – and the L.E. Waterman Company is making its own pens – in 1888. Was Ray simply dismantled into oblivion? Or did a new owner of its equipment simply pick up where it left off?