The Leadhead's Pencil Blog

Monday, September 12, 2016

Clearing Up the Victorian Backlog

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.

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

Since I had such a blind spot when it came to Victorian pencils when I wrote The Catalogue, that’s been an area into which I’ve worked to expand my horizons over the last couple of years. It’s also the area which has pushed me most to hone my photography skills, since the details you need to see to appreciate them are rarely visible to the naked eye. I’ve been frustrated with my limitations as a photographer, and the drawers of new acquisitions in my printer’s cabinet were getting crowded with Victorian pencils awaiting some decent photographs – or a decent photographer.

Here’s some of the “before” pictures, from the days when I was still fumbling around with a camera and doing the best I can, of a few magic pencils:

Photography is always tradeoffs – if I put this against a darker background, the colors would pop more, but the shutter would stay open longer, making it harder to stay in focus. To let in more light, you can open up the aperture more, but then you lose the depth of field. It was driving me crazy. The closeups were good enough to convey the information, but that’s about all. We’ve got a Kurtz & Moneghan:

A couple “Mabies Patent Oct. 3 1854":

An “A.G. Day”:

An Edward Todd:

and finally, an unmarked piece with an interesting finial:

I had plenty of readers cursing the darkness of my pictures (and my photography skills), but none were stepping up to light a candle, other than the vague and unhelpful “get better lighting” comments. Then, after I posted one unfortunate picture, my friend Daniel Kirchheimer used a couple magic words that changed everything: “spot metering” and “aperture priority.” “Spot metering” is a setting on a camera which allows you to measure the light – and therefore set the exposure – at a certain point in the frame, rather than having the camera gauge the overall light in the picture and average things out.

“Aperture priority” is a setting on your camera which allows you to control how open or closed the opening is – the smaller the aperture (higher the setting), the more depth of focus you have.

Put these two together, and you’ve got better colors up close with better focus. So instead of that first picture:

I can get this:

When it comes to getting in close for the imprints, though, another issue emerges. On the Kurtz & Moneghan, I was able to get a nice shot of the imprint using spot metering on the aperture priority setting, because the reds didn’t darken up the picture so much that the shutter needed to stay open forever and a day:

But when I went to zoom in on the Mabie Todd, using spot metering on a black object that close meant that most of the pictures came out blurry – even with a tripod – and the one that was passable doesn’t even look like the same pencil:

However, when I shot it in automatic mode without a flash, the picture was way too dark:

Here’s where the third tool in my new arsenal came to good use: Lightroom, a photo editing program. Using Lightroom, you can very easily adjust the level of exposure, lighter or darker, to adjust for these issues. This trick only works, however, if the digital information is present in the original shot to start with: since my spot metered shot registered nearly all of the cap as just “white,” even when I backed off the exposure significantly, the detail in the cap just wasn’t there to enhance:

However, the shot done on automatic settings, when increased by about a stop and a third, was exactly what I was trying to capture:

Note that there’s not as much depth of focus, but the imprint is crisp and the colors are correct – that’s what I’m looking for, so I’m happy with this. So I used all the new tools in my bag to reshoot the remaining images. The A.G. Day is truly almost gone, so there wasn’t much more to catch, but the rest of them turned out much nicer than I was able to do before.

Now that I’ve finally been shown how to get the photographs I’ve been trying to shoot for years, I felt ready to take on that backlog of Victorians I’ve been meaning to tell you about. That starts tomorrow . . .

Sunday, September 11, 2016

And I Called Myself a Pencil Collector

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My futile attempts to limit my collecting to American-made pencils tended to exclude pencils like these from my shelves:

The pencil is generally referred to as a “Lund,” for the English patent issued to William Lund in 1856 - I don’t think that’s right, because I found an index of English patents applied for and issued during that year, and the only mention of Lund is with respect to a clip for retaining papers:

Another source indicated that Lund might have purchased his patent rights from a William Riddle, who patented the pencil in 1848; that appears closer to the truth, because I did find a listing for a pencil patented by William Riddle on December 21, 1848:

The index isn’t very helpful, but The June 30, 1849 edition of Mechanics’ Magazine, Museum, Register, Journal and Gazette picked up the Riddle patent and reprinted the entire specification:

If this comes off sounding particularly American, my apologies . . . but pictures would be helpful. Midway down the left column, though, you can see it: “Or, a slate pencil or other marking substance is placed in the longitudinal groove of a stem which has a spiral cut on its periphery, and extending from end to end.”

Unfortunately, none of the sources I found included drawings, so I don’t have an image to share with you. Lunds are distinguished by that external corkscrew: a metal band which threads onto the barrel surrounds a bracket, so twisting the band effectively advances and retracts the lead:

I did find a short history of the Lunds on a fan site for one of the company’s other products: corkscrews. The following is posted over at vintagecorkscrewcenter.com (the full link is http://www.vintagecorkscrewcenter.com/some-famous-corkscrew-makers/the-story-of-thomas-and-william-lund,-london-16693072):

“Thomas Lund first established his business in 1804 . He moved to 57 Cornhill, London in 1814. His main business at the time besides boxes was manufacturing pens and importing filtering stones for water treatment. His profession was inherited from his father who died 1806. In the monthly magazine from 1806 his father was mentioned as the first ivory turner in York. Logically, Thomas Lund entered the same profession. . . .

“By 1820 he added a copying machine business to the company. However, this seems not has been his main business. Furthermore, he was probably not making corkscrews at this time. At least not what we know of. He still made various boxes and diversified into making dressing cases. These cases usually included a very small corkscrew. There are known cases from around 1815.. . .

“William Lund joined his father 1835 and took over the whole business 1845. Unfortunately, there are not many personal records of the Lund family. In fact, there is nothing in the history books.”

The Lunds were famous for making several other things, including quality boxes. Another website, http://www.antiquebox.org/lund/, explains that William took over the business in 1845 due to Thomas’ death that year:

“Thomas and William ran their businesses independently, but after Thomas’s death in 1845, William took over the running of both, whilst also expanding his own premises to include 23 Fleet Street. By 1859, the Fleet Street premises had again expanded to include No. 25.

“When William Lund died in 1872, his son Charles continued on the business under the name of William Lund & Son.”

There’s a picture of William Lund at both sites:

At the DC show, I had the opportunity to purchase an entire collection of Victorian pencils and, after reassuring the finance department of the family that yes, we would still be able to have dinner and maybe even some gas money to get home, I pulled the trigger. Only about a third of the collection is going into mine, including these two:

The smaller of the two is unmarked, but the larger one has “Lund Patentee London” inscribed on the lower portion of the spiral. I’ve been looking for an example with this detail for a long, long time:

Unmarked examples might have been made after the patent expired, and some commentators have noted that they may not actually have been made by Lund, either. I don’t know.

Until this one came my way, the only other pencil in my collection which approached a Lund was the W.P. Wallace “20th Century” pencil, a cheaper American knockoff (the full story. . . or at least as much of it as I know . . . is at http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2012/10/when-20th-century-was-forward-thinking.html).

Although I’m still not any closer to knowing more about Mr. Wallace or his 20th Century pencil, I’ve got a better answer to those who have said, “You call yourself a pencil collector and you don’t have a Lund?”

Saturday, September 10, 2016

'Salrite Update

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Coincidences seem to follow me around as I write these articles. A few weeks ago my west coast connection Michael McNeil (Northwest Pen Works) sent me a couple pictures of pen trays to look at. Here’s the picture he sent me:

That pencil on the far left is another example of the ‘Salrite; since I’ve got a few full sized ones like that, I almost passed on it, except there was what appeared to be a bit of decorative scrollwork around the cap unlike the plain raised rib I would expect to see. So I bit.

There was more to the story.

Since Michael’s picture was taken at an angle from the nose end, I couldn’t see a couple other interesting things about this one. The pencil arrived the very day part 2 of the ‘Salrite saga posted here (http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2016/09/before-salz-was-salz-part-ii.html), and of course it changes a few things I wrote. Here is a shot of Michael's pencil from a better angle:

Yes, it has the decorative scrollwork like the gold-filled example I posted about a couple days ago (see http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2016/09/before-salz-was-salz-part-iii.html), but it’s rendered in the same nickel-plated trim found on the other black hard rubber examples – but with an exposed eraser, a feature I’ve never seen on a ‘Salrite:

But wait, as Billy Mays would say . . . there’s more. That’s not the most interesting part about that cap:

In “Before Salz Was Salz Part 1" (http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2016/09/before-salz-was-salz-part-i.html) I indicated that Lucifer Most was awarded two patents for the pencil – the patent date usually found on metal Sta-Sharp and ‘Salrite pencils is December 23, 1919, but an earlier patent application Most filed was not awarded until June 20, 1922.

In “Before Salz Was Salz Part 2" (http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2016/09/before-salz-was-salz-part-ii.html) I noted that the hard rubber ‘Salrites are marked on the cap with the December 23, 1919 date, but that the barrels are also marked with “Other Patents Pending.”

“The ‘others pending’ doubtless refers to Lucifer J. Most’s 1922 patent, which was applied for in 1918 but wasn’t issued until 1922,” I said. I was wrong: the patent date seen here is May 2, 1922, not June 20, and it wasn’t issued to Lucifer Most:

On November 27, 1920, James Salz applied for what would be issued on May 2, 1922 as patent number 1,414,752, for a “hard rubber pencil.” The patent was assigned to Pencil Products Corporation.

That clarifies something else I wrote in Part 1, in which I noted that one of the incorporators of The Pencil Products Corporation was “J. Salz.” At the time, I couldn’t tell whether “J.” was Ignatz’ brother James or his other brother, Jacob – fair to say it was James, in light of this patent.

But wait . . . There’s even more. Note from the patent drawings that James’ patent shows an internal tube with a pushrod that engages the threaded inner walls of the barrel? I can’t for the life of me figure out how this wasn’t a violation of Charles Keeeran’s patent for the Eversharp . . . but no worries: that isn’t what’s inside this pencil:

There’s a unique little pushrod inside, with two holes drilled into the flange at one end so that it threads onto a spring:

Once threaded in place, the flange engages into a slot inside, so that turning the top causes the plunger to advance and retract, while the lead is held in place by the tip.

Just like an Autopoint, except the rod is attached inside the barrel instead of being threaded into the tip. Oh, wait... exactly like an early Autopoint.

I’ve started going through 1920s patents in my book (American Writing Instrument Patents Volume 2: 1911-1945) indexed under “Mechanical pencil (screw drive)" and I’m finding some promising leads, but I’m surprised I’m not seeing this unique propeller rod yet. The most promising patent I’ve found was issued to Julius Swanberg, applied for on April 2, 1924 and issued on May 24, 1927 as number 1,629,766:

The only differences between this and the Salrite are that the top is threaded in place on the Swanberg patent and the pushrod is designed differently. Other than that, this pencil is identical to this ‘Salrite – it even shows in Figure 5 holes drilled in the barrel for spare leads, just like the ‘Salrite. Research continues on this one.

In the meantime, consider one last point – which comes from the first thing I noticed from this pencil when Michael sent me the picture: I was hoping that this pencil might have some more clues tying together the stories of the Pencil Products Corporation and the Chase Pencil Corporation, and it does. Since the only example I’ve seen of a ‘Salrite with a 1922 patent date is also the only one that has this scrollwork, I believe this feature was added late in the ‘Salrite’s run. That is consistent with my hypothesis that Salz turned over the brand to Chase, which was manufacturing these pencils all along, after clan Salz butted heads with the Federal Trade Commission and Shur-Rite.

Friday, September 9, 2016

Most's Influence On Sheaffer

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(Note: This series of articles began at

http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2016/09/before-salz-was-salz-part-i.html)

For some time, I’ve been looking at Sheaffer “Titan” flattops – the big boys – and noting a subtle difference: some have short tops, and some have much longer ones:

Consistently, what I’m finding is that the shorter tops designate the older style eraser, mounted on the other end of the drive tube, while the longer ones conceal an eraser mounted on the end of the pencil itself:

I know that longer cap is a little beat up, but there’s a reason I hold onto it:

As a loyal member of the Elks, I couldn’t cast off an example of our fraternal emblem atop the cap! That, however, is an aside to our story. After yesterday’s story about how Lucifer Most, before he went into business with the Salz brothers in a new venture called the Pencil Products Corporation, invented a fountain pen which captured Walter Sheaffer’s attention, who then “co-invented” Most’s first pencil design with him.

Now I’m interested to see whether the redesigned version of Sheaffer’s flattop pens showed indications of the young inventor’s influence. Titan pencils, like all other Sheaffer flattops, are built like tanks and they were not meant to be disassembled . . .

And don’t worry. I’m not about to go and try to tear apart a cherry red Sheaffer Titan. I did, however, acquire a promising test subject or two. A friend of mine gave me a few damaged Sheaffer flattop pencils at the Raleigh show, including a long cap model. Since they weren’t much good for anything else, I decided to do whatever I had to do to pull it apart so I could show you what’s inside:

This is the Cuthbert/Lindemon patent works:

The direct descendant of Lucifer Most’s patent.

Thursday, September 8, 2016

The Company With The Most

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(Note: the first installment in this series is at

http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2016/09/before-salz-was-salz-part-i.html).

The fascinating and tantalizing detail that came to light during the previous articles about the rise and fall of the Sta-Sharp and ‘Salrite pencils involved the exit of Lucifer J. Most from the Pencil Products Company. Most’s departure appeared at first to have been heralded by the patent application he applied for on September 24, 1922, which was issued on September 1, 1925 as number 1,551,604 and was assigned not to Pencil Products Corporation, but to Mabie Todd & Co.:

Did you notice something about Lucifer’s new pencil?

Doesn’t that remind you of something else?

The opening article for this series of stories at Leadhead’s was about a goofy Sheaffer pencil, and the fact that as it turns out, all of the early Sheaffer Balance pencils were equipped with that internally goofy mechanism shown in patent number 1,900,669, featuring a prominent bushing at the forward end that makes these unusually difficult to disassemble. There was something else I didn’t tell you at the time, because I wasn’t sure how this detail fit into the story:

That wasn’t the first Sheaffer patent along these lines.

William R. Cuthbert and William H. Lindemon applied for patent number 1,653,151 on March 24, 1922 – before Lucifer J. Most applied for his patent for Mabie Todd – and notwithstanding the similarities between the two designs, it was Most’s patent that was issued before the Cuthbert/Lindemon patent.

But Most wasn’t copying from Cuthbert and Lindemon. It was the other way around:

On November 12, 1920, Lucifer J. Most and Walter A. Sheaffer himself filed an application for what would be issued as patent number 1,675,826 – but not until many years later, on July 3, 1928. Note the plug (the patent description calls it a “block”) at the nose.

We know from other examples that Walter A. Sheaffer likely had nothing to do with inventing pencils (I still haven’t serialized my article from The Pennant, "Wahl, Sheaffer and the Race for Boston, Part II," in which I presented the evidence that Sheaffer was not the inventor of the original Sheaffer Sharp Point). How did Most get on Sheaffer’s radar? Simple - Most’s first patent was for a lever-filled fountain pen, filed on January 20, 1916; just after William A. Smith left Walter Sheaffer’s employ to begin selling pens for the Boston Fountain Pen Company. Sheaffer, fresh out of court from having sued Kraker and awaiting the court’s decision, would have been keenly aware of what the then 21-year-old inventor was up to.

Stringing the clues together from the last few stories, the story that emerges is as follows:

1. The Salz Brothers go into business with Lucifer J. Most in 1919, to manufacture Salz Sta-Sharp pencils, which Most invented in 1918 and perfected in 1919;

2. Around the time the ‘Salrite name is adopted, in mid-1920 or so, Lucifer either leaves or is ejected from the Pencil Products Corporation.

3. Pencil Products Corporation retained Most’s patent rights, but doesn’t have the desire or ability to continue the manufacture of metal pencils; therefore, Salz hires the Chase Pencil Corporation to manufacture a hard rubber version. Pencil Products Corporation continues in name only.

4. Lucifer either freelances a patent to Sheaffer in late 1920 or is briefly hired by Sheaffer on his reputation for inventing the successful Salz Sta-Sharp.

5. By 1922, Lucifer has found a new home at Mabie, Todd & Co., where he apparently spends the rest of his career.

6. Pencil Products Corporation runs into legal trouble over the use of the ‘Salrite name in 1923 and disbands. In 1924, Chase Pencil Corporation makes a brief but unsuccessful attempt to continue producing the Salrite, probably under a different name. Salz Brothers incorporates pencil production into its regular line of lower-quality pens.

Additional glimpses into Lucifer’s life come indirectly from his mother’s memoir, Storm in My Heart: Memories from the Widow of Johann Most (a fascinating read, by the way – it’s available on Google books at https://books.google.com/books?id=yRtjCgAAQBAJ&pg=PT18&lpg=PT18&dq=%22lucifer+j.+most%22&source=bl&ots=Md_A7qB-pC&sig=pK1DiwiRRCJ369-4lw4cDKnnd_Y&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwij0Jzx4fLNAhWFRCYKHf3qDHUQ6AEILTAE#v=onepage&q=%22lucifer%20j.%20most%22&f=false). Helene Most, who usually went by Minken, was the last wife of Johann Most, a Jewish Russian Immigrant who was a socialist and anarchist activist as well as founder and editor of a radical newspaper, Freiheit. Johann became active in the socialist movement in Germany, and was forced to relocate to New York in June, 1888. When Johann decided to start a family with Helene in 1893, he became somewhat alienated from the movement – prominent activists thought he was going soft.

Although Johann was never convicted of any violent crime, he publicly advocated the use of dynamite to topple America’s capitalist system and was frequently arrested for inciting others to riot. Johann died in 1906; Helene tried to keep the Freiheit going until more hard line elements of the socialist movement in America forced her out.

Into this environment Lucifer was born in 1895, the fourth and youngest of Helene’s children. When the United States entered World War I, Lucifer enlisted. His first patent application was filed in August, 1918, suggesting that his tour of duty was over before the war ended in November. Since Helene’s memoir is primarily about her infamous husband Johann, it doesn’t provide much detail about Most’s life – in fact, after World War I her papers indicate only that he was a “salesman.” He moved to Lake Hopatcong, New Jersey after World War II, living in a house on an island in the middle of Raccoon Island until he died on August 26, 1949.

Lucifer was survived by wife Nadia and two sons, Norman and John. John’s son, Johnny M. Most, became well known as a sportscaster for the Boston Celtics until his death in 1993.

(Tomorrow's article, showing how Lucifer Most influenced Sheaffer's pencil designs, is at http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2016/09/mosts-influence-on-sheaffer.html).

Wednesday, September 7, 2016

Before Salz Was Salz, Part III

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(Note: the first part of this story can be found at http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2016/09/before-salz-was-salz-part-i.html).

Where we left off yesterday, the last mention of the ‘Salrite – and what should have been the eulogy which laid the brand comfortably to rest – was an advertisement from December, 1923, in which the pencils are described as “mottled or black.” While I understand it’s difficult to hold an advertiser hawking closeouts to strict details concerning the blowout pricing of a discontinued brand, I thought Salrites were made only in black hard rubber:

Until last summer, when this monster popped up in an online auction:

Not just mottled hard rubber, but with gold filled . . . ok, goldish filledish trim?

Note that clip? It isn’t the usual banded ‘Salrite clip, either. It appears to be the same clip used on the all-metal ‘Salrites before they were discontinued. The unmarked cap has some fine detail work to it – it fits neither into the Sta-Sharp nor ‘Salrite usual lines:

It is, however, all ‘Salrite. All you need do is unscrew the nose to examine the patented spare lead chambers – from which it received the Salz moniker in early advertisements, “The Machine Gun of Commerce”:

So is this an early transitional model, made while all metal pencil clips were still available and before Pencil Products had settled on plain black and plain nickel trim? Or was it a last gasp, hail Mary attempt to spruce up the brand in late 1923, as suggested by that December advertisement which was the only one to indicate there were mottled hard rubber examples?

I'm still not entirely sure, but I got another clue . . . just before the Chicago show this year, this one popped up online:

Note that the clip and tip, unlike the other example, are nickel plate:

This one has two of those great wide bands:

And on the reverse is a clue not found on any other ‘Salrite:

Chase Pencil Corporation. I had never heard of the company, and a Google search turned up nothing. However, when I searched Newspapers.com, I did get one hit which might explain a few things:

This “help wanted” advertisement, which ran on November 5, 1924 in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, states that the Chase Pencil Corporation was a New York City manufacturer, established three years (the first ads for the ‘Salrite appeared in September, 1921), and still making a “meritorious product.” It would appear, connecting the dots, that the Chase Pencil Corporation, and not the Pencil Products Corporation, was the actual manufacturer of the ‘Salrite.

I’m still no closer to answering the question of whether these mottled hard rubber examples are from the beginning of the line, at the end of the line, or are a previously undocumented deluxe model that ran the continuum. Nor am I any closer to knowing exactly what sort of cap this new example would have had, since this one is missing and mix-and-match was apparently par for the course on the Chase Pencil Corporation assembly line. For the time being, though, I couldn’t believe my luck when this part jumped out of Rob Bader’s junk box at the Raliegh show:

Yeah, it’s a nickel trimmed Salrite cap, complete with “Pencil Products Corp.” and the 1919 patent date, but what the heck:

On a pencil with a nickel plated tip and clip, and wide gold filled bands, who’s to say that’s not what they did?

(Tomorrow: more about inventor Lucifer Most. Article is at http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-company-with-most.html.)