Talk About Reverse Trim

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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It’s been a long time since I’ve picked up one of Eversharp’s “half Coronets.”  I don’t remember the origins of the nickname, but it’s a good one and it stuck.  Here’s the Coronets I pictured in 

The Catalogue, at page 69:

Out of all of these, only the example on the far left, with the greenish lower barrel, was actually referred to by Eversharp as a “Coronet.”  The all-metal pencils were – unimaginatively – called the all metal pencil matching Eversharp’s all-metal pens.  All these other versions were called simply repeating pencils.

What you see in The Catalogue has been about it.  I found one a while back which might have had a grey plastic lower barrel instead of blue (see http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2015/12/what-color-is-this.html), but other than the occasional upgrade to add a price-stickered example, this has been about it (that’s a challenge to you out there, to show me an example that isn’t in the book).

Until the Ohio Show, at which I added the first variant to my collection since at least before I wrote the book:

Here it is shown alongside it’s closest relatives:

I’ve seen a few of these backwards half Coronets, with the plastic on the top end rather than the lower – a really cool variation especially when shown alongside a normal one.  But all the ones I’ve ever seen have that metal band at the top end, while this one has nothing.

The imprints are different, too:

Most of them have the “Genuine Eversharp Made in USA” imprint lengthwise on the barrel, but this one has what I believe to be the earlier “Genuine Eversharp Patented” imprint around the top (probably when the litigation between Gilfred and Eversharp started, which resulted in the invalidation of Gilfred’s patent on the repeating pencil mechanism, which Eversharp blatantly copied, in 1942 – see http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2011/12/my-find-of-year.html).

And, of course, it didn’t hurt my feelings a bit that this one has a price sticker on it:

Model 3014SC.  If we ever find an Eversharp catalog listing all these, that bit of information might well come in handy.

Another Barrel of Lead

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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Pearce Jarvis brought this one along with him to the Ohio Show.  He knew I wouldn’t be able to resist:

This is a Sager, made by Solomon M. Sager’s Sager Pen Corproration, which was famous for it’s plunger-filler pens which held so much ink, Sager trademarked the phrase “Sager Barrel-Of-Ink.”  I’ve always thought it was funny that the barrel-o-ink logo was carried onto the company’s line of pencils, as well:

This example joins two others in my collection, and while it doesn’t have the same pizzazz when it comes to color, the flat top is a kind of interesting development:

The other interesting development occurred when I took this one apart.  I haven’t pulled a Sager apart before:

Recognize that?

Did Sheaffer make Sager’s pencils?  I believe they did.

Cleeland's Inshuro in Cleveland

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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When Howard Edelstein offered me a bunch of pencils at the Ohio Show, this was one of the ones I was just itching to get home and research:

This one has a great pattern, reminiscent of something made by Cross:

The imprint at the top, however, was not something I had seen before:

“Sterling / Inshuro / Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. / Pittsburgh, PA USA.”   When I got home, I plugged “Inshuro Pittsburg” into my browser and promptly found out . . . well, I found out about as much as I think is out there.  I found an advertisement from The Pittsburgh Press on May 12, 1918, in which the “Cleeland Inshuro Pen Company” of Butler, Pennsylvania (note that the name was misspelled “Inshruo,” so thank heavens they got it right earlier in the ad) was looking for sales representatives for the Inshuro pen, “unconditionally insured for five years.”

That summer, notice was published in The India Rubber World that a trademark had been granted for “a horizontally elongated diamond with the word Inshuro within,” providing serial number 108,242 for the registration:

That made it easy to find the actual trademark reported in The Official Gazette on April 30, 1918.  The company claimed it first used the mark as of January 1, 1917:

On a hunch, I looked up “Cleeland” in American Writing Instrument Patents Vol. 2: 1911-1945, and I hit paydirt: Roy A. Cleeland applied for a design patent on June 22, 1922, and it was granted on February 5, 1924 as Design Patent number 63,874.  Best of all was that the patent was not for just any design, but for the exact design found on my example:

Roy A. Cleeland was a jeweler from Butler, Pennsylvania.  Here’s an advertisement from the Pittsburgh Post Gazette in 1914:

In September of 1922, the stationers’ press reported on the incorporation of the Inshuro Pen Company – no mention of Cleeland – by a John Hughes in Pennsylvania:

The incorporation of the new company, ironically, is the last thing I could find about it.  Well, except for maybe one other small thing:

The same month the incorporation of the new Inshuro Pen Company was announced, an advertisement ran in the Akron Beacon Journal for sales representatives for the “Inshuro Reg. U.S. Patent Office,” but the address was for the “Cleveland Inshuro Pen Company.”

Cleeland’s Inshuro, without Cleeland, in Cleveland – what are the odds?

A Flash of Style from the House of Faber

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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I paid more than I could justify for this one in an online auction:

That great green lizard-skin celluloid is really eye catching, and the chrome accents really set this one apart nicely.

It’s an Eberhard Faber, a brand I’ve always liked but which I have been even more in tune with since that series of articles I posted detailing the company’s history.  The celluloid is a little reminiscent of some of those pencils in the Permapoint series, but a little brighter.  It’s just something fun to look at on a lazy winter’s Sunday.

Big Pencil on Campus

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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I just kind of like this one.  Maybe it’s that great clip:

Zooming in at the top of the clip is the name: “Campus.”

I’m trying to imagine how this would help a freshman get beat up less than in high school, wearing a combination tie clasp/pencil proudly to one’s first day of class.  Who knows?  Maybe these will come back in style one of these days, along with the fedora.

A Forest of Tree Trunks

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You won’t see a picture like this anytime soon again:

That’s because as rare as these are, you’re not likely to see three of them together, and Joe Nemecek and I would like to get a head count to see just how many of these things are acutally out there.  These are Eversharps with custom caps made by the same unknown maker who turned out the Waterman “tree trunk” overlay pens - right down to the mold seams on the caps showing they were made using a three-part mold.

I’ve written about these before (at http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2013/01/it-pays-to-chat.html and http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-red-herring.html), but after I found a second example, I asked Joe Nemecek to bring his along to the Ohio Show so that we could compare them.

I have some new observations to report.

This started when I bought my second example online from Stephen Overbury; I bought it because, with as few of these as are out there, every little clue we can pull out of them might help finally identify who made these – and likely who made similar tree trunk pens on Waterman’s chassis.

Stephen’s example turned out to be identical in every respect to mine:

With the cap removed (and the mechanism still screwed into it), they are more obviously Eversharps:

The caps were made around an ordinary Eversharp cap, with a Wahl Eversharp clip riveted to the outside of the new cap and further secured with a layer of metal poured around it:

Completely disassembled, here’s a tree trunk pencil shown next to the parts from a “normal” Eversharp:

Both of mine have identical imprints:

“Wahl Eversharp / Triple Plated Pat. Made in USA”

That prompted an email to Joe Nemecek, to find out what imprint his has and his answer?  None.  None?  Joe reminded me that I found no imprint the last time I had it apart, but when I couldn’t find whatever pictures I took at the time, I asked him to bring it with him to the Ohio Show so that I could take another look and we could compare.  Sure enough, Joe’s has no imprint whatsoever, but I think I know why:

The barrel is shorter, and from the way the top on Joe’s has been countersunk, it would appear that his has been trimmed off, right through where the imprint would have been:

The barrel is a bit shorter, but the cap on Joe’s is just a little bit longer, maybe to compensate for the barrel being shortened?  Seems odd, since the cap telescopes down over the barrel and seats.  The extra length of the cap does nothing to make up the overall length of the pencil:

A thought occurred to me, and maybe this is another direction in which we can focus our research.  I’ve seen one other Eversharp pencil, with the imprint obliterated and non-Eversharp features added:

This pencil features a George T. Byers patented snake clip.  You’ve seen it here before at http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-one-that-kept-me-awake-at-night.html, in which I concluded that it was probably was not made by Byers, who had given up his shenanigans by 1918 and was a respectable partner in Byers & Hayes.  Likely someone else had set up a nice business customizing Eversharps.  Could the same craftsman have made the Eversharp tree trunk pencils?

John Wahl's Parlor Games

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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John C. Wahl gets a bad rap from history as the corporate tycoon who swindled Charles Keeran out of Keeran’s Ever Sharp pencil and led the greedy board of directors at The Wahl Adding Machine Company to purchase the Boston Fountain Pen Company. 

Largely forgotten is that John Wahl was a prolific and gifted inventor in his own right, and almost as soon as his company started making pencils for Charles Keeran’s Eversharp Pencil Company, Wahl started coming up with improvements and designs of his own.

He even came up with a few new looks for the pencils, for which he applied for design patents.  Here’s Design patent 56,681, applied for on November 18, 1918 and issued November 23, 1920, for a goofy fleur-des-lis pattern:

Then John got on a bridge pencil tear, applying for three versions of pencils with card suit motifs on December 6, 1920, which were all issued on March 15, 1921 as design patent numbers 57,403, 57,404 and 57,405:

Apparently he forgot to apply for a fourth version, number 58,516, which he applied for a few weeks later on January 17, 1921.  It was issued July 26, 1921:

I found a gold-filled example of the fleur-des-lis pattern a while ago, by my photography limitations have hindered my efforts to shoot decent pictures of it.  At the Ohio Show Rob Bader swapped me a sterling example for a Sheaffer desk base, and so I took another “shot” at it:

Both of these have a telltale detail which dates them precisely to 1917 or 1918, when the word “Wahl” had been added to the imprints but before the company contracted “Ever Sharp” to one word:

As for John Wahl’s neat bridge pencil designs, I had never found any evidence that any made it into production . . . until this year’s Ohio Show, at which Don Lamkin had this one on his table:

There’s a couple really interesting things about this piece – other than the obvious, which is that an Eversharp bridge pencil has finally surfaced.  But note also that this one doesn’t match any of  Wahl’s design patents: there’s six rows of card suit symbols rather than just four, and it’s completely unmarked: unless you knew about John Wahl’s bridge pencil craze, you might think this was a foreign copy of the Eversharp.

The pencil appears to be sterling with gold over the ends and the card suit emblems

Perhaps the fact that this example is unmarked might explain why it’s been so difficult to turn one of these up: it wouldn’t show up in a search for “Eversharps” online unless the seller know that’s what it was.  But now that I know . . .

I’m going to have to search “card pencil,” “bridge pencil” and anything else I can think of that might turn up other variants in the future!