The Leadhead's Pencil Blog

Thursday, January 5, 2017

Back to Sioux City

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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Here’s an updated family picture of my Kaligraf pencils, those lever-advance pencils made by the General Manufacturing Company of Sioux City, Iowa. I won’t say they are “lever filled,” because the lever scoots the lead forward a bit as you press it flush with the barrel from the raised position.

I’ve written about these before here, at http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2013/02/martin-borbecks-busy-day.html. Last year, Joe and I got all of ours together for another one of those shots you won’t see:

The straight side clip model was Joe’s until he traded it to me at the Ohio Show - he has picked up a second example with an unusual feature: a green top cap:

But what prompts me to revisit the issue is the really weird roller clip, the lowermost example in that first picture:

It attaches to the barrel the same way, but instead of an upturned tang at the end of the clip, this one wraps around a little metal barbell that remains free to turn:

Although it might look like a really elegant design, there’s only one problem: on the thin round barrel of the pencil, it doesn’t work as a roller clip because the roller’s don’t even touch the barrel:

There’s no record of this clip that I can find in the patent record, and the only markings on the pencil are the usual Borbeck patent imprint. As soon as I had won this one in an online auction, I was excited to post a picture in an online discussion group, and I mentioned that I had not seen a clip like this one anywhere. Andrew Timar, on the other hand, had:

Andrew’s clip is an accommodation model marked “Made in Japan,” fitted on a glass-nibbed crescent filling pen similar to those imported by Spors – but unlike most, not marked with the Spors trademark on the crescent. Spors was an importer of German and Japanese novelties during the early 1930s; I wrote about them a while back after I figured out that their trademark was the one I had found on a pencil I had consigned to the dead letter office (http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2014/12/one-less-envelope-in-dead-letter-office.html):

The products Spors imported were usually imitative of the products of others; hence the replication of a Conklin Crescent Filler. Here’s a couple other examples of Spors imports I’ve picked up along the way:

The “Lady Spors” ringtop is nothing unusual, but note that the “Spors” incorporates a version of Conklin’s Mooney clip.

I’m careful to say at this point that we don’t know that Spors was responsible for importing all of them, so Andrew’s unmarked example might have come from another source. Nevertheless, I am confident that whoever made Andrew’s pen copied the clip from somewhere – the Spors glass-nib pens were introduced around 1930, about a decade after the Kaligraf, so maybe that was the inspiration.

If, however, this clip is traced to another source, perhaps this might tell us more about the history behind them.

Wednesday, January 4, 2017

A Couple ZABCO Footnotes

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Recently I posted an article concerning how a goofy ZABCO pencil established to me immediately that an equally goofy Parker Zaner-Bloser prototype I acquired from Dan Zazove was the real deal – independently of the fact that I acquired it from Dan Zazove, whose expertise in such matters is beyond question:

That article was posted at http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2016/08/a-parker-zaner-bloser-from-zabco-era.html. At the Columbus show last November, Dan added a bit of “junk box provenance” - or rather, “junk bag provenance,” when he approached me with a plastic bag full of Zaner Bloser pencils at an eeeeresistable price. Of course I bit - no Columbus native should pass on a bag full of pencils marked with the hometown name.

Most were of the later plastic or painted wood varieties and weren’t very exciting, although there were some neat colors in there I hadn’t seen before. But then there were three more ZABCOs to add to my collection:

All three of these are built the same, except they use standard-sized leads rather than the fat checking lead of my red example. The pencils prove that the reason my red example’s operation has been so confusing has been because it is in fact broken . . . the long tail telescopes into the metal center section when turned to advance the lead.

And . . .

What Columbus native could be without examples in scarlet and gray?

Tuesday, January 3, 2017

A Good Reason to Circle Back Around

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It’s been about two years since I posted something about this really cool Scripto boxed set (http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2015/02/still-feeling-around-for-walls.html), containing a Scripto No. 33 “Duopont” complete with instruction sheet and “Sharpont” leads:

In the nearly two years since, I have found a couple more examples of double-ended Scriptos:

The top one is marked No. 33-47 on the barrel, and is very similar in construction to the No. 33 Duopont. The lower one has ends like the later translucent Scripto school pencils, joined together with a metal center section marked only “Scripto Atlanta.” Both are really cool, but since I didn’t have much new to report about them, these two hadn’t made the cut for an article here.

But then this turned up online:

Although this is along the lines of the one I turned up with translucent ends, these are opaque - not to mention that there’s five of them, on the original store display card. Note that the name has been changed to the more intuitive “Duo-Point,” and there’s one detail at the bottom of the card that piqued my interest:

Patent number 2,362,727 was applied for by Blanchard D. Smith on March 23, 1943, and it was issued on November 14, 1944.

Although I was hoping for something insightful in these drawings regarding double-ended pencils, this “uno-point” pencil design does tell us one thing: it dates this store card to sometime after November, 1944 . . . and given the amount of metal in the barrels, I think it’s safe to assume the card dates to after the end of World War II in August of the following year. My bet would be 1946 or later, after the American industrial machine had retooled to again produce consumer goods.

Finally, the reverse of this card provides one last detail:

A checklist of store display cards to watch out for in the future!

Monday, January 2, 2017

Before Streamlined Meant Round

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I recently asked Joe Nemecek if he had any requests for articles I should write at my blog. Without hesitation, he emailed me a picture of a few of his Parker Duofolds:

You’ve seen this picture before - it was in The Catalogue at page 112. In the caption, in addition to crediting Joe with the picture and ownership of the pencils, I noted that a few of the pencils in the picture had slightly shorter and less ornate bell tops:

“[Joe] believes these to be the earliest Duofold Streamline pencils, before Parker redesigned them to more closely match the pens,” I said. After years of searching, Joe still craved chapter and verse on the subject, and if there was a more definitive answer to be found, he said he’d like to see it.

The Pen Collectors of America’s online library contains two Parker catalogs of interest on the subject. The 1927 catalog shows, without exception, flattop pens accompanied with “normal” bell top pencils:

Note that the ringtop at the right has a cap with two ribs - it's just shown with the cap end pushed down flush with the end of the plastic barrel. A shorter catalog bearing a print date of March, 1929 shows the same models - the only change on the comparable page is the switch of the color name from “Chinese Yellow” to “Imperial Mandarin Yellow.”

There’s another catalog in the PCA Library attributed to 1929 (we’ll get to that later), which shows, without exception, streamlined pens accompanied by newly redesigned streamlined pencils:

The most tangible lead Joe had turned up was a page from the October, 1929 issue of the Parkergram, Parker’s in-house company magazine. Joe says he got this from Dan Zazove two or three years ago:

Yes, this page shows both bell top pencils - with the shortened caps - and streamlined pencils. But it falls short of establishing that the short-capped pencils were intended to accompany the first streamlined pens. In fact, the lower left corner shows Duette sets, one with each style of pencil . . . but both with flattop pens, not streamlined ones:

When I went to the PCA library to scour the rest of that October, 1929 Parkergram, I found that issue isn’t (yet) included in the library – sigh. However, I did find a couple of other things which answered the question.

The library contains a pamphlet titled “Graphology: Reading Character from Handwriting” by DeWitt B. Lucas, printed and distributed, according to the subtitle on the cover, “Compliments of the Parker Pen Company.” The document is loaded with advertisements from only one advertiser (you don’t need to guess which one), and has a publication date at the end of June, 1929 – just a couple short months after the March 1929 catalog was published. And look at this two page spread:

This is the earliest documentation I’ve seen of the shortened cap treatment, but they are already being referred to as the old-fashioned STANDARD Parker Duofold pencils here . . . “if you prefer the present style.” The headline, however, for “The New Parker Duofold Streamline Pencil that 72% picked at sight in first sales showings,” clearly indicates that the introduction of the Streamline pencil was intended to be an out with the old, in with the new . . .

While Parker’s entire dealership network had likely just stocked the redesigned old models with shorter caps. Dealers likely complained about such swift planned obsolescence, and what Parker printed in the August, 1929 issue of the Parkergram (that issue is in the PCA library) appears likely to have been a response to such complaints:

In this piece, Parker indicated that both pencils would be offered (and note that the old-style pencil is shown with the earlier, pre-June, 1929 cap) to accompany the new streamlined pens. “Now a CHOICE of Parker Duofold Pencils! — the flashing Standard Gold-Capped Model, or Parker’s new Streamline Duofold to match the Pen!” this announcement proclaims. “For customers who like the heft and looks of the Gold Cap models, Parker will advertise and push them as heavily as ever. Both models will be featured heavily this fall.”

So there’s the answer. No, the shorter cap bell-top pencils were never referred to as streamline pencils, but the “Standard Gold Cap Duofold” was offered to those customers who preferred it. And as for the color catalog in the PCA Library dated 1929? Nowhere on the document itself is there a publication date. Does the PCA Library have the date wrong? Maybe . . . unless Parker had it printed around June of 1929, while the company was printing its “72% prefer the new model” advertisements in Mr. Lucas’ pamphlet and was intending to entirely discontinue gold cap models in favor of the new streamlined ones.

I think Parker suffered some backlash from its dealers after the Lucas pamphlet was out and the new 1929 catalogs were printed in June, 1929, In response, I believe Parker tried to placate them in August with that bit in the Parkergram – promising to “advertise and push” the two models equally in the fall of 1929 – so that dealers would feel better about their chances of moving their recent stock of short Gold Cap models.

Did Parker keep its promise to equally “advertise and push” these short cap Duofold pencils? The pencils are rare, and more than 85 years later it took some digging – to find proof only in a magazine distributed to dealers, not to the general public. No, I think it’s fair to say Parker did not.

Sunday, January 1, 2017

a few thoughts

Who Designed the Sheaffer Sharp Point

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Some time ago, my friend David Nishimura posted an article over at his blog titled “Who Designed the Eversharp Pencil?” (the link is http://vintagepensblog.blogspot.com/2013/12/who-designed-eversharp-pencil.html). He rightly states that the earliest Eversharps, which were made by Heath, were made by retrofitting barrels and caps from Heath’s clutch pencils with Charles Keeran’s new mechanism.

So far, this article sounds like a broken record - I started with that same paragraph here on December 21 as an introduction to my article on the “Every Pound Pulls” pencils made by Heath and Brown & Bigelow. This time, though, I’m bringing up David’s article because I’ve just figured out something:

Sheaffer did the same thing Eversharp did.

Not the “Every Pound Pulls” figural pencil bit - although that would be cool of find a Sheaffer Sharp Point in that pattern! No, what I found is that the mechanism that would become Sheaffer’s Sharp Point was similarly retrofitted into a clutch pencil.

I’ve known about these Sheafferesque clutch pencils for some time. Here’s a picture showing the early Sharp Point featured in “Wahl, Sheaffer and the Race for Boston,” at top, compared to two examples of these early clutch pencils:

The clips are identical:

The chasing on the checkerboard example is nearly identical to what I’ve found on another Sharp Point:

Inside, the same design influences are present:

However, there’s no markings to identify who might have made these. The only markings are “Pat. Apl’d For”

Until recently, I didn’t know exactly what to make of these. But an advertisement I recently found has me thinking:

This is a page from G.W. Huntley & Company’s 1915 catalog – a year before Wahl and Sheaffer wrangled over the Boston Fountain Company, and two years before Sheaffer’s Sharp Point was introduced. Who designed the Sheaffer Sharp Point? Obviously, the answer is whoever made the clutch pencils pictured in this catalog.;

G.W. Huntley was a Chicago-based mail order business. We know that Boston Fountain pens were being sold at Marshall Field & Co. in Chicago – that’s how Colonel William E. Smith became acquainted with the brand and first hit upon the idea to pair Boston fountain pens with Eversharp pencils. In fact, let’s take a closer look at that Marshall Field ad from my article:

I didn’t notice that before . . .

“‘Eversharp’ and clutch pencils $1.00.” Do you suppose these unmarked clutch pencils were made by the Boston Fountain Pen Company?

That would add an interesting dimension to the story.