The Leadhead's Pencil Blog

Thursday, August 25, 2016

Maybe I Should Leave Some Spacers

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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My system for categorizing Eversharp Skylines is published in

The Catalogue on page 72. Although it hasn’t caught on, it’s held up pretty well for me - nearly all of the Skylines I’ve seen in the wild fit neatly into these classes:

From left, I referred to these as:
Skyline Standard I: striated top section, thin band
Skyline Standard II: striated top section thick band
Presentation: ribbed gold filled top section
Presentation Vertical: gold filled top, lengthwise lines
Presentation Dart: gold filled top, engine turned design
Solid I: single color/material barrel with no bands
Solid II: single color/material barrel, thin center band
Solid III: single color/material barrel, thick center band
Streamliner: simplified clip/derby assembly
Press Clip I: simple clip pressed into barrel, no bands
Press Clip II: simple clip pressed into barrel, single band
Press Clip Twist Model: twist action pencil
Press Clip Moore Patent: feature a Moore patented action (these days, I call these “Lovejoy patent Skylines”).

In fact, since the book was published, the only additions I’ve made to the above have been in the “Press Clip” series, and I haven’t added anything to that area in four years (see http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2012/06/eversharp-skyline-press-clip-v.html):

From top, there’s the Press Clip I and II, augmented by the Press Clip III (single wide band), IV (no bands at all) and V (thin center band only).

Obviously I’m bringing all of this up to let you know I’ve got another one to add to the Press Clip clan, and I wonder whether I call it VI or whether I ought to leave a few numbers in between, since it feels like there should be something in between the simple single-band variations I’ve shown you so far and this one:

This one also comes from Rob Bader - with no provenance other than the “junk box provenance” of being found in the wild. Although it seems to be a one-off, I suppose I’ll give it a VI if/when there’s a second edition of The Catalogue.

Wednesday, August 24, 2016

That One Bugged Me

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The top example in the last picture from yesterday’s article bugged me:

I’ve had that one for more than a decade; even though the clip has broken away, the unusual plastic has made it worth keeping as a placeholder until a better example comes along:

Nothing better has come along. Some time ago I picked up a duplicate green one, missing the cap and with a few issues - a crack at the top of the barrel and a tip that was a little goofed up. Now and then I wrestle with it a bit to see if I can’t get it apart, I get frustrated, and I give up. After I finished that last article, however, I thought it was time to get serious. I wrestled the tip off, and what I found is that the nose of that heavy plastic is itself threaded, so the tip simply screws into the plastic:

Since there wasn’t anything holding things in from the front end, I figured everything must be press fit in from the back. The top knob pried off easily, and I was able to use a knockout block to start banging the mechanism out from the nose – sounds harsh but believe it or not, these mechanisms are robust enough to take it. Once I had forced the mechanism back enough for that bushing to come out, I could see into the barrel where the clip was attached, and there was no way the lower bushing was going to clear it on its trip out:

To put these together, Conklin pressed the mechanism in first, then installed the clip, then pressed in the upper bushing and mounted the top knob. Once they were assembled, they were never meant to be taken apart again. So how did I do it?

I had to remove the barrel down to a point below the clip. This poor Conklin has been sacrificed in the name of science – and one man’s desire to simply replace a frickin’ clip. An examination of the clip reveals how hard it is to break one of these from the barrel:

The wings of the clip were inserted through small slits in the barrel, then folded over into a death grip on the material between them. And I DO mean a death grip - there was no getting a knife blade or anything else under those tabs to pry them loose! I ended up using my lead drill to drill small holes through the plastic:

Then, I used my flat pliers to gently pry those prongs apart and fish out the rest of that green material:

My first thought was to insert the clip through the hole with the ears bent straight up, then bend them outward to grip the outsides of that hole, but by the time I’d pried things apart it was clear that the metal had had enough, and much more manipulation would break them off. However, with the flaps bent out, there was more surface area to which glue could be applied:

It isn’t a perfect solution and I won’t be clipping this into a shirt pocket, but at least it is a much nicer display piece!

Tuesday, August 23, 2016

Visitor From a Fiery Other World

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Sometimes I get hit squarely in my blind spot, and today’s pencil is one of those instances. When this one showed up in an online auction, I bid hot and heavy because I’d never seen one in this color:

It doesn’t look much like it, but it’s a Conklin from the All-American series – the same series from which the Conklin-made Guild pencils were derived (see http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-last-two-nails.html). The color is even more dramatic when the pencil is viewed from the side:

I knew I’d see Conklin specialist Alfonso Mur at the Chicago Pen Show, so I made a point to pack it in my show and tell folder, hoping to find out some information about this color, which I’d never seen before.

Pen collectors are well familiar with the color, which is known as “flame” and which is also one of the most desirable colors in Conklin circles, overshadowing even such desirable colors as the “halloween” and “zebra” colors I’ve written about here. Pete Kirby let me shoot a picture of my pencil next to a Conklin All-American pen in flame – I didn’t have my photography stuff out at the time, so forgive the lousy cell phone picture:

Yet all this was news to me for one simple reason: I don’t collect pens. Since the color is so rare, and no one else recalled seeing a pencil in flame, either, that explains why I never had cause to learn about this before. What the heck – if I knew it all, this hobby would have bored me a long time ago!

So here’s the new family portrait of this class of Conklin All-Americans:

Monday, August 22, 2016

A Parker Zaner Bloser from the ZABCO Era

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Zaner-Bloser is one of those names that exists only in extremes in the minds of collectors. On the one hand, there’s the cheap wood or plastic pencils and dip pens that few take seriously – other than a certain collector living near Columbus, Ohio who views them with a certain degree of hometown pride . . . and who also happens to be writing this blog.

At the other end are the super-rare, super-desirable examples made for Zaner-Bloser by the Parker Pen Company, which command hundreds of dollars whenever they surface. I’ve been able to scrape two of them together and into the fold:

The “true blue” (Parker called it “modernistic blue”) striped example is well documented, but the grey one, in something close to (but not identical to) the grey pearl plastic found on some contemporaneous Parker “Zephyrs,” is to my knowledge uncatalogued. Both of these are nose-drive pencils, sporting Parker depression-style clips:

and on the back of the caps, a special imprint:

The True Blue example has an imprint which runs towards the clip; the grey one, however, is what some pencil guys call a “left handed imprint”: it runs from the clip end down, so when you hold the pencil in your left hand, the imprint isn’t upside down.

A Parker/Zaner-Bloser pen and pencil set in lapis blue turned up at the Chicago Pen Show auction in May, and I valiantly gave chase. Alas, I was vastly outgunned by pen collectors who saw the pencil, rather than the pen, as the “extra” they’d have to pay extra for. After the bidding topped out at around $2,000.00, I knew I’d have to wait for another day to find the pencil in lapis.

Besides, I told myself, I’d already found a PZB that weekend . . .

This one appears to be earlier than any other example I’ve seen, with a patent 1916 Parker clip rather than the plain depression-style one:

The imprint, in addition, doesn’t match what’s found on Parker Zaner Bloser examples:

And, unlike all the other Zaner Blosers I’ve seen, this one isn’t a nose drive pencil - it’s rear drive, with a mechanism that only vaguely resembles anything Parker made:

The cap and barrel appear at first to be a mismatch, with a typical Parker jade used on the cap, and an interesting, swirly cream and green plastic on the lower barrel.

So let’s think about this new one for a few minutes. Most of the people I showed it to in Chicago wondered whether this wasn’t a mismatch, but I am completely confident that this is a prototype Parker-made Zaner Bloser pencil.

1. It came from Dan Zazove, Parker uber-expert and author of several books on the subject, who says it came directly from Parker. A Zazove seal of approval alone is frequently enough to convince most skeptics, but I’ve got more.

2. The Duofold imprint on the cap isn’t something you would ordinarily find. Parker moved its imprints to the caps, but only on the examples made for Zaner Bloser, because the contours of the lower barrel apparently made it infeasible to try to stamp the lower barrels.

3. This might look unfamiliar to students of Parker, but it is completely consistent with what you’d expect to find on an early Zaner Bloser. Compare the new find with one I’ve written about here some time ago:

The big red pencil, which I wrote about here about four years ago (http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2012/10/zabco.html), is marked “ZABCO Cols. O./Pat. Appl. For”:

I’d concluded in that prior article that the “Pat. Applied For” stamped on the Zabco must apply to the Coke-bottle shape, which was the subject of a couple design patents. Now I’m wondering, since it is a rear drive pencil just like the green example, whether it has the same slightly weird internal workings inside and a utility patent was applied for with respect to the works, but never issued. I can’t get it apart to see what’s inside, so we’ll take that issue up another time. The real reason I place these two alongside one another is to show you the similarities in their design:

Note how much more pronounced the curves are from later Parker Zaner-Blosers, and how the ends taper down much farther to a somewhat ill-fitting metal inner nose. I haven’t seen these features anywhere else, which leads me to conclude that both are clearly Zaner Bloser products, and that this was likely Parker’s first collaborative effort with the company to produce the company’s line of writing instruments.

Sunday, August 21, 2016

Sage Design

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At the Triangle Show, Rob Bader had two of these in his box o’ surprises:

Both were equipped with what appeared to be a white lead, leading me to think this might have been for marking clothing alterations. I took both of them and gave one to Joe. In addition to the tight, rear-drive design, this one had a nice imprint I thought would be fun to track down:

“Peggy Sage.” It didn’t take long to figure out what this one was all about. Peggy Sage was and is a cosmetics company. According to the company’s website, the firm was founded in 1925 in the US and was bought out by an English concern in 1950; since then, the brand name has been sold to various firms, being revived most recently in 2000 by “the Collomb family.”

The company’s website still offers pencils with a white “lead” like this, and the accompanying description explains what it was used for: “The lip shaper lip lead pencil is used to draw a transparent, mat line around the lips before applying lipstick to prevent it from smudging even if the lips are damaged.”

Ok, that’s a little gross, and I might have to retrofit this one with a stick of lead in the appropriate size and discard the partially used lip goo. Even though this is a cosmetic applicator rather than a writing pencil, though, it still fits well into my collection. Did you notice that celluloid? The first thing I thought when I saw it was Eversharp, because it does have a cousin in the Bantam world:

An exact mirror image, if you look closely. Burgundy with grey pearl streaks on the Peggy Sage, and grey pearl with burgundy streaks on the bantam.

Saturday, August 20, 2016

Permanently Entertaining

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I’ll admit that I’ve evolved from collecting American-made pencils only to collecting pencils that I like, regardless of where they were made. This one, which surfaced in a recent online auction, screams not American:

The worn german silver plating screams continental, but I really liked the pattern on the barrel:

And I’m always a sucker for a great name like “Permanento.” Note also the interesting pattern around the crown:

This one got even better when it arrived, because the seller, who apparently didn’t know anything about pencils, left a couple things out:

That blue square is a color indicator - this is a multicolor pencil. And then there’s that great logo:

I was pretty sure the middle letters were “ie,” but I wasn’t sure whether the first letter is an o or a v and the last letter might be an r or a k. After I posted a question about this on the Pentrace page over on Facebook, my friend Giovanni Abrate figured out that it is “vier,” the German word for four – of course.

Aurora makes a “Permanento” pencil, but it isn’t a multicolor. Google isn’t turning anything up for me, so I’m at a dead end. I’d appreciate hearing any other information about it.

Friday, August 19, 2016

What's Going On Here?

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I picked up all three of these pencils at the Triangle Pen Show in June, two from Brian McQueen and the third from Rick Krantz:

All three of these are Eversharps:

I call them “Square 4 derivatives” because they are descendants of Eversharps “Square 4" line, originally designed for use with leads that were 4 inches long and square, purportedly to keep them from twisting around in the barrel and also to keep sharper points as they wore down (see “Hip to be Square” at http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2012/05/hip-to-be-square.html). Square lead quickly proved to be a fiasco, as the corners tend to shave off inside pencil barrels and gum things up, but the 4 inch lead thing did catch on, so Eversharp streamlined the design a bit.

I’ve got a picture of a few Square 4 pencils on page 71 of The Catalogue, although I was off a bit on the date they were introduced (I indicated 1937 - the patent for the square lead was applied for in 1932). I mentioned in the book that you can assemble quite a collection of these, since they came in such a wide variety of colors and patterns, and I’ve added quite a few since the book was written of these later models:

The plastics on these new additions, though, are really interesting. The grey one is made from a plastic I’ve only ever seen used on Sheaffer WASP pencils (“WASP,” an acronym for W.A.Sheaffer Pen, was the company’s lower-tier line of writing instruments). Some call it “Screaming Souls in Purgatory,” but I prefer “birdseye.” Sheaffer was even more sedate, calling it simply “gray.” Here’s a Wasp Clipper pencil in that same plastic:

The green examples are also made from a plastic I’ve only seen on WASPs before - Sheaffer called this one “green lahn”– here’s a WASP from that same series in that same color:

That WASP isn’t the best example of the plastic, since it’s a little less dramatic than what you normally see. Here’s three WASP Clippers of a little later vintage, in silver, green and brown lahn:

The lahn plastic was patented – but not by Sheaffer. Patent number 2,081,538 was applied for on June 26, 1934 by Fred J. Hoarle and was issued on May 25, 1937. The patent was assigned to the Celluloid Corporation and not to Sheaffer, for a process of embedding little metallic strips into decorative celluloid.

Sheaffer didn’t always have a lock on the distinctive patterns found on its products, and we’ve seen other Sheaffer colors “leak” out to other manufacturers (most notably, the blue “clown” plastic which has shown up on Ford’s Jr., Realpoint and Rite-Rite pencils). But this is the first time I’ve seen a leak from Sheaffer to Eversharp.

And, as I’m writing this, another online auction is about to close with another Eversharp in gray birdseye. Where are all of these coming from at once?