LeBoeuf history

The LeBoeuf Fountain Pen Company was a pioneer in the manufacture of celluloid pens. LeBoeuf was not the very first -- celluloid was not a new material by that time -- but earlier makers of celluloid pens hadn't made the material their selling point. It was instead used as a cheaper substitute for hard rubber, in almost all cases without any exploitation of its ability to be colored and patterned.

If you search online, you'll read that LeBoeuf was founded in 1921 and went bankrupt in 1933. You won't find much more beyond references to various company patents -- though the fact that the latest was filed in 1938 and awarded in 1939 should have been a bit of a red flag. What is all the more surprising is that the history of  LeBoeuf was thoroughly researched by Chris Odgers 30 years ago and published in two comprehensive articles in Pen World (vol. 6, no. 3, Jan/Feb 1993, pp. 20-25 and vol. 6, no. 4, Mar/Apr 1993, pp. 28-31, 52-54). The story is far too involved to recapitulate here, involving not just a bankruptcy but also stock manipulation, embezzlement, a hostile takeover, and multiple refoundings and name changes, with the last successor company surviving until 1973, so I strongly encourage readers to consult Odgers' article for themselves -- whether in the original Pen World issues, or through the PCA's Reference Library, to which the author has generously made his original typescript available.

Although one might think that Odgers' work would be easy to duplicate now that so many sources have now been digitized, it turns out that some of his most important information came from a local newspaper, the Springfield Daily News, whose back issues are not part of the holdings of Newspapers.com, but rather are to be found at Genealogybank.com. I've not made a search through the latter as of yet, but I did dig through Newspapers.com which yielded only rather minor addenda to Odgers' findings.

Perhaps the most significant was Frank P. LeBoeuf's obituary in the Hartford Courant of May 21, 1951 which is shown below. There is no mention of his involvement in the pen business, which by multiple other indications appears to have been remarkably brief.

Another obituary was of Aurore Bessette, who died in 1991. Originally published in the Springfield Union-News of Springfield, Massachusetts on December 17 of that year, it is reproduced on a Bessette family genealogy site:

Aurore M. (Roy) Bessette, 100, of Springfield, a retired employee of the former Springfield Celery Co. and former president and owner of the former LeBoeuf Pilgrim Pen Co. in Springfield, died Monday in Springfield Municipal Hospital.

She owned the pen company from 1945 to 1953, and retired from the celery company in 1967.

Born in the city, she lived in Springfield most of her life. She was a communicant of St. Thomas Aquinas, and a life member of its Dames de St. Anne.

She was the widow of Homer J. Bessette.

She leaves a son, John of Chicopee; a daughter, Alida Higgins of Great Barrington; two sisters, Alida Roy of Chicopee and Phelonese Caldwell of Wellesley Hills; nine grandchildren, and many great-grandchildren.

The funeral will be Wednesday morning at Grise Funeral Home and the church, with burial in St. Aloysius Cemetery. Calling hours are this afternoon and evening.

I was also able to make use of trademark research tools that were not available to Odgers at the time. There are two trademark applications for "Unbreakable", the first filed by E. E. Le Boeuf on May 13, 1922, claiming first use on January 1, 1920, the second by John J. Byrnes on February 21, 1925, claiming first use on May 1, 1919.

The half-page ad above appeared in Springfield Old and New: Tercentenary Souvenir, 1636-1936, p. 173.

First celluloid pens

Those who know a bit about fountain pen history will tell you that Sheaffer was the company that pioneered the use of celluloid. Those who know a bit more will tell you that LeBoeuf beat Sheaffer by a few years, though it was Sheaffer's adoption of celluloid that was responsible for the industry-wide move away from hard rubber that quickly followed.

What very few realize, however, is that celluloid was used by other penmakers well before either LeBoeuf or Sheaffer. Indeed, by the 1920s celluloid was already an older material, widely used for all sorts of articles since the 1880s. Serious pen history geeks will recall past discussions of the 1909 article in The Metal Industry in which electrodeposition of silver overlays is described. The third paragraph of that article begins, "The pens, being made of hollow rubber or celluloid . . ."
I suspect that any overlay celluloid fountain pens made this way were of the cheapest sort, but I have also personally handled name-brand celluloid pens with non-electroformed overlays, including at least two Parkers, as well as a non-overlay John Holland hatchet-filler. The celluloid parts of these pens were all black, and could easily have been mistaken for hard rubber. But I have also seen small colored celluloid  pens made by Salz, some with parts marked "GERMANY", datable to the early 1920s, about which I posted here back in 2013.

There are yet earlier European celluloid pens, too, though they are of truly execrable quality and design. I am speaking of the Manos, a dirt-cheap Austrian-made piston-filler that was also exported to different markets as the Standard, the Triumph, the Globe, and the Victoria, among other names. Advertising appears well into the 1920s, but the first American mentions I've found date to 1912 with other writers reporting appearances as early as 1904 in the British trade press. 

If it sounds too good to be true . . .

Collectors are talking about the pen shown above, coming up for sale at Rock Island Auctions later this month. That is, unless it gets pulled from the sale -- which might well happen, as I'll explain.

The pen is a Wirt slip-cap dropper filler in black hard rubber with a gold filled "filigree" overlay. It's the sort of pen that would normally be worth several hundred, but this one carries an auction estimate of $15,000 to $25,000 thanks to engraved inscriptions that identify it as a gift from Theodore Roosevelt to Pat Garrett, including the date of December 20, 1901, when Roosevelt nominated Garrett as customs collector of El Paso. According to the catalog entry, this pen previously appeared at auction in 1996 and was shown in a book on the Old West first published in 1992.

The problem is that this pen cannot date to 1901. The nib and feed are of a form that Wirt did not adopt until a couple of years later (US patent 724984, applied for and issued in 1903), though the exact form of the feed appears to be later yet (see US patent 978420, applied for in 1908 and issued in 1910). And even if the nib and feed are not original to the pen, the trefoil pattern filigree of the overlay is a design  of distinctive form that was only introduced in the 'teens -- several years after Garrett's death in 1908. What Wirt was actually making in 1901 is nicely illustrated by the 1901 and c. 1903 catalogs in the PCA Reference Library (and the latter catalog may well be later than the listed date estimate). Unfortunately we don't currently have comprehensive documentation of Wirt's offerings over the following decade or two, but since Wirt like virtually all pen companies subcontracted overlay manufacture, designs can easily and precisely be traced across the pen industry at large. 

The interesting thing is that the engravings don't appear to be new, though they are suspiciously crude for what purports to be a presidential gift. This isn't the first pen that's turned up with an old inscription that wasn't as old as it purported to be -- I'm thinking of a Waterman silver overlay safety pen that recently turned up at auction with a Stanford family inscription -- so this sort of "enhancement" seems to have been going on for some time. The puzzling thing is that the engravings wouldn't always have obviously enhanced the pen's market value. That wouldn't have been the case with this pen, of course, but it's hard to imagine the Stanford inscription attracting a collector's attention at the time it was done. One can speculate that in at least some cases a pen might have been engraved well after the fact to reflect family lore about its history. Yet as experienced antiques dealers and experts well know, such lore can be unreliable. Even where the core story may be true, over the years it all too often may end up attached to a different item. In the case of this Wirt, however, we don't even seem to have any provenance tying it back to Garrett's family or friends. It's yet more speculation, but the Waterman box  in which the auction pen is being offered could actually be for a pen purchased in 1901.

An unusual Laughlin

Laughlin is not one of the better-known American pen manufacturers, though they came up with some unusual and innovative designs -- not so much in the way of styling so much as gadgeteering.

When I saw this Laughlin at a show earlier in the year, it caught my eye as a somewhat oddly proportioned screw-cap dropper-filler. And then I noticed that the cap was two-piece.

After unscrewing the top and playing with it a bit, I discovered that there was a spring-loaded inner cap inside. You can see how it all goes together in the picture below. The cap would not have been intended to be taken apart by the user, at least not on a regular basis. I bet a lot of curious users ended up dropping and losing the little coil spring, though. 

"A lot" would have been relative to the number of total owners, though, which likely wasn't that many. This is the only example of such a cap that I've seen, and surely it met with little commercial success. It offers no better sealing than a conventional fixed inner cap, and where a fixed inner cap gives a nice crisp feel to the closure when the cap is screwed all the way down, the spring cap makes the last half-turn or so decidedly mushy and draggy.

There is no patent imprint on the pen. A bit of searching, however, uncovered US1075631, awarded to Harry B. Dods in 1913 and assigned to Diamond Point. How it ended up used on a Laughlin, who knows?

Contract manufacture for the stationery trade

This ad is from a 1910 issue of The Bookseller & Stationer, a Canadian trade periodical. It nicely illustrates how stationery stores would contract to have fountain pens (and other products) made under their own names, and that many pen companies were happy to supply them. Most were like Sanford & Bennett in being New York based and not in the top rank when it came to market share and brand recognition.

Inside a Cross broker's pencil

This large gold filled pencil recently came in with the front end detached. I really shouldn't keep buying projects, but this seemed both straightforward and potentially interesting.

I could have cleaned and lubricated the mechanism in situ and just reattached the nose cone, but there were a couple of shallow dings to the barrel and I wanted to get a look inside. This is what everything looked like upon initial disassembly.

The lead measures a hefty 5.53 mm. The spring fingers of the holder make thickness less than critical, so modern 5.5 and 5.6 mm lead should fit with no problem. 

The mechanism propels and retracts the lead, using a simple track and helix design. Very sturdy with not much to go wrong.

Pencils of this sort were the subject of four related patents applied for and granted in 1882 to 1884: US263392, US296537, US296538, and US296539. Of these, the third most closely corresponds to our example. Cross pencils don't usually bear patent imprints, unlike Cross fountain pens and stylographics, and this pencil is no exception. 

Who made the Aztecs?

At the California pen show Chris Odgers came up to me to share a recent discovery: a sterling silver flat pencil holder with American Indian motifs in high relief. A beautiful and striking item in itself, but of broader importance in that the motifs are the very same as those on the celebrated Parker Awanyu Aztec.

The pencil holder is fully marked as a Mabie Todd product. I wasn't able to take a closeup photo, but from what I recall it bears the tiny "M" in square stamp. Mabie Todd, however, has never been identified as a supplier of overlays to other companies -- a reminder that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. While we have long known that Heath supplied overlays to Parker, we don't know how many other suppliers Parker might have used.  

The attribution of overlays is based upon relatively thin evidence. The pen companies did not publicize their sourcing, so we rely primarily on the existence of overlays found on various brands of pens that bear Heath markings. The problem is that only silver overlays appear to have been so marked, even where identical overlays were made in gold filled and solid gold, and that it appears that even those marks were eventually omitted -- not surprisingly, as penmakers had no wish to give the impression that their products were anything but wholly made in-house. 

Silver Aztecs are rare indeed. I don't have much hands-on experience with them, so had to make do with these images of a gold filled example from quite a few years ago. But I'm pretty sure that there aren't any silver Aztecs known with Heath marks. Chris didn't seem to know of any, and he's seen more than I have. A good number of Parker Snakes in silver bear the Heath mark, though, and there are Heath-marked magic pencils and dip pens with the same snake decoration. That seems to have led collectors to assume that the only other Parker figural overlay must share the same source.

Finally, we must consider the possibility that Heath was doing work for Mabie Todd, and that both the pencil and the Aztec overlays were actually Heath products. This seems unlikely, however, for several reasons. Mabie Todd had a long history of producing ornate pens and pencils of all sorts and of the highest quality quite on their own, and aside from the more basic patterns, their fountain pen overlays look nothing like anything offered by other pen companies. The same holds for their more elaborate magic pencils. I am unaware of any Heath-marked Mabie Todd products of any sort, and though I earlier inveighed against arguing from a negative, one must also give some weight to the absence of Heath-marked Aztecs given the prevalence of Heath-marked Snakes.

Thanks to Chris Odgers for sharing his discovery, and apologies for taking so long to get it posted. The photos of his pencil are his, and are used with his permission. Any errors and omissions are mine.

UPDATE: It turns out that Aztecs in silver are found with Heath marks. So what now to make of the pencil holder? Time for a closer comparison of details. A look at other makers's handling of American Indian motifs would also be helpful.

Magic pencils Pen Profile

This site is my usual location for sharing new information, but in some cases it is more appropriate to add it to the vintagepens.com website as a Pen Profile. That was the case when I decided to put together a piece on Dunn, and it the case now for magic pencils (upon reflection, I should probably move over some other posts here, or at least link them).

Please take a look -- comments and questions are always welcome. It was a bit surprising to realize that no one had previously tried to answer the question of who invented the magic pencil and when. 

Gold fabrication notes: a 1930s Swan section overlay

This Mabie Todd Leverless was made in England in the 1930s. All the external metal is 14k gold, which one would expect to be largely immune to issues from aging. But take a look at the section overlay -- definitely also solid gold and fully hallmarked. Click on the images below for a closer view.

The surface has the appearance of a loose net, or of a greatly magnified hand-hammered finish. The net consists of incipient fracture lines with slightly flattened areas in between -- something like what you might get if you wrapped an irregularly shaped geodesic dome around a tapered cylinder. How did this happen? And why is only the section affected?

This is a result of stress corrosion cracking, discussed in previous posts in relation to gold nibs. The way in which the section overlay was manufactured left the metal in a highly stressed state. Subsequent exposure to chemicals found in inks and especially cleaning and polishing products would have provided the other necessary ingredient to start the cracking. This would not have happened overnight: it would have been a cumulative process over a period of decades, each exposure adding imperceptibly but inevitably to the outcome visible today.

What could Mabie Todd have done differently? That's a tough question. The overlay was made by attaching a section of gold tubing to the hard rubber section with a rosin-based mastic, the only contact points being at the ends of the tube, then spinning the metal down until it was in full contact with the section throughout. Since the section was locked into the overlay the assembly could not be heated enough to relieve the internal stresses in the gold. A different alloy might have been a solution -- going to 18K would have done the trick. On the other hand, I'm not sure how common a problem this is. Perhaps this particular pen had the bad luck to be cleaned with something particularly strong. We know that ammonia solutions are bad for 14K gold, but anything containing bleach is much worse.

A late-production Duofold Senior

 

The black streamlined Duofold Senior shown above came my way at the recent Chicago pen show. With complete lack of foresight I cleaned the tarnish off the clip and cap bands before photographing it, even though I knew that that tarnish was interesting -- for it was that characteristic dark grey that forms on gold only when it is on top of a silver substrate. This is consistent with other features of this pen, most notably the late 1944 date code and the use of celluloid rather than hard rubber for the section, blind cap, and cap top/inner cap. The pressure bar is three-piece, consistent with all the rest.

So why is the tarnish interesting? We already know that Parker periodically cleared out excess inventory of older spare parts by assembling them into complete pens, and that such pens typically bear date codes from well after their regular production was discontinued (I write "periodically" because the date codes on these pens aren't evenly distributed, but rather form distinct clusters). We also know that in many cases parts had to be made to complete these pens, as they often differ in subtle ways from the parts from the original production run. That is surely the case here, for Parker only began to substitute silver for brass as a substrate with the advent of WW2, which tells us that the clip must have been made around the time the pen was assembled, and that it was not an older part taken from inventory. The cap bands also must be war-era, which suggests that the entire cap was made then as well -- though it is not inconceivable that this started out as one of those caps kept in inventory in bandless state, allowing for customization for special order trim configurations.