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.