Pencils, eh
A virtual museum of the golden age of the Canadian pencil industry.
No, I'm not talking about the Netflix series... this is however a regal pencil. The Eagle Crown 862 copying pencil is a pencil made with high quality. One British advertisement from 1881 stated that "Each [Eagle Pencil] Brand denotes a quality of Lead, Cedar, and Finish, "The Crown" being the highest grade that can be produced. You can see there has been much effort to design a pencil that stands appart including a unique ferrule. The "Crown" logo and name was originally applied to a line of penholders and so it is difficult to find information about this copying pencil as most searches lead to the more common penholder.
0 Comments
Oh Canada... A pencil made by Venus Canada to celebrade Canada's Centennial celebration in 1967. I features the image of an RCMP officer along with the centennial maple leaf logo.
I recently found a pack of Eagle Confetti 90-HB pencils. This is a pencil that I've been hoping to find for a quite some time. They came in a package with a trio of colors (light blue, orange and yellow) and a funky font style. These pencils are fairly uncommon. The price tag on the package is from S.S. Kresge Co. (which became Kmart in 1977... but there were S.S. Kresge stores in Canada into the 1990s). I think these pencils date from around the 1960s based on the logo on the package and the style of the silver ferrule. I've seen other examples of the pencil in different colors (burgundy, orange and green). I've wondered if these pencils were sold about the same time as other colorful Eagle pencils with close numbers such as the Eagle Rocket 84, Eagle Neon 86 and Eagle Roy Rogers 88. All of these pencils came in a number of colors and had the same ferrule Do you have any favorite colorful pencils? Here are some of mine...
This weekend, Circuit Gilles Villeneuve in Montreal, plays host to the 2023 Canadian Grand Prix. This Formula One race event has a long history in Montreal. The track was opened in 1978 and is named after Canadian driver Gilles Villeneuve who won the first Grand Prix event held at the track. Berol Canada started making a "Grand Prix" pencil around 1979. The pencil was been made in many different colors and styles over its production life from about 1979 to the early 1990s. I've written about these pencils in the past. These are some great vintage pencils with surprisingly good erasers for their age. I write with them regularly.
May 8th is the anniversary of Victory in Europe Day, or V-E Day. This day commemorates the day that Germany unconditionally surrendered its military forces to the Allies on May 8, 1945. There is a show on community television where I live called "The Past and the Curious." The show states, "An article can endure through time, but only its story makes it an artifact." I think the pencil shown below has an interesting story to tell. It is a pencil made by the Venus Pencil Company of Canada that has the patriotic slogan "There'll Always Be an England" on its side. In addition to the slogan it has the Union jack, a British bulldog and lion... all popular symbols of England. "There'll Always Be an England" is an English patriotic song, written and distributed in the summer of 1939. The song became very popular as Canada entered the Second World War in 1939. The song was played on the radio and the sheet music sold 130,000 copies in Canada (published by Gordon V. Thompson who secured the North American copyright). Initially, the song was banned on the radio in the US which was still neutral at the time. Because of the popularity of the song, many items where made with the slogan, "There'll Always be an England." Below is a vintage Canadian post card with the slogan and a Union Jack waving in front of a military display. Below is an envelope sent from Canada to the US in November 1941. The postmark shows that the letter was mailed on Nov. 20th, 1941 from Windsor, Ontario. It appears that the "Enlist Now" flag cancel was used in 32 different cities during the period of 1941 to 1943. I can imagine this letter reaching its American destination about the time of the Dec. 7th 1941 attach on Pearl Harbour. Happy VE Day!
There won't be a "made-in-Canada" pencil to mark the coronation of King Charles III but we can at least admire pencils from past coronations. A number of Canadian pencil manufacturers made commemorative pencils for the coronation of King George VI in 1937 and Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. Below is a pencil, made by the Eagle Pencil Company of Canada, to mark the coronation of King George VI in 1937. Below is a very similar pencil, made by Eagle to mark the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953. It came in both gold and silver.
The vast majority of vintage "Made in Canada" wooden school rulers were manufactured by the Acme Ruler and Advertising Company located in Toronto, Ontario. There were other companies that made wooden rulers in Canada as well. One company, almost as old as Acme, was the Canadian Rulers Company was founded in Bedford, Quebec in 1939. Below is a 15 inch ruler from this company. While Acme was purchased by an American company production moved overseas, the Canadian Rulers Company is still in business in Canada. The company changed its name in 1960 to Bedford Ruler Ltd. and now focuses mainly on production of paint paddles. It is difficult to find much information on these rulers. The only mentions I found online was from several different Canadian Trade Indexes from the 1950s.
Stationery companies often gave out ink blotters adverting various pens and pencils. I have shared some ink blotters in the past... see Ink Blotters and Ink Blotters - Part 2. I've added two more ink blotters to my collection which feature Dixon pencils. A story is what turns an object into an artifact and ink blotters have lots of stories to tell. The ink blotter on the right advertises the Dixon Ticonderoga pencil. In the US, the image of Ethan Allen often adorns packaging and advertisements for Ticonderoga pencils. This was problematic for the Canadian subsidiary of Dixon Pencil as Ethan Allen doesn't have the same patriotic connotations in this country. Beaupres Interiors Ltd. also has a story to tell. Harold Beaupres enlisted in the Canadian Air Force in 1941. He became a flight lieutenant and was a navigator on a Lancaster Bomber which was shot down in 1943. It crashed in occupied France and Beaupre was taken to a prisoner of war camp near the Polish border called Stalag Luft 3. The camp was made famous when seventy-four prisoners escaped in 1944, inspiring the film The Great Escape. He was liberated from the prison in 1945. In 1946, after returning from the war, he worked in his father's store Beaupre Paint and Wallpaper. He later renamed the store Beaupres Interiors. Beaupre ran the business for thirty years in several downtown locations before retiring in 1979 and opening up another shop called Beaupre Stamps. The seven-digit, two letter and five number (2L+5N), format of the telephone number helps to date this ink blotter most likely to between 1951 and 1962. Below is a picture showing the ink blotters featuring pencils that I've collected from Canadian stationery and office supply stores. Turns out, all of these stores are from Ontario.
Pencil from the short lived Canadian Pencil Company are rare to find. The company is one of the few that were a purely Canadian company and not a subsidiary of a US company. The pencils below are a fantastic example of pencils from this company. These writing pencils have a small space on them to write your initials (or perhaps your name if you have a short one). These pencils have an HB lead and came in four different iridescent colors: dark blue, gold, red and dark green. The dark blue and dark green are hard to tell apart unless there is light shining on them. Like many Canadian Pencil Co. pencils, they have "Fait Au" as well as "Made In" next to the word Canada as well as the Canadian map logo.
A couple of years ago, I saw a vintage Canadian APSCO Giant pencil sharpener. Unfortunately it was way out of my price range. I've been keeping my eye out for a more affordable one since then. I've recently been sucessful in getting one at a reasonable price. It is the only vintage sharpener I have and it looks great next to my collection of ACME rulers. The original olive green paint color is great and the logo on the transparent plastic "chip receptacle" is in relatively good shape for its age.
There is some great information on the history of the Automatic Pencil Sharpener Co. at the Made in Chicago Museum website.
|
Archives
May 2024
Categories
All
|