Sunday, March 4, 2018

A Pushmaster Tutorial

This article has been edited and included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 5; 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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On page 54 of The Catalogue of American Mechanical Pencils, I mention the Esterbrook Pushmaster as an “Esterbrook variant to watch for.”  Recently I was able to pick up a red one from Eric Magnuson :


It joins the green example shown in the book


The model was introduced around 1941 – possibly earlier, as I found a black example commemmorating the New York Worlds’ Fair of 1939-1940 that I wrote about back in 2012.  Google wiped out the pictures, but I was able to find them on my hard drive:



What I should have done, either in the book or here at the blog, was show the Pushmaster next to its more common cousins for comparison:


The Pushmaster shares the longer nose from the earlier Dollar pencil series, and the trim band and clip of the later models . . . and the plastic from neither.  My favorite feature of the Pushmaster, though, is the top: these don’t have the name on the clip itself, but there’s a great Esterbrook logo in the place of a black plastic “jewel”:


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