What Price?

Being a collector of anything involves some financial outlay. Luckily collecting pencils, woodcase or mechanical, is generally towards the lower end of the expense spectrum. Having said that, you can certainly spend many a pretty penny or two on mechanical pencils. You can easily pay hundreds of US dollars for luxury brand items by the likes of Parker, Caran d’Ache, Mont Blanc and Yard-O-Led. In moments of extreme PAS madness you can also pay over a hundred bucks for used vintage pencils that were not all that expensive in their day. Thankfully for me personally, these hundred dollar plus moments are the extreme exception rather than the norm, and I am taking steps to inoculate myself against them.

As any dedicated fan of Antiques Roadshow knows, provenance is everything. A piece of jewellery made by Faberge is tremendously expensive, but if that same piece of jewellery was owned by the Tsarina, then you can slap a couple of extra zeros on the price tag. Similarly there are silver spoons and then there are silver spoons made by Paul Revere.

I was recently discussing some historical events and disastrous communication failures with an American friend. In passing he mentioned ‘Jeb’ Stuart and the Battle of Gettysburg as one example. That set some of my lateral thinking cogs awhirl. As they say provenance is everything. So, what then is the most expensive mechanical pencil? Who knows? Think of some possibilities. I do know that the most expensive mechanical pencil I know of is the engraved gold pencil owned by the said Jeb Stuart and used to write battlefield orders. Auctioned back in 2006 along with a set of gold cufflinks, pre-auction value estimates were in the vicinity of US$10,000. Maybe one of you belongs to Worthpoint or wants to sign up for a free membership trial and tell us what it actually sold for.

http://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/jeb-stuart-s-highly-engraved-gold-mechanical-pen