Image from Len Provisor

Pompeian Brown
by George Kovalenko

Some of you may be aware of the story of the early advertising strategy, merchandising campaign, and sales drive used by the Parker Pen Co. to introduce the Duofold in 1922. The official story is that Parker decided to first test the pen in the Chicago area in the spring of 1922 using a combination of saturation marketing techniques. If successful, they would then repeat the technique in other cities. Salesmen armed with supplies of the pens and advertising ephemera visited those stores which did not have the pen in stock yet. They postered the area with Duofold ads and placed advertisements in the Chicago Tribune in a certain sequence. In those days, a newspaper page was much larger than it is today, and the first promotion was a large 800-line ad that took up two-thirds of the newspaper page. This ad featured some Duofold copy, beneath which was a long list of all the stores in the area that stocked the pen. This advertisement ran once in the first week of the campaign, thereafter followed by two 360-line ads each week for 3 weeks, and one 360-line ad each week for 8 weeks. By the fifth ad in the third week, there was such a surge in sales that Parker didn’t wait to complete the Chicago trial before he went ahead with similar campaigns in New York and fourteen other major US cities. So the story goes.

This was the official version put out by the Parker Pen Co. Explaining that fifty to sixty “universities and colleges offering courses in Advertising and Merchandising requested behind-the-scenes information” about the company’s Duofold ad campaign, their Advertising Department issued a booklet titled “Advertising & Merchandising Campaign On The Parker Duofold Fountain Pen, and An Analysis Of The Parker Duofold Copy”. That’s where the Chicago campaign was laid out in detail for the world to see, but this, however, was the second campaign. There was definitely an earlier phase. If not a campaign, it was at least an earlier effort to introduce and test the Duofold on the market.

If you look at the actual ads that appeared in the Tribune, another version of the story emerges. After Lewis Tebbel made his proposal to the company for the design of this new pen in early 1921, a batch of prototypes was made up for him to sell in his sales area, Spokane and Seattle, Washington. More batches were made up for him, and when he and other salesmen sold well over 12,500 Duofolds, Parker decided to test the pen in a larger market area. The test area chosen was Chicago, but it happened in November and December of 1921. And the first Duofold ad to appear was not in the Tribune, but actually a modest ad in The Saturday Evening Post, November 5, 1921, p.79. The magazine page at that time consisted of four columns of text or advertising space, and the first Duofold ad consisted of one column only. The pen in this ad was described as having a “red brown barrel”. In “Proxy”, a newsletter for salesmen, in the August 4, 1921 issue, George Parker referred to the color of the pen as “maroon”. Now, I would not describe an early red hard rubber Duofold as “red brown”, or “maroon”, so something curious is going on here. Then a series of more-traditionally-shaped rectangular ads appeared in the Chicago Tribune between November 19 and December 22 that year, and all of them use the phrases “rich Pompeian brown”, or “red brown”, in the ad copy. These are the ads familiar from the Glen Bowen book, which reproduces two of them, but I found five different versions of these ads. There was another ad in The Saturday Evening Post on December 10, this one also using the phrase “Pompeian Brown”, and then no more ads appeared for a while.

In fact, the phrase "Pompeian Brown" appears only three times in all those ads, and one of those ads is an exact repetition of a previous ad. So that's just two unique uses of the phrase up to that time, and that's just one shy of a hapax legomenon, a word that occurs only once in the recorded corpus of a given language. All that fuss from just two uses of the term! Within a few years of the introduction of the Duofold, the Moore Pen Co. also had pens in a red-brown, terracotta color that were referred to as "Tuscan Red" and "Maroon". Another interesting point in all these Parker ads is that the Duofold was also
advertised as "the patrician of all fountain pens", thus preceding the Waterman's pen of the same name by almost a decade. Later in the 1920s, in the plastic era, Parker had a sub-brand pen called the "Patrician" that was available in a brown plastic. It was a pen that looked exactly like a Duofold, but it was not the same thing at all.

After this large ad, there was a series of smaller ads that appeared in the Tribune, one every few days from March 30 to June 13. As a punctuation mark to end this series, a small postage-stamp-sized Duofold ad appeared in the Tribune on June 30. It was not an official Parker Pen Co. ad, but was part of the jumble of mixed-product ads included in the large half-page ad for Walgreen’s Drug Stores in Chicago. That’s how quickly the pen had passed to the area of commonly advertised products. At the same time, there were one-column ads in The Saturday Evening Post on April 22, May 6, and June 3, but then no ad in the July issue. Something big was being prepared, the first full, one-page ad for the Duofold! This was an ad for the large-format magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s in the US, and MacLean’s in Canada. Downsized versions of these ads were also prepared for such small-format magazines as National Geographic. It made its debut in the August 26 issue of the Post, and a one-page Duofold ad was to appear every month for the next eleven years, until the appearance of the Vacumatic in March 1933.

Image by Rob Morrison

Before 1921, Parker had a very low market share, around 15 to 20 percent of all pen sales, mostly because their product line consisted of over 400 different models in many sizes, and their production facilities were too diversified. After the success of the Duofold, however, their market share soared to around 50 to 60 percent, and their product lines shrank to about 100 different models. The Duofold was so successful that any company that wanted to survive had to have a Duofold look-alike, a red pen with black tips. Waterman's already had an all-red pen, but it was only in this era that the color was marketed as "Cardinal", and in 1923, it came out with its red and black "Ripple" line of pens to compete with the Duofold. Morrison had its "Tourist", and Conklin its "Duragraph", and Eclipse and every other no-name brand had to have a red-and-black pen in order to compete.

The Parker Pen Co. filed an application for a trademark for the word “Duofold” on January 14, 1922, and received trademark no. 155,044 for the word only on May 16, 1922. The Statement And Declaration for the trademark claims that the word was first used September 1, 1921. They also applied for a trademark for the red-black color scheme on May 23, 1922, and received trademark no. 163,481 on October 17, 1922. The description of this mark in the index to the trademarks reads in part, “[The] Trade mark consists of a fountain pen having a red body portion and two black end portions”, and states that this color scheme was in use since August 25, 1921. Now, if the claims can be taken for fact, then the filing dates came much later than the first uses, and much closer to the time when the Duofold started to skyrocket, and all the competitors and imitators and scavengers came out of the woodwork. They applied for the name-trademark earlier as part of the normal course of giving their new product a name, but the later color-trademark came about in response to the mimics, and the plagiarists, and the rip-off artists. Big money was at stake, so they had to act quickly, and they weren’t just “folding around”.

What I have been calling the “Pompeian Duofold” and “Tebbel’s Duofold” is just shorthand for the pen produced for Tebbel as a prototype, before it went into mass production as the Duofold. The bandless version of the Duofold is the one that most closely resembles Tebbel’s ideal pen, but while talking with machinist and pensmith Lynn Sorgatz about this issue, he added an interesting last distinguishing feature to the checklist of early Duofold characteristics. He mentioned that, along with the other distinguishing details, the pitch of the cap thread on the early Lucky Curve pens was completely different than the thread of the production Duofolds. The two thread patterns are completely incompatible. And that last detail might just turn out to be the cinching characteristic of Tebbel’s brainchild. If a red hard rubber #26 Lucky Curve pen with black hard rubber tips shows up, one with a Manifold #6 Lucky Curve nib, with a bandless cap with the correct “Jack Knife Safety” imprint, with no “Duofold” imprint on the barrel above the “Parker Lucky Curve” imprint, and with a thread pattern that’s incompatible with other later Duofolds, then we’ll know that it’s the real thing, no matter what color it is, whether orange or brown. I don’t really care what color it turns out to be. I’d just prefer it if it were a bright orange color rather than brown. In fact, the two colors that really need to be distinguished are the later Vulcafor Orange Duofold color and the earlier slightly darker red color of the rodstock used in such pens as the eyedropper and Jack Knife Safety pens of the pre-Duofold era. The difference in color is almost negligible.

Fragly, Scarlid Tanager, I don’t give a dab about Pompeian Brown pens. I have come to the conclusion, and it is just an opinion, that the color of the rod stock used to make those prototypes was probably not brown, because Parker had never used anything like that brown color in their previous inventory of pens. They probably just used any old brittle red rod stock that was lying around unused in their warehouse. It’s just that the myth of the brown “Patrician” has dragged a red herring, or rather, a stinky old pompeian-brown herring, across the trail of the Pompeian Duofold, and now everyone expects there to be a brown Duofold as well. The pen was probably the same color as the other red hard rubber pens that Parker was already producing before the Duofold, pens such as the “Red Giant” and the other special-order filigree pens from the late 1890s and early 1900s and 1910s. This color was slightly darker than the Duofold, but only marginally so. It was still a bright red color, even if not yet the later bright orange Duofold color, but it was almost certainly not brown.

Starting off in black and white, the Duofold ads very quickly became two-tone ads, with the pens pictured in red and the ad copy accentuated and highlighted with red details. And when the celluloid colors came out, the ads were in full color. Some months it was a two page spread, and during 1926 and 1927 the ads appeared regularly every two weeks. The ads came back to black and white only in the Depression, and only became lackluster in the last year of its production while the Vacuum Filler, later the Vacumatic, was being developed and prepared for release. But what a glorious run the Duofold had!

Early Duofold Ads

“First series”, 1921

1. Saturday Evening Post, Nov5, 1921, p.79
2a. Chicago Tribune, Nov 19, p.4,
2b. Ch. Trib., Dec 5, p.2, same ad repeated
3. Ch. Trib., Nov 24, p.12
4. Ch. Trib., Dec 1, p.2
5a. Ch. Trib., Dec 8, p.4
5b. Ch. Trib., Dec 12, p.10, same ad repeated
5c. Ch. Trib., Dec 15, p.6, same ad repeated
6. Sat. Ev. Post, Dec 10, p.46
7a. Ch. Trib., Dec 19, p.4
7b. Ch. Trib., Dec 22, p.10, same ad repeated
7c. November ? , 1921, in Glen Bowen book, p.42,
repeats graphic, diff. ad copy, "Three Good Gifts"

“Second Series”, 1922

8. Ch. Trib., Mar 27, 1922, p.13, large ad
9. Ch. Trib., Mar 30, p.10
10. Ch. Trib., Apr 3, p.12
11. Ch. Trib., Apr 7, p.16
12. Ch. Trib., Apr 10, p.14
13. Ch. Trib., Apr 13, p.6
14. Ch. Trib., Apr 18, p.15
15. Sat. Ev. Post, Apr 22, p.46, strip ad
16. Ch. Trib., Apr 25, p.3
17. Ch. Trib., May 2, p.14
18. Sat. Ev. Post, May 6, p.133, strip ad
19. Ch. Trib., May 9, p.2
20. Ch. Trib., May 16, p.6
21. Ch. Trib., May 24, p.4
22. Ch. Trib., June 1, p.2
23. Sat. Ev. Post, June 3, p.53, strip ad
24. Ch. Trib., June 6, p.5
25. Ch. Trib., June 13, p.4
26. Ch. Trib., June 30, p.7, Walgren’s Drugstore ad
27. Sat. Ev. Post, Aug 26, p.31, full-page color ads start…, etc.

Above is the Advertisement numbered 2a