A Century of Autopoint - 2020 Indie Book award winner
UPDATE: A Century of Autopoint has won Best Overall Design Non-Fiction and was a finalist in Writing/Publishing Non-Fiction in the 2020 Next Generation Indie Book Awards!
Jonathan Veley's 10th book is a comprehensive history of Autopoint, one of America's leading manufacturers of pencils, fountain pens and a variety of other products. The story begins with Charles Keeran, the inventor of the Eversharp pencil, who founded Autopoint in 1918. With the cooperation of researchers Robert Bolin and Jim Stauffer, combined with photographs and documents provided by the Keeran family, this work presents the most complete biography of Keeran's life ever published, along with detailed histories of Realite, Autopoint, Dur-O-Lite, and how their stories weave together with those of other manufacturers, such as Wahl and Rite-Rite.
The book brings together the development of the mechanical pencil history in Chicago with that of the early American plastics industry, and in particular Bakelite. It provides a complete taxonomy of Autopoint models and their variations, together with the dates they were produced. Also included are sections on Autopoint's rare tab filler pens, ephemera, prototypes, and an appendix reproducing previously unpublished material from Keeran's 1939 lawsuit against The Wahl Company.
Hardbound, 224 pages. ISBN 978-0-9840392-6-8.