You must have not asked nicely enough?
Hmmm, well........
It was apparently more difficult a proposition than I initially thought. I originally believed it was a simple matter of looking for a stylus with the Empire logo stamped on it.
So, after being "rebuffed" by Gary, I ordered a NOS S888SE-ERD from PUN and I like it very much. But I eventually started thinking about it again and it occurred to me that I'd never seen a pink, white, blue, or green generic for the 888 cartridges. So, I reasoned, if that's true and if I ordered one of those colors from Gary, it would of necessity be the real deal. So, in a recent order from Gary, I added an 232-SDE, specifying pink as the first choice and blue as the second. (He's out of white.)
I figured that my theory would be confirmed if the stylus I received had the Empire logo on it. However, when I got the stylus yesterday, a pink one, it was unmarked so I figured it was a generic. But it had a very slender cantilever (with no dot), much slenderer and also shorter than the one on my S888SE-ERD so I didn't know what I had here.
This morning I put it under the microscope and what I saw brightened my mood considerably. The stylus is a hand polished nude elliptical! This can't be a generic. Nobody puts that much work and that much quality into generics. So, my supposition that all the 888 styli have the logo stamped into them (as was the case with the few original styli I've seen) is almost certainly wrong. Some, perhaps the earliest ones, may be unmarked.
So, this would explain Gary's disclaimer that "232 needles may or may not be products of Empire Scientific" and his reluctance to sift through them to find an original. It's just too difficult to distinguish NOS from generic with these. But I have hope for my color theory. It seems to have worked out in this case.