Thread: Rare razors

Originally Posted by sharptonn

WOW! Something to be said for tang stamps! Those are amazing!

What is that last one?

Unsure. I can't even call that one exceptionally rare though, as I have two of them. Likely English but I can't say for sure where.

It reminded me of this!; http://straightrazorpalace.com/razor...or-blades.html

Originally Posted by sharptonn

It reminded me of this!; http://straightrazorpalace.com/razor...or-blades.html

Early Sheffield (and other) blades were often marked with just a series of symbols / letters / numbers that was the cutler's mark. Take a look through the non-razor pages of the 1787 Gales & Martin and you will get a good idea of the variety out there.

A link to that?

Would a razor be considered rare if you have the only one you've ever seen? He is a link to a post I submitted on here a while back of one that I own, its the only one I've seen;
http://straightrazorpalace.com/razor...ml#post1574878

Originally Posted by DoughBoy68

Would a razor be considered rare if you have the only one you've ever seen? He is a link to a post I submitted on here a while back of one that I own, its the only one I've seen;
http://straightrazorpalace.com/razor...ml#post1574878

I would consider it rare. I own two razors that I've never been able to find another to compare it to. One has a strange tang stamp that I think is only a parcel, the other is a odd shaped wade and butcher in the mail.

Originally Posted by DoughBoy68

Would a razor be considered rare if you have the only one you've ever seen? He is a link to a post I submitted on here a while back of one that I own, its the only one I've seen;
http://straightrazorpalace.com/razor...ml#post1574878

Depends entirely upon how many you have seen,,,and noted!

Originally Posted by aaron1234

Which razors do you consider rare.

There's probably already a forum for this but I couldn't find it.

Quality custom razors are what I consider rare. I have handled quite a few customs, including some of myown that the ergonomics were not just right. I've also honed some customs that shouldn't have left the shop. Razors scaled in Ivory & other exotics like tortoise are a bit rare. Lastly, there are the commercial razors that are hit and miss depending on the things you like. I like the long monkey tail razors personally.

Don't forget that there are many razors that are held in collections that you never see. So it's hard to say. Even tiny cottage industry producers were making heaps and heaps of these things - they had to to make a living. And for anything modern, it takes a bit of effort to set up machining and etching and decorating processes, these were production razors.

Just remember the story of the Wentletrap shell: Economics and the Wentletrap | The Common Room

Rarity can be relative.

And imagine this situation: one has an 8/8 Filarmónica Medallon Taurino, and an 8/8 by a Belgian maker no one has ever heard of. You can imagine which one will command the attention of most, and conversely which one is likely more rare...

There are a lot of different places with some version or other of the Gales & Martin directory, but I like the Google Books one best because it's got good (relatively speaking, OCR-based text searches are largely terrible) searchability.

You can find it here.

As for the thread topic, I consider the whole rarity thing too much of a zero-sum game. I have lots of stuff that likely very few people do, but that's not really interesting. Technically, when you're getting razors made in the era before full automation, EVERY SINGLE ONE is unique. That W&B wedge you've got that looks like a hundred others is the only one exactly like it because it was made by human hands without a mold. That they're as similar as they are mostly explains why it took Sheffield so long to get fully automated.

On the other hand, I can be interested in the idea of 'lucky to have'. In that spirit, I offer up this trio:



The monogram is A H. This box was technically a box that held another box, namely the fancy-but-not-personalized manufacturer's box. That interior box is lost to time as well as one of the razors from the pair within it.



The complete pair is a set of razors I got quite a while back off eBay. I got them mostly because they represent a very particular era of production, namely between April and December of 1824. The only time when Charles Pickslay, still working under the Green & Pickslay banner, produced 'Peruvian Steel' razors. It was a formula he'd adapted from the two papers that James Stodart & Michael Faraday published with the Royal Society a few years previous. It was an alloy of imported India steel with rhodium and iridium. He kept trying to market his steel, long, long after the dissolution and lawsuits with Green & Pickslay had ended. It bankrupted him several times and he ultimately moved to the US, where his descendants still live (one of whom has a ledger he'd recorded in 1825 that points out it wasn't just the expensive steel that bankrupted him, but also his penchant for hiring a coach to go spend two years of a workman's salary on partying in London).

The pair were bought by William Archbald, a writer living in Kelso Scotland. He held a clerk position in the town government and didn't leave a lot of records for exactly what sort of writing he did, though he was an avid Cricket player and not particularly talented.

The razors most likely would've been purchased not long after they were made, so between 1824 and 1825. Archbald was a young man then, just starting his family. They're extremely plain, with just the scrimshawed name on the ivory.



Earlier this year I caught another eBay auction for a single, highly decorative razor with the box above. Now I probably would've been interested in this one regardless, because I've been trying to get nice examples of Hawcroft & Pearson, Hawcroft, and Pearson razors (after the pair split up they made things under their own names for some time), but what really caught my eye was the etch on the blade:

"To Wm. Archbald Houliston, from Willm. Archbald, Kelso, August 5th, 1845"

It's a gift from the owner of the Pickslay razors to his grandson. Originally, it would've been a pair, and I'm sad that the other razor's lost, but to have a group of razors like this is pretty remarkable, especially considering how I acquired them.

Consequently, it was the grandson who moved to America and probably brought all of the razors with him.

I consider myself extraordinarily lucky to have these three razors.

(And I'm expecting to finally have a workshop again in the next couple of months and I'm really looking forward to repairing and cleaning all three of these razors.)