Thread: Confusing the next generations

Thank you, Doc, for starting this interesting discussion! Everytime I have to deal with a razor whose conditions were altered during its life, I wonder what restoration means. I try to be the most "respectful" as possible, feeling both a sort of pride for being the owner of an object with a very long history and the responsability of having to decide about its future and contribute, in some part, to its life.

Up to now, after asking many things to myself, I don't know what restoration exactly means. Sometimes I find a very old blade of the end of XVIII c. whose scales were substituted 80 years later, in the second half of the XIX century. I think that all what I can do in such cases is trying to read the history of the razor in the best way I can, identify what is older and what is just less old. I'd like to find some very old scales, not impossible if they come with a very dammaged blade, and put those scales on the nice blade of the same period, but probably this isn't restoration. It would be just a new step in the long life of this razor, a different future; also, it would mean a loss of information about its past.

I think that future generations will have data enough to trace a very complete history of razor evolution. Probably this isn't the point. Just an example. I play harpsichord, a keyboard instrument with a very long history starting at the very beginning of XV c. and ending in the first years of XIX c. when the piano became the most comon keyboard instrument in houses. At the same time old-fashioned harpsichords started to be transformed into pianos changing its mechanincs! Makers made no more harpsichord for 100 years and "nobody" played this instrument until 1920's. The first new "harpsichord players", at the beginning of harspichord revival in 1920's, didn't know exaclty how the instrument should be played and they played it exaclty like a piano. The five-century-long tradition of harspichord playing and harpsichord making had been forgot. Some makers started to make new harpsichords, in part with the idea of improving the old ones in part without the knowledge of how an harpsichord was made. Today those new "harpsichords" can't be considered harpsichords: they are a sort of piano modified to sound a bit strange, probably a bit like an harpsichord because strings are plucked instead of hammered. Afters decads of inversigation, today we know much more things about harpsichord and harpsichord playing. We are rediscovering its long tradition just on the base of rare documents of different kind: descriptions, paintings, old "original" instruments, music composed for the instrument, ancient treatises, etc..

Sorry! too long