Since I first saw pictures of one of these, I've wanted to own one. There's something about the industrial design that appeals to me on a pre-verbal level. Maybe it's because it reminds me of the better industrial designs of the mid 1980's, maybe it's because I'm just a sucker for clean little arrows telling you which way to move things.

This reminds me a bit of the Rolls razor, except that I find it more functional -- I never did get the zen of shaving with an edge on the end of a stick. It's a very gadgety razor. If you slide the guard off the bottom of the scales, they separate into halves with a little comb at the bottom. Those little rivets that look kind of like an oddly placed third pin hold on push-tab buttons at the point-end.





I like the knurling on the buttons. If you hold in the button while you close the blade, a little tab inside will lock onto the functional barber's notch at the end of the blade, like so:



Now you've got a razor with a guard! How new and high tech! The incredible innovations of the machine age..

Wait, you Stewart's Plantagenet razor came first? Oh. Stewart bought the existing patent from another firm? Oh... Jean Jacques Perret had one in the mid 1700's? In fact there were a lot of different versions of this idea.

Well, did any of those guys have arrows and sans-serif typefaces? NO THEY DID NOT!
(I actually like the design of the Plantagenet razor best, but I've failed to get my hands on one so far).



In any event, this is a neat razor. Here you can see it with one of the scales clipped to the blade to act as a guard. It's really easy to unclip and change sides, and as an added bonus, you can use the clip to lock the blade into the scales to prevent it from opening. To get it open again, you have to take that slide off, open one scale and then unclip. It's an elegant design, but the weight of the scales works against it. I have to wonder how much better a tool this would be with a heavier blade to balance the weight.



The one I got does have a forging defect in the blade. It looks and feels like a bad crack, but it's very shallow and doesn't extend down to the cutting edge (or up to top of the spine). It hasn't seen much honing, and it took a fantastic edge with minimal effort, other than dealing with the weight of the scales. I can't really stress this enough. I got one of the best shaves I've ever gotten from this razor.

These were made between the summer of 1912 and maybe as late as 1915. By 1916, the Zepp Safe-Razor company was listed as defunct. I can't find any ads for theses razors beyond 1913 though, so I suspect they'd gone floaty in the aquarium well before 1916. For a year, there, they were posting a lot of business. $120,000 or so of assets at the end of 1913. The following year there was some kind of reassessment though, I think over import duties because the parts were made in Germany.

Next up, I'll post some pictures of the Zepp with its close cousin, the Ern Junior.