Thread: It's been big week for my stack of razors...

I'm still out of town, staying with friends, but I've won some eBay auctions and gotten some very neat stuff in the midst of lots of fairly unpleasant work.



This was a pure gamble. The pictures in the listing were bad, but it looked like this was a pretty sizable blade. More interesting was the unusual notched point. I've only seen a few razors in this style. The most striking was a Colley from the mid 1830's. I think this Joseph Smith is a bit later than that. Probably 1840-1850.

It sure does look pretty grungy, but I don't anticipate many problems fixing it up. It's currently about 15/16. It'll lose some width to get rid of that nasty ding, but it ought to still be nice and large.

The other thing I got that was worth getting pictures of is this set:



The spines are etched with MAGNUM BONUM, one of the earlier marketing designations for razors in America. The earliest ad I saw for Magnum Bonum razors was an 1810 ad in the New York Evening Post (along with Ne Plus Ultra and Refined Steel).

I don't think these razors are from 1810, but they're no later than 1825.

They've been very well loved over their long lives. At some point, someone replaced the scales with piano keys as well as a significant (and quite good) regrind.



One's a little bit bigger than the other (and there are some subtle differences between the two blades, including the stamps, but I'll get to that in a moment). They're both in spitting distance from 8/8. When they were new, they were certainly at least that big. Also, they're heavy.



The tangs were reground so I can't tell if they were originally like that, and the stamps were unfortunately mostly lost. There are two lines of text on both, and on both the bottom word is almost certainly 'Warranted'. The top line of text is in a semicircle on one razor, and both of them have EN as the last two letters. Other than that it's a mystery. Maybe they're Stenton razors? I know the old Devil Stenton was fond of gigantic razors.



The ivory, of course, is cracked. Ivory is almost always cracked. But one of the two has a kind of neat old repair. That piece of wood on the bottom doesn't actually touch the blade. It just holds a broken piece of the scales in place.



This pair of razors simply oozes history. Sadly, there's no marks to identify who might've owned them and they were vended through one of those strip-mall eBay stores, so there's very little chance the vendor will know anything about them.

I've done nothing to either of these razors -- all my tools are 1700 miles away, but the pair will get pretty minimal cleanup. I'll probably glue the ivory and get the rust out of the pivot, but nothing else.

Big razors still aren't really my thing -- several of the ones I've gotten recently I've gotten purely because I intend to sell them -- but these three will not be leaving my possession any time soon.