I'm posting a little early on this one as besides being a restoration project, I'm also pretty curious about the history of the razor. I rather jokingly posted asking who Tom Harrison was and how the heck did he auction lions before, but further research suggests he may well have done just that. The only information I can find is a reference to a letter by Thomas Harrison, The Lion Auctioneer about an order for some mouldings in 1899. It seems reasonable that Tom and Thomas are one and the same, and the interesting part is that the letter is part of the National Fairground Archive at Sheffield University. It's seems possible but unlikely that he had a sideline in razors, "Too scared to put your head in a lions mouth? How about putting some cold steel to your face instead!" So I'm wondering if this may have been a personalized razor. I'm guessing lions were pretty upmarket items around 1900 so it's not too much of a stretch to think if some German manufacturer offered to stamp your name on the tang that he could have got one done.
The way the o in lion and the n in auctioneer are imprecisely struck does suggest to me that the tang was stamped letter by letter. You can also see how the stamper started spacing the letters out more for alignment as he did the Auctioneer part.
There are similar small errors on the case debossing, the most obvious being how the i in Lion is far above the baseline.
So do I just have an unusual make or is personalized razors something that was being done around 1900?
When I do get to the restoration, there's a bit of rust on the tang, it needs new scales and I should have fun trying to get a straight edge instead of this wavy mess
The way the o in lion and the n in auctioneer are imprecisely struck does suggest to me that the tang was stamped letter by letter. You can also see how the stamper started spacing the letters out more for alignment as he did the Auctioneer part.
There are similar small errors on the case debossing, the most obvious being how the i in Lion is far above the baseline.
So do I just have an unusual make or is personalized razors something that was being done around 1900?
When I do get to the restoration, there's a bit of rust on the tang, it needs new scales and I should have fun trying to get a straight edge instead of this wavy mess
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