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Tom Harrison - Lion Auctioneer

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.

$LionTang.jpg
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.
$LionCaseName.jpg
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 :001_rolle
$LionBlade.jpg
 
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I'd be willing to bet my next straight razor purchase that the stamping refers to "Licensed Auctioneer".
Edit: Unless the OP post was tongue in cheek. In that case, never mind!
 
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Antique Hoosier

“Aircooled”
As a licensed Auctioneer I find this really unique and interesting! And we have a few "Lion" ones among us to this day indeed!!
 
I'd be willing to bet my next straight razor purchase that the stamping refers to "Licensed Auctioneer".
Edit: Unless the OP post was tongue in cheek. In that case, never mind!
I'm having fun with it, but it's not tongue in cheek. You can tell it's not LICN but LION with an imprecise O by comparing with the C in AUCTIONEER which serifed and obviously different. I do leather work and know a slight lean on the tool can give that sort of impression. The O was struck while the stamp was leaning to the left (or a glancing blow on the left side of the tool), the N with it leaning diagonally up and to the left - you can see the top left is a deeper impression. Also the LION on the case is perfectly clear.

It's what makes me think it's a one off, or perhaps a very low production run for advertising gifts as if it was a volume production a plate for the full debossing would have been made and the character alignment would be better and it wouldn't have the variance in individual letter impressions.

I won't hold you to the bet, but thanks for the input :001_smile
 
There are many blade where the stamps are not uniform in depth. To my eyes it clearly shows LICN on the tang but the box looks like LION. But given the stamping on the box doesn't look very precise it probably just ran together. It could have been a short run that this guy used for advertising or something. Any way its a great score.
 
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