Having spent a lot of time in coins, stamps and other popular collectibles, I am a bit spoiled by the wealth of reference materials available on most of these items. Razors, on the other hand, are dismally documented by comparison, as are many of the companies that manufactured them. Try Googleing for information on Wade & Butcher - a MAJOR manufacturer for over a century and you will find very little. With razors you are basically stuck with The Standard Guide and Goins. I have found another free reference put out by Canada that isn't bad, but that it about it. And these guides themselves and sparse and incomplete. By saying this, I mean absolutely NO disrespect to the authors of these works. They have done a mammoth amount of work compiling what they have. But probably if you asked the authors (sorry, cannot ask Mr. Goins, as he sadly passed away), they would probably express the same dissatisfaction and frustration as I feel. There were SO many razor manufacturers making SO many brands. And unless they were also gold or silversmiths, the only documentation on them might have been their handbills, barber supply catalogs and their own catalogs.
But maybe what they could not do on their own we can do together. I would like to start a project where any of you anywhere who has a barber supply catalog, a manufacturer's catalog, an old flyer or anything on razors or Barberania, scan it into pdf format. If you cannot do that, send it to me and I will scan and return it. The only proviso is that these documents become part of the public domain so everyone can use them. I don't believe that there would be copyright issues on anything that old (some lawyer can email me if there is). It would be such a great project and do so much to advance the hobby.
I, for one, would love to get a razor and be able to find out how much it sold for, the history of the manufacturer and whether or not it was used in a particularly dastardly crime.
Does anyone know what razor Humphry Bogart shaved with?
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