A Knife with a Name – by Neal Punchard
From the October 2019 issue of Knife Magazine:
“Every good knife has a name, and usually it is seen on a blade. But sometimes the cutler’s name or trademark is found right on the handle. Not a bad idea when you think about how most of the top companies from automobiles to electronics put their names front and center on products. While knives with wood, plastic, or celluloid handles are sometimes found with a name of the maker on the handle, this article will focus solely on metal-handled knives.
Knives with metal handles date back to the bronze-age, but the metal-handled knives featured within first appeared around the mid-1800s. Most collectors associate stamped or cast metal-handled knives with names in the handle as “Boy’s Knives.” Although that is indeed often the case, it is not an absolute rule. Boy’s knives in general were certainly meant as an inexpensive way to get a first pocket knife into the hands of youth. Any good company knows that if you can secure a customer early on, you have a good chance of keeping them for a lifetime. Most of the early metal-handled boy’s knives from the late 1800s to early 1900s had stamped hollow sheet metal handles. Those handles were easy to form in a press and were seen with a variety of slogans like “Boy’s Favorite”, “Our Boy”, “School Knife”, and “Dime Knife.’But the metal-handled knives featured in this article are in a whole different league from the frugal boy’s knives.”
Click the blue box below to launch the flipbook of the article: