A straight razor will never give you a year, and it is worth saying that at the top rather than at the bottom. There are no serial numbers on the blade, no date code under a guard and no register to consult. What there is, is a stamp struck into the tang — the flat surface at the base of the blade, between the cutting edge and the pivot — and that stamp names a maker. A maker names a period. Reading it well means knowing which kind of key you are holding.

The tang, and the two things that destroy it

The tang sits between the blade and the erl, and the maker struck the firm name, the mottos, the trademark and, on exported goods, the country into it, usually on both sides. Two things destroy this evidence, and both are common. The first is repolishing: a heavily polished blade loses its stamp irreversibly, and no other part of the razor carries the maker name. The second is the passage of the metal itself — the commercial blades of the nineteenth century were struck deep, the late ones less so, and a century of cleaning takes its toll. The practical instruction is blunt: photograph both sides of the tang before anything touches the blade.

Sheffield: the stamp as a chronicle

Wade & Butcher is the clearest example of a stamp that reads as a sequence. Its razors can be sorted by the wording on the tang, and the wordings follow one another: the name Wade alone on the earliest razors, then the partnership marks, then the crown initials of successive monarchs, then the motto that made the firm famous — For Barbers Use — in an early and a main variant, then the Celebrated form with an etched inscription and a six-feather arrow, then a run of twentieth-century model names such as Special, Bow Razor, Lord Byron and the 1918 model. The crown initials are the crudest of these keys: GR for the 1820s, WR from 1830, VR from 1837, with the printed caveat that the WR stamp is given both as 1830 to 1837 and as 1840 to 1870 by different lines of the same evidence.

Joseph Rodgers & Sons is the counter-example: a stamp that identifies everything and dates nothing. The star and Maltese cross has belonged to the firm since 1724 and was used for well over a century and a half. Royal warrant inscriptions are the only part of a Rodgers razor that narrows anything, and a Cutlers to His Majesty King George IV inscription belongs to the 1820s.

Three more Sheffield houses round out the school. George Wostenholm is placed by its two works, Rockingham up to 1847 and Washington from 1847, which is a good key in theory and a thin one in practice because the address is almost never stamped on the razor; the firm also gives two different founding years, 1745 and 1785, and its reference work admits that the precise date is unknown. Frederick Reynolds is placed by workshop addresses — Sims Croft, School Croft by 1851, Gell Street around 1860, Monmouth Lane into the 1870s — with the same practical problem, and the added complication that the sources disagree about whether he worked in Sheffield or Birmingham. Thomas Turner is simply a window of about 1834 to 1921, which is all the sources give.

Solingen: the registration year as a lower bound

The German school works on a different key, and it is the one place in this layer where real years appear. The years are mark registration years, taken from the Solingen directories, and they bound a razor from below rather than dating it.

A registration year is a floor. A Puma-marked razor is no earlier than 1921, and that is the whole of what the mark says.

Thiers, Eskilstuna and the American schools

The French school around Thiers is thinner. Thiers-Issard has a confirmed founding date of 1884 and a documented succession of owners, and the Le Grelot mark now belongs to that house; Le Grelot's own habit is the trap, because the firm struck the model number on the spine, so a number that looks like a serial number is a designation. Fontenille has nothing but the country mark.

In Sweden, C.V. Heljestrand carries the MK designation, which is a trademark series and not a year, and the firm itself has no documented years of operation; the only dated record for the Eskilstuna school belongs to a different maker. In the United States, Case is surrounded by dated connections — Crandall Cutlery moving to Bradford in 1903 and joining W.R. Case & Sons in 1912, George W. Korn making razors for Case around 1900 to 1925 — and a Case-stamped razor may have been made by an outside works; Robeson has a single printed window of about 1907 to at least 1991.

The layer underneath: grind, spine and scales

Below all of the firm evidence sits a shared era layer that does not date a razor but does cut off a period. A wedge blade, thick through the middle and without a distinct tang or a monkey tail, is early. A quarter hollow is transitional, roughly 1850 to 1900. A full hollow singing blade belongs from about 1880 onwards. Scales of horn, bone and ivory belong to the nineteenth century, celluloid from about 1900 to 1950, and plastic from the 1940s. Acid etching runs from about 1850 to 1900 and gold wash from about 1870 to 1920. Read together with the stamp, that layer can confirm a window or rule one out. Read alone, it is an era and nothing more.

See the tang-stamp system page for the tables, and the country-mark page for why ENGLAND on a tang means no earlier than 1 March 1891.