Download KNIFE WORLD * WHUT IZZIT NUMBER 362 FEBRUARY 2008 page

KNIFE WORLD * WHUT IZZIT NUMBER 362
FEBRUARY 2008
page 1
WHUT IZZIT
by Bernard Levine
www.knife-expert.com
PICTURE 1
CAPTION:
Thoresen’s Korium ad from 1955 (don’t try to order!).
KIM: PLEASE USE THIS IMAGE FULL SIZE, BOTTOM LEFT OF PAGE 9
In the years following World War II, from 1945 into the 1950s, dozens of Americans began
wholesale cutlery importing businesses. First bringing in knives from Italy, Japan, and India,
then after 1950 from Germany, and even from France, Scandinavia, and South America, these
small new firms hoped to compete with well established firms like Boker and Henckels.
Overseas knife manufacturers were happy to stamp new American brands on their wares, in
hopes of winning increased sales in what was then the only booming economy in the world.
Most of the newcomers to cutlery wholesaling had no more clue how their business actually
worked, than did the thousands of postwar newcomers to chicken farming. Any fool could buy
baby chicks, and any fool could buy private brand knives. The hard part was turning them over
profitably, steadily, and consistently. Knives were an easy business to lose money in. As one
wag said, the way to make a small fortune in the knife business, was to start out with a large
fortune.
I still don’t understand how anyone can raise chickens profitably, but I do know what it took to
import and distribute cutlery profitably. The two main requirements were plenty of capital, and a
sharp eye for credit-worthiness. The main business of any wholesaler is advancing credit to
retailers. Sound credit practices mean success. Anything less means failure.
Thus it is no surprise that most of the newly established cutlery importers of the 1940s and
1950s were only in business for a few months -- often just long enough to run through an initial
order of knives, which they swapped for uncollectible promises to pay -- essentially giving them
away to insolvent retailers who had been cut off by older more experienced cutlery wholesalers
such as Coast Cutlery or Kastor Bros. Bankruptcy or simply shutting down soon followed.
For knife collectors today, that flurry of mismanaged wholesaling has left a legacy of mystery
import brands. The successful postwar importers’ brands are well known to us -- for example
Gutmann (founded 1947) used G.C.Co. and Edge Mark; Precise International Corporation
(founded 1954) used Deerslayer, PIC, and a fist holding three arrows; Liberty Organization
(founded c1950) used B. Svoboda (svoboda means liberty); and Latama (founded 1949) used its
KNIFE WORLD * WHUT IZZIT NUMBER 362
FEBRUARY 2008
page 2
own name (short for LAtin AMericA) on knives made for it by the German-owned Italian knife
company, CORICAMA, with factories in Caslino and Maniago. Latama also used the brand
EDWIN JAY on knives that it imported for New York retailer Edwin Jay Hoffritz. But if you
have spent much time looking at older knives, you will have encountered a variety of more
obscure importer brands, usually on generic German, Italian, or Japanese knives of the 1950s.
In this column we have learned the background of a few such obscure brands, often from
vintage ads, sometimes from old timers with long memories. One such brand was ROSCO,
discussed in the January 2003 column. ROSCO was used on knives imported by the George
Rose Company of Los Angeles between 1950 and 1952. Another was FABICO, discussed in
August 1994, used by the F. A. Bower Import Co. of Jacksonville, Florida in the late 1950s and
early 1960s. Then there was Fred Mac Overland’s Overland Import Co. in Los Angeles,
1951-1953, discussed in November 1994.
Yet even some of the commoner mystery brands of the 1950s and 1960s still elude us. For
example, who and where was R. J. RICHTER, an importer of Scandinavian and German knives
in the early 1960s? His main claim to fame was importing the first fantasy Nazi pen knives,
evidently made for him by Olbertz of Solingen. Other mystery markings include ATCO,
ALAMO, BEST, COLES, ERMA, IMCO, L.A. Co., ORIENTAL, and PASTOR ALEMAN
(probably a Mexican import brand).
PICTURE 2
Another common import brand that has long remained a mystery is KORIUM, most often seen
on German daggers with cast metal handles and guards. This brand had baffled me for most of
three decades, until late last year when a colleague drew my attention to a clipped magazine ad
offered for sale on eBay. The ad had been published in 1955, in the National Rifle Association’s
American Rifleman magazine. That ad does not reveal the entire history of KORIUM, but it does
appear to reveal who owned the brand. This was an importer called Thoresen’s, at 342 Fourth
Avenue in New York City. The ad states that over 100,000 KORIUM knives had already been
imported.
A few months earlier, Thoresen’s had been spending even more on advertising -- such as a full
color ad on the back cover of the November 1954 issue of the men’s magazine, Cavalier. That ad
laid hyperbole on thick:
“The famed Korium Black Forest Knife is available in this country. Inspired by Rommel, the
Desert Fox... The platinum color handle represents an Eagle’s claw grasping the globe, the Nazi
dream that died on D day.”
That ad even included a Canadian order fulfillment address: 45 St. James Street, West
Montreal.
For a small wholesaler who was losing money from having advanced goods to insolvent
retailers, Plan B might be to start competing with those retailers, by means of direct mail retail
sales. Direct retail avoids credit hassles, because every sale is paid for in advance. Plus the direct
KNIFE WORLD * WHUT IZZIT NUMBER 362
FEBRUARY 2008
page 3
importing retailer can capture both the jobber’s markup of 5-10%, and the retail markup of
60-100% or more. How sweet that seems... until one figures in the costs of national advertising,
and of single item order fulfillment.
Successful direct mail knife retailers (think Atlanta Cutlery, Smokey Mountain Knife Works,
A. G. Russell, Maher & Grosh) do only enough advertising to make people aware of their
catalogs -- lots of small ads, widely scattered. Most of their ad budget goes into their catalogs
(and now into websites); although catalogs are expensive to publish, most of the people who
request one are going to read it, and are likely to order something from it.
Full page mass-market ads like the nearby 1955 Korium ad, are seen by many, but are acted
upon by very few -- so few that such ads would bankrupt even a big retailer in short order, unless
he sold only high-markup exclusive items, the way the various collectible “Mints” do -- and
discontinued his direct mail ads as soon as sales began to decline, as Thoresen’s evidently did.
Long-running campaigns of full page ads in big mass-circulation magazines might pay off for
Ford or Coca-Cola, although even that has never been proven. Ongoing ad campaigns would
have been folly for a small importer with only a handful of specialty products to sell. Yet such a
merchant could not economically publish a consumer catalog, either, especially not with a
selection of just four items.
By contrast to high volume consumer advertising, advertising in a small circulation specialty
magazine, such as Knife World, is nearly as cost-effective as a catalog. Of course small
magazines like this did not exist until the 1970s. When they did come online, they helped small
start-up knife importers such as James Parker, Frank Buster, and James Frost build successful
wholesale and direct retail businesses, where many of their predecessors starting out in the 1950s
had failed.
*
What of those Korium knives? Their prices were low, $3.95 postpaid. The “dagger” blades and
scabbards were standard Jagdmesser (south German hunting knife) components of decent
quality. Where corners were cut was in the cast metal handles. The ‘golden’ lady looks to have
been made of plated zinc alloy (pot metal), readily broken (especially the guard quillons).
PICTURE 3 OPTIONAL
The ‘platinum’ eagle claw handles look like aluminum alloy, but those might have been pot
metal, instead.
PICTURE 4
KNIFE WORLD * WHUT IZZIT NUMBER 362
FEBRUARY 2008
page 4
The eagle head knife is shown in the ads with a round stag handle, but the few examples I have
seen have flat panels of jigged bone.
PICTURE 5
Worst of all is the “Swiss Army Knife,” which is not Swiss, not Army, and barely a knife (a
later Thoresen’s ad called it a “Swiss Army Type Knife”). The handles look French, the blades
look Japanese, and the knife looks just plain bad. The visible rivets are thin wire, snipped off and
left unfinished. The tang stamp is a mess: KORIUM in the first line, something illegible in the
second. Its plastic handle does have have a molded in place metal shield, of the type pioneered
by August Pauls back in 1892. Even this shield is sloppy.
PICTURE 6
PICTURE 7 OPTIONAL
PICTURE 8
*
By 1960 Thoresen’s (now at 585 Water Street, New York) had shifted to a new line of direct
mail merchandise -- pocket calculators. Not electronic pocket calculators, those had not been
invented yet, these were mechanical calculators, the Wizard Calculating Machines, made in
Germany, only $1.98 each. Thoresen’s also sold KORIUM brand metal cigarette cases.
PICTURE 9 OPTIONAL
And what became of this illustrious KORIUM knife brand, after Thoresen’s had gone on to
other product lines? I don’t know for certain, but I found two clues on eBay: a ball and claw
dagger made in Germany, and jigged bone handle hatchet made in Japan. Both are marked
KORIUM/ PIC. This suggests that Precise International Corporation picked up the Korium brand
in the early 1960s, for whatever it was still worth. These and a few other KORIUM/ PIC knives I
have seen were of even lower quality than the “originals,” both the blade finish and the handle
casting.
KNIFE WORLD * WHUT IZZIT NUMBER 362
FEBRUARY 2008
page 5
PICTURE 10
*
*
*
Here is an unusual old jack knife of a pattern that I have never seen before, except in a catalog
drawing. It sold on eBay to an Australian collector for $62 and change. The seller described it
accurately:
PICTURE 11
“On offer is an antique pocketknife with stag-horn handle. The blades are stamped WJNO
BAKER/ 3 HUNTER STREET/ SYDNEY and MADE IN SHEFFIELD. This is a very early
example of a pocketknife stamped with an Australian distributor’s name. Both blades are well
worn and have been thinned down by decades of sharpening -- otherwise in good condition and a
nice collectible.”
Just how worn down its blades are can be seen by comparing it to the top drawing in the
nearby group of castrating knives, from page 3 of the 1924 W. Jno. Baker mail order catalog. W.
John Baker was a retailer in Sydney, founded in 1888.
PICTURE 12
That knife is Baker’s No. 284 Western Castrator, offered only with genuine stag handles. This
pattern was made with two identical large spey blades, the remnant of whose tiny clips can be
seen on the relic blades of the eBay knife. Actually, the blades were not quite identical. The front
one was stamped out on the blade W. JNO. BAKER while the back one was stamped
WESTERN CASTRATOR.
I have never seen this handle die (shape, profile) in any American cutlery catalog, either
manufacturer or distributor. Neither do I recall ever having seen it in any English knife catalog.
Evidently it was made exclusively for the Australian market, perhaps even exclusively for Baker.
I guess one might call this handle die “platypus tail.”
PICTURE 13 OPTIONAL
Baker offered a variety of other distinctive Australian patterns in his catalog, both folders and
fixed blades (see the June 2006 column for one of his fixed blade styles, the Camp Knife).
KNIFE WORLD * WHUT IZZIT NUMBER 362
FEBRUARY 2008
page 6
Baker’s 1924 specials were all made in Sheffield -- although in the 1930s-1950s period, some of
the fixed blade styles were made in Sydney, by East Bros. Baker’s 1924 catalog also offered a
range of standard Sheffield patterns, as well as few American knives, notably Schrade Cutlery
Co. switchblades.
One Australian series Baker featured was his Station Knives -- “station” is Australian for
“ranch.” With their stout equal-end handle dies, they were evidently inspired by the American
cattle knife pattern, first made circa 1880s. But they have different style blades than cattle
knives, and typically more of them, four to six.
PICTURE 14
PICTURE 15
These Australian patterns are interesting in their own right, at least to Australians, but I
brought up that worn down No. 284 for a more general reason. Watching and listening to
collectors discussing their older knives, I have been struck by how often they fail to see blade
wear and damage. Either they don’t see it at all, or if a blade is obviously reduced and
misshapen, such as by a dime-sized chip out of the cutting edge, they ask “what special purpose
was this blade shape made for?” They make up elaborate theories to explain the deformed blade,
oblivious to the obvious, that it was broken or ground down.
*
The most common collector error -- mainly made by people new to old knives -- is to read the
markings on a knife first (or only), without regard to the knife itself. People who read the
markings, instead of “reading the knife,” wind up buying fakes, along with a variety of brand
new knives marked with old brand names -- in each case often paying old knife prices for what
are in fact new knives.
Anyone can read a marking. It takes experience, tempered by cynicism, to read a knife without
regard to what it happens to be marked. Markings only matter when they are correct for and
appropriate to the knife they happen to be on.
Another error almost as common, even among experienced collectors who ought to know
better, is to assume that whatever tired remnant of blade happens to be left on a knife, is
somehow right for that knife. Just as it takes experience to “read” a knife without reading the
markings, it takes experience to “see” the parts of a blade that are absent, rather than just the part
that is still present. This type of experience comes both from handling genuinely unused knives,
and from studying old catalogs and catalog reprints. People who see every blade as full, rather
than noting the metal that is not there, wind up buying knives with worn blades, knives with
re-shaped blades, knives with welded blades, and knives that were repaired with incorrect blades.
KNIFE WORLD * WHUT IZZIT NUMBER 362
*
*
FEBRUARY 2008
page 7
*
As always I am happy to be corrected when I am wrong. Otherwise I would never learn
anything. If you catch me in an error, please do me the favor of letting me know. Just be sure of
your facts before you do.
Please send me an email, or mail paper correspondence to Whut Izzit, c/o Knife World, Box
3395, Knoxville TN 37927. Be sure to enclose either an email address, or a long self-addressed
stamped envelope with your letter, and also a flatbed scan, photocopy, or photograph (on plain
LIGHT GRAY or WHITE background please) of your knife. Do not write directly on the
picture. Indicate the knife’s handle material and its length (length CLOSED if it is a folder).
Make enlarged images of all markings and indicate where they appear. Because of the large
backlog, it usually takes me at least six months to answer a letter to the column.
My newest book, the updated 2nd Edition of Knifemakers of Old San Francisco (softcover,
complete with price guide) is available direct from Knife World for $29.95 plus $5.00 postage
and handling.
*
*
*
*END*
*
*
*
KIM: I CAN EMAIL YOU SOME SHORT 1-PICTURE FILLERS IF YOU NEED THEM. LET
ME KNOW HOW MUCH SPACE IS LEFT TO FILL.