Museums have started making their collections available online. And as I was browsing digitalmuseum.no – a common digital platform for a lot of Norwegian museums – I ran across a nice and simple wedge razor. Always a sucker for shaving oddities, I poked around a bit more.

According to my source, the razor is marked “Mrk. Erik Anton Berg, Eskilstuna. Garanti.”. Which I read to mean that this simple wedge razor was made by the Erik Anton Berg factory in Eskilstuna, Sweden – Herr Berg himself being dead and buried by 1910 – and that there was a warranty.

The razor is reasonable simple. A frame, a handle, a guard, and – of course – a wedge blade. The blade is secured to one side of the frame. On the other side, the guard and handle is screwed into place. The slit in the handle is likely intended to hold the blade during stropping. It would work in much the same way as the separate blade holder described in the patent for the Kampfe razor. Overall it seems a workmanlike, if somewhat clunky, design.

E A Berg made a lot of other edged tools. They were – and still are – known for their quality straight razors, shoemaker’s knives, daggers, pliers, chisels and planer steels. A simple wedge razor wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for therm.

I did poke about on Google Patents a little, but couldn’t find a patent for this simple wedge razor. If it was patented, the patent would be long since expired. Anyone with access to basic machine tools could recreate this simple wedge razor today. Whether it is a marked for such a razor today it is a completely different question.