I have been working with my growing collection of finishing tools now for over a decade, and it's a natural interest (especially since learning to make finishing tools myself) to glance at old engravers' names stamped on the sides of the tools, or look at the imperfections in the hand engraving, and wonder about the person behind these little works of art.

Recently, I bought a group of five small tools that were all missing their handles - and I was surprised to find that there is just as much variety in how the shanks and tangs of these tools are made and finished as there is in the face. Some of it I knew already, but some of it was new - and since I hadn't seen anyone else write about this before, I thought I'd do a bit of research and share my findings.

This is a diagram of a common British finishing tool shape. The shank is the visible part of the tool shaft going into the handle, while the tang is the pointed end of the tool that fixes it to the handle. On British tools, these are commonly separated by the shoulder, a result of the casting process, which seems to have become the norm in the early 19th century.

Pretty simple, right? It's a straight forward, functional part of the tool that doesn't immediately lend itself to creativity.

So how can the shanks and tangs of tools really vary that much?

I have been making finishing tools for almost two years now, and I'm coming up to about 100 tools that I've made in total. Originally the shafts of my tools had quite a simple shape - until I bought an antique pallet made by Wilhelm Leo of Stuttgart. It had a fantastic sweeping shape to the entire tool, which changed my perception of how the tool itself looks as a complete piece, rather than just focusing on the face.

After several iterations of different designs, the finishing tools that I now make have a few varied styles similar to the below image.

These look nice, but what about the examples in antique British tools that I mentioned before? Here is the interesting range of different shanks and tangs that I have encountered in my own small collection.

As I found out when I was researching an early roll in my collection, rolls got larger as time went on - from quite small tools in the 18th century, slowly growing during the industrial revolution as brass became faster and cheaper to produce, until by the mid 19th century they had doubled in size from what they were a hundred years previously.

It seems like the same can be said for other finishing tools.

These three tools seem to be about fifty years apart - the one on the right is probably late 18th century (dated stylistically from the design, there is no maker's name), the middle one is from c1840, and the one on the left is probably late 19th or early 20th century (again dated stylistically, the maker Caslon were active for a long time).

The longer shank and tang is beneficial to the bookbinder, because the larger amount of metal in the tool allows it to hold a working temperature for longer. It also makes it much easier for a binder to "sight" a tool and be able to accurately tool the binding with it.

This actually could solve a massive question that I've always had - we have so many early and mid 19th century tools, why are there barely any 18th century tools surviving. For patterned tools, you can put it down to patterns going out of fashion and being melted down into different tools, but what about simple line pallets and other shapes - they would get worn, sure, but surely not worn enough that every single one was melted down and replaced in the 19th century, when most antique tools date from.

If it is also the case that 19th century tools are generally larger than their 18th century counterparts, then it makes much more sense why very few 18th century or earlier tools survive - 19th century tools were much easier to use owing to the larger amount of metal in the shank and tang, so it was a no-brainer for 19th century binders to replace their entire inventory of tools with new ones.

Makers names are often stamped on British tools made after the industrial revolution. The advent of mass production and railways meant that toolmakers were selling their tools across the country, and having your name clearly stamped on a finishing tool was a great way to advertise when your customer was far away, and wouldn't just hear about you through word of mouth.

I was surprised at how widely there were different ways of adding the maker's name.

On some Paas tools, I found the tool stamped on 3 sides with "26 High Holborn", "London", and "Paas", while I found other tools of more or less the same size just marked "Paas".

This Seare tool was the mostly heavily stamped, with a stamp used on each side of the shank to spell out "Seare late Paas", "44 High", "Holborn", "London".

Some makers would stamp their name multiple times, I have a Caslon tool where Caslon is stamped on opposite sides, and a W. Day tool has his name stamped twice on adjacent sides. Neither tool has the name badly struck, so it wasn't a case of re-stamping a name on a tool where the first stamp had gone badly.

Not all finishing tool engravers stamped their tools, and for whatever reason there are plenty of 19th century British tools that exist without a maker's stamp. Individual handle letters are very rarely stamped, Hicks seem to have been the only manufacturer who regularly stamped their names on handle letters. Perhaps this was rarely done because of the quantity in one batch, but it seems odd that often straight line pallets will have a maker's name stamped on them, which must have taken a lot less work to produce than a single handle letter.

The most unusual maker's name placement in my small survey of tools was a tool by J Francis of London. He chose to stamp his name on the tang rather than the shank, so it was by pure chance that I even found his name because the tool was missing its handle.

Almost every tang that I have found is a straight, pointed tang. The above J Francis tool is a bit of an exception only because someone has taken a hammer to the tool for some reason.

Some late 20th century tools have round tangs or tangs that screw into the handle, but these are machine made and shouldn't be considered as part of this survey of handmade tools.

The only real exception to this, is a single handle letter tool that I have.

On this unsigned letter tool, which is probably early 20th century, the tang has been twisted by 90 degrees. Perhaps this was done to grip into the handle slightly better than a straight tang, although the lack of handle on this tool suggests that it didn't help much to hold the handle on.

Shoulders are left on the tool from the casting process, and are very common on British tools but much less so on tools made in continental Europe.

Only two professionally made British finishing tools in my collection have no o shoulder. One is an unsigned gouge, well made but roughly filed and extremely worn, so probably 18th century, and the other by Dyer (possibly H Dyer of Hatton Garden or Richard H. Dyer of London, both engravers active in the second quarter of the 19th century)

On the rest of my tools, the range in shape of these shoulders is quite surprising. In two of my tools (both unsigned, but stylistically probably late 18th century or very early 19th) the shoulder has been filed into a very neat square.

Tools by important early 19th century firms such as Timbury have the shoulders filed into a round shape, which is presumably similar to the shape the shoulders had when the blank tool was first cast. By the mid 19th century most firms were doing this or sometimes (more commonly on letter tools for some reason) the shoulders were left completely un-filed in the raw un-uniform shape the blanks had when they were originally cast.

By the end of the 19th century they are almost always filed into a very neat circle, sometimes they would be slightly domed and other times completely flat. The one exception I have to this is a partial set of 20th century gouges, where the shoulder is left in a messy shape exactly as it would have come from the foundry where the blank tool was made, unfortunately there is no maker's name on them.

There is something quite special about finding a maker’s name hidden away on a tang, or noticing a unique way that a tool was finished over a century ago. These little variations and imperfections are what make these tools different to mass produced objects - they are each the fingerprint of an artist, and one of the reasons that I particularly prefer using old handmade tools rather than buying tools from modern machine engravers.