An Old Collector Ranks the 10 Most Valuable Pocket Knives Ever Made

THE BARN FIND BIBLE: the maker marks, the stamps, the dating rules and the real sold prices, all in one place: https://barnfindbible.com Somewhere north of 11,000 pocket knives have crossed my table in forty years. There is one I still think about. A little pearl handled whittler in a cigar box at a farm sale outside Monticello, Iowa, screws through the handle scales instead of pins, a name on the tang I did not know yet. I sold it that afternoon for $80 because $80 felt like a good day. It brought $2,600 at a knife auction the next spring. That is all the standing I have got, and it is enough for this. A man who has handled that many gets to have an opinion about the order. So this is the order. The real top of the market, counting down, not ten knives that might be in your drawer. Most of these are not in your pocket and they never will be, and that is exactly the point. The shape of the mountain is what tells you where your own knife stands on it. But this is not a museum tour either. Every entry names its honest cousin, the ordinary knife by the same hand or the same idea that a regular person can actually turn up on a Saturday, and what that cousin really brings. THE ORDER, 10 down to 1: 10. CASE, the floor. A common used Case is a $25 to $75 knife and anybody quoting four figures on one is fixing to buy it from you cheap. What lifts one out is a single word: CASE BROTHERS, the separate family shop at Little Valley and Springville, New York, gone by about 1915. $400 to $1,500, scarce patterns past $2,500. 9. NAPANOCH KNIFE CO, Napanoch, New York. About twenty years of production, then the plant was bought out from under it in 1919 and the name was done. No reissue of a Napanoch exists, which makes it the rare name nobody has ever faked. $150 to $800, big folding hunters past $1,000. 8. SCHATT & MORGAN, Titusville, PA, the original run, 1895 to the 1933 bankruptcy. The trap is a number: the 1991 revival series carries a YEAR on the tang or bolster. An original never does. Originals $300 to $2,500. The revival, $60 to $200. 7. THE PRESS BUTTON KNIVES, the early American automatics out of Walden, New York and Bridgeport, Connecticut. A button set flush in the bolster and patent dates on the tang. $300 to $2,000. Laws on these vary by state and I say so in the video. 6. MILLER BROS CUT CO, Meriden, Connecticut, 1860s to 1926. The tell is screws instead of pins through the handle scales, sometimes with a star inlay. $75 to $1,200, the silver and pearl ones past $2,000. Then the mid count stop: how a collector actually decides worth, in order. Maker and era off the tang stamp, pattern scarcity, handle material, condition and whether the blade has been sharpened away. Then the two that decide the top of this list, completeness with box and papers, and provenance. The first four you can check tonight at your kitchen table. The last two are not about the knife at all. 5. TIFFANY AND THE PRECIOUS METAL FOLDERS, where the handle outvalues the blade and everyone involved knew it. Hallmark, karat mark, magnet, weight. $1,500 to $3,000 for a small gold cased one, gem set exhibition pieces well into five figures. The findable cousin is the sterling fruit knife, $200 to $600. 4. THE BIG FOLDING DIRKS AND FOLDING BOWIES, 1840s to 1860s, mostly English built for the American trade. A lock, an etched motto, pearl or silver scales. $1,200 to $8,000. 3. GREEN BONE AND THE SCARCE PATTERN. Not a maker, a combination, and the biggest jump in money that happens to a plain American factory knife. The same maker's two blade jack is $60 to $150. That maker in a six blade congress in honest green bone is $2,000 to $6,000, and the record I know of for an American factory pocket knife is a green bone congress that hammered at $13,000 and came to $14,300 with the premium. Exceptional, and I say so. 2. THE CUSTOM SMITHS. Loveless, Ron Lake, Tony Bose, Jess Horn, Michael Walker. One man, one bench, and a fit no factory hits every time. $3,000 to $8,000 for a good working maker, ten to thirty thousand for the great names. The cousin is the factory collaboration knife, $150 to $400, a wonderful knife that is simply not the one he made. 1. THE PAPER. Provenance. The highest price an American knife has ever brought at auction was Theodore Roosevelt's own hunting knife at $414,000 in 2018. That is a hunting knife, not a folder, and I say so plainly in the video, but it makes the point better than anything else could. It did not bring that for the steel. And provenance is the only value driver on this entire list that a regular person can add to a knife themselves, tonight, for the cost of an index card. Now tell me where I got the order wrong. What I put too low, what I had no business putting that high, and if I missed one entirely, name it. And tell me where you're watching from while you're at it. I read every single one