Yeah interesting stones – indeed! I found a picture of the first stone above that chess1 posted in my archive, in a folder that says „Sham’s black Escher“.Great post, Peter. What are your thoughts on the stone that the OP posted?
Nothing else but two pictures of the labelled stone, but I am pretty sure to remember that Sham contacted me in his old Forum -Razor and Stone- about that potential black Escher and we talked about the stone there. Don’t recall if he says it was his stone or if he only posted a picture he found elsewhere…. Unfortunately I didn’t make backups or copies of posts in these older days.
Anyhow, both labels look autentic to me. The question is - why should somebody fake stones with an Escher label, stones that are in no case typical for Escher hones. If someone fake a green or yellow stone I would understand that. But an unknown black hone…. Did someone designed a label on the computer and print it out, than destroy parts of the label just to glue them to an unknown stone. Or did someone loosen an original label from an original Escher to glue it on an unknown black slate…. not really plausible.
The stones themselves are black slates. I have dozents of them – not knowing from which quarry they are. In Germany, especially thuringia but also other regions, we have a lot of slate. Slate for building, roofs, pencils, etc. Hundrets of quarries around. The whetstone business was very small compared to other slate industries. But quarrying tons of slate and dealing with slate products, it was easy to cut some hones and also sell them in older times, if demand was there.
Well labels and stamps are nice to have – but as you all know and we have discussed and stated many times here, we shouldn’t pay to much attention to them. The performance makes the hone not the label. Here is one of my story but I am pretty sure this may sound familiar to one or the other.
When the JNAT hype started I was also infected. Because knowing nothing about the mines, strata and typical appearance of the stones I bought quite a lot of Maruka stamped hones, hoping to have here the ultimate proof for a good JNAT. After having checked the forum threads and contacted several friends and experts in Japan, I found out that most of the stamps were faked. Angry about myself I put the hones into a drawer hoping to forget them. But after a while I put the one and other out to simply play with them a little and found, that some are really good hones. So I rubbed away the fake stamps and from this time on, the hones weren’t useless fake Marukas but simply good JNAT finishers. That is all that counts. And simply need to pay some more attention on the reputation oft he one who sells the hones - before I buy them.