Old cast-iron pocket knife..

[lambertiana]

Do you have any examples of Canastota knives to compare this one to? I looked through the entire vintage Canastota catalog which that town's library has available to browse and all of their knives are of much higher quality than this one, and all of the marks on their blades are much different, typical of this page below, so I see no reason to suspect this is a Canastota knife right now:

I don't have any knives from Canastota. However, the lack of an arched stamp in that particular catalog does not mean that they never used one. I spent some time looking through Goins trying to find possible matches, and there aren't many. The name should be somewhere around nine letters long (the middle letter in the name would most likely be the one directly above the letter I in the word Knife). There were not a lot of brands that used the word "Knife" instead of Cutlery. I also looked at the listings under G and did not find anything that looked like a good possibility. Under C there are also Catskill Knife Co, and Camillus Knife Co (the forerunner of Camillus Cutlery Co before it was sold to Kastor and renamed), to name two. There are several other possibilities with shorter names, but, again, based on the design of the tang stamp I think the name in this case is at least eight characters long.

As far as quality is concerned, it is probably not appropriate to compare the quality of the standard line of knives with the boy's knives like this one. I think boy's knives were made to a price point, like a lot of the cheaper goods made today overseas in a country that shall remain unnamed, and do not represent the best work a company can do.

Of course, it could easily be an obscure brand that didn't make it into Goins.

 

[gben]

I see there was a Corning knife company too.