A Sale of Knives by an Eccentric Maker

The reclusive blacksmith William W. Scagel lived off the grid in the woods near Muskegon, Mich. From the 1920s to the ’60s, he manufactured luxury knives there, with ergonomically curved horn and antler handles, powering his home and workshop with a windmill, old submarine batteries and a Cadillac engine.

He sold his products through a few urban outlets, including Abercrombie & Fitch. Customers also stopped by, but warily, partly because of dark rumors about what had happened to Scagel’s two ex-wives.

Area residents gossiped that one or the other woman had been killed: that she was gored by an animal while on safari with Scagel, or that he stabbed or shot her or shoved her over Niagara Falls. Dr. James R. Lucie, a retired physician in Fruitport, Mich., has published a new biography, “Scagel Handmade,” explaining that the knife maker was simply twice divorced from incompatible spouses.

Dr. Lucie spent hours as a young doctor interviewing Scagel, who died in 1963 at 88. Dr. Lucie has acquired dozens of Scagel knives and axes, including table cutlery and Marine weaponry, and has consigned them for a March 12 auction at James D. Julia in Fairfield, Me.

Dr. Lucie, 83, said in a recent phone interview that selling the collection made sense once the book came out. He is widowed, with four daughters. “I don’t want to leave a mess on their hands,” he said.

The blades are expected to bring up to $30,000 each. Scagel weathervanes, cooking pots and workshop tools have estimates up to a few thousand dollars apiece. Dr. Lucie has defaced Scagel’s hallmarking dies with deep scrapes, so they cannot be used to create fakes.

The book describes Scagel’s daily life, tempering and sharpening steel over coal flames and wooden wheels. Once a week he relaxed for an evening at a local tavern, drinking beer alone. He would often rant about crooked politicians and unions. “He was an extreme right-wing conservative,” Dr. Lucie said.

Paperwork from Scagel’s divorces in 1902 and 1917 has turned up. The first wife, Rosetta, ran off with her married lover. The second, Alice, called her husband “sullen and morose” and accused him of scaring away visitors with a pet wolf in the yard. Scagel retorted that Alice was “exceedingly distrustful and jealous,” and that the wolf was “tame and harmless.”

Scagel had a little-known warm and fuzzy side. He made free leg braces for children who needed them because of polio, and gave knives to people who helped him. For a Democratic Party official who drove him home on a winter night, Scagel created a knife with a handle plated in ivory on one side and pink mother of pearl on the other. The different materials, he later admitted, represented his conviction that “Democrats are two-faced.”

In the Julia sale the “Democrat knife” is expected to bring up to $5,000.

The American Museum of Natural History often poses dinosaur skeletons in attack mode, based on the latest paleontological research. But some nearby vintage paintings have an anachronistic trace of pulp fiction and Art Deco.

Amid the bones, the museum displays dozens of tableaus of prehistory by the artist Charles R. Knight. Starting in the 1890s, he freelanced for museums around the country from his studios in Manhattan and Mount Vernon, N.Y.

“He just knocked out one painting after another after another,” even as his astigmatic and cataract-impaired eyes deteriorated into blindness, said Richard Milner, the author of a new monograph, “Charles R. Knight: The Artist Who Saw Through Time” .

Mr. Milner has tracked down scattered Knight works, including elephant sculptures on Bronx Zoo buildings, sloth portraits at the Field Museum in Chicago and a scene of a rhinoceros fending off wolves at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. He pored through Knight’s correspondence and an image archive that belongs to his granddaughter, Rhoda Knight Kalt.

The letters are so eloquent that Mr. Milner suspects that Knight, who died in 1953, and his friends expected future historians to appreciate the prose. “They knew one day we’d be picking over their bones, like the vultures in the dioramas,” he said during a recent tour of the New York museum’s galleries.

The painter’s handwriting deteriorated as his vision failed. He also constantly battled with clients who delayed payments and tried to edit his mural proposals.

“My own ideas from an artistic standpoint are the only ones to which I can subscribe,” Knight sternly wrote to Henry Fairfield Osborn, the museum’s president.

Knight was disciplined about refusing to collaborate, but hopeless with money. Unless his wife, Annie, and daughter, Lucy, watched over him, he would forget to ask for change at grocery stores. “You are a very good painter but a very bad mathematician,” a magazine editor wrote when Knight undercharged for an illustration.

In a stairwell at the museum, a Knight mural shows cavemen painting woolly mammoths by torchlight. Mr. Milner believes that one craggy face in the scene was a self-portrait. “The central figure is Knight,” he said. “There’s no question in my mind.”

Another caveman in the tableau wears an elegant collared robe and stands back skeptically to watch the work; he may represent forebears of Knight’s more difficult patrons. In prehistoric times, Mr. Milner said slyly, “The first occupation was artist, and the second was art critic.”