The ANRI company, located in the Alps of Northern Italy, specializes in hand-carved wooden items including collegiate mascots. Although the company still makes wooden carvings, they have not produced collegiate mascots in the last 30-40 years due to the stricter enforcement of copyright laws.

Founded in 1912, the company has a rich heritage, and as you would expect from hand-crafted Italian objects, they are very high quality.

A close-up of the colorful University of Illinois Illiniwek mascot

ANRI made wooden mascot for scores of schools including the University of Michigan, Princeton, Yale, Tulane, Columbia, Cornell, Penn State, NYU and Lehigh. ANRI collegiate mascots are often confused with those made in the United States by Carter Hoffman. Hoffman’s mascots are almost always stamped with the company name on the bottom, the ANRI mascots are unmarked.

Like each of us, ANRI mascots were done in all shapes and sizes. Typically they are five or six inches in height, although they were also done in miniature versions, as shown in the cute Columbia lion mascot below, which is two inches from end-to end.

A Columbia University lion wooden ANRI mascot

ANRI also produced other wooden accessories associated with colleges and universities, most notably letter openers. A University of Michigan wolverine letter opener is pictured below:

ANRI carved items are sought after by collectors and alumni and are a nostalgic piece of ephemera from the glory days of collegiate life. We have a nice collection of ANRI and Carter Hoffman collectibles on our website.