This unassuming red box was something I picked up from a local flea-market about two weeks ago. I thought it was rather cute, and after a careful examination of it, I decided to buy it. On the outside, it doesn’t look anything special, and its outward appearance certainly doesn’t provide any clues as to what’s inside the box. But when I opened the lid, I just knew I had to have it.

And here we are! With the lid unlocked and folded down, we see that it doubles as a writing-surface, with tabs for holding in blotting-paper. Beyond that is a storage-compartment and inkwell-slot. With…the original inkwell! Whoo-hoo! Beyond that is the leather stationery console…

…which pops up… …to reveal more stuff on the other side: Here we have even more of the box’s original bits and pieces. I believe most of these to be crochet tools. We have yarn in a variety of colours and various hooks and picks, together with hole-punchers, a file, and a paper-knife or letter-opener. They’re all made of ivory. Between the legs of the pop-up stand is a beautiful, red silk interior, for storing stuff like the needle-case, the pin-cushion and other stuff… The little bundle of sticks up the back are actually tiny, tiny, tiny pencils. I’ve no idea what they’re for. They came with the box. Here’s a closeup of all the cute things inside the box:

I was able to roughly date the box by its contents. Inside were calenders, booklets and photographs, dating between 1891-1899. I took that to meant that the box was manufactured sometime in the 1880s, possibly before then. In roughly 10 years of collecting antique writing instruments and accessories, and roughly 20 years drooling over writing-slopes of various kinds, this is the first slope or box or desk of this kind, that I had ever seen. I was amazed at a number of things. The first was the design. I’d never seen something like this before. And until someone else showed me a finished eBay auction, I thought that it might even be unique. But it does seem to have been an established style in the 1800s. Albeit one that must be pretty rare. In my time, I’ve seen about half-a-dozen different writing-slope designs, but never something like this! The box has no manufacturer’s mark on it anywhere at all. Which I find odd. You’d think something of this quality would come with a mark or label somewhere. And perhaps at one point it did. But I can’t see it anywhere. Restomodding the Box When I purchased this box at the start of the month, I was more-or-less, thrilled by its condition. But there was one problem with the box that needed to be swiftly rectified. And that was the broken storage compartment, which looked like this, when I bought it:

The storage-compartment bottom or floor, was originally one long, length of wood, which ran from one end to the other, fitting in place between small, wooden supports. Unfortunately, this was broken at some point in the box’s history. As it was the one piece that held all the other pieces in the storage-compartment together, everything had since gone out of alignment. There was evidence of at least one attempt at a repair, but it obviously didn’t work! So I was determined to try and fix it. If I wanted to, I could easily just cut a piece of wood and slot it back in and reassemble the box as it was originally. But I felt that this created a huge waste of space underneath the storage compartment. So I decided to restomod (restorative-modification, for those who’ve never heard the term) the box. To rebuild the broken floor, as well as incorporate a secret storage compartment underneath it. To do this, I pulled the box apart…

…then I glued in small, wooden blocks to act as supports… …after that, I cut out two pieces of wood. One to support the inkwell, and the original storage-compartment-inkwell divider, and the other to act as the base for the storage-compartment, and the false-bottom, and lid for the secret compartment, underneath. The finished product looks like this:

And here we can see the new floor:

…and without the inkwell… And here’s what it looks like with everything in place: