Album Amicorum

This shallow continental box, 152 x 83 x 13mm deep (6 x 3¼ x ½in), with embossed leather and gold tooling front cover provides the owner with a place to keep their album pieces within. Known as an album amicorum, book of friends, or Stammbuch in Germany, they generally consisted of an assembly of small loose sheets of blank gilt edged paper.

Contributions would be solicited from friends and acquaintances in the form of poems, religious writings, engravings and drawings. The size of the album made it suitable for the owner to take on a journey and would provide a suitable repository for offerings from fellow travellers.

The decorative inner flap with a hand coloured engraving is lifted by a ribbon to access the contents, mainly manuscript entries in French by various hands dated in the 1840s.