The unique leather bound book safe or sham book, once being a photographic album, the covers with central lozenge, the gilded and bound pages opening with a brass clasp to reveal a vacant inner secret storage compartment, with Queen Elizabeths, The Queen Mother’s cypher above in royal blue, and surviving from the high Victorian period.
Unknown.
A book safe is a type of concealment, often a hollowed-out book used to store valuables or small items, designed to blend in with other books on a shelf. The concept has existed for a long time, with historical examples including “sham books” used to fill empty shelves in libraries and even hollowed-out Bibles used to conceal weapons. Octave Uzanne, writing in 1904, in The French Bookbinders of the Eighteenth Century writes: “‘Sham books’, simple wooden boxes, and sometimes mere mouldings, covered with gauffered and gold-tool leathers, with which they filled the empty shelves of a pretentious library, or with which they garnished the doors.”
A particularly good example and a lovely tactile gift for those secret mementoes.
The piece is in good all-round condition with the only deficiency being one of the brass clasps is lacking. The interior compartment has been executed with super precision.
By appointment only.
