Читать книгу Little Book of Wooden Boxes - Oscar Penn Fitzgerald - Страница 9

By the seventeenth century, a box maker’s guild had been incorporated in England, and its members specialized in wooden boxes with compartments and drawers and slanting lids to hold books for reading. Serving as the portable desks of the time, these boxes held valuable books, writing equipment, and papers. In the eighteenth century, as papers and accounts proliferated and boxes grew larger, they were placed on stands, and the modern desk was born.

Both men and women used dressing boxes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Ones for men contained razors, strops and hones, scissors, penknives, and a looking glass. In his The Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterer’s Drawing-Book (1792), Thomas Sheraton illustrated a square “Lady’s Traveling Box” fitted up for writing, dressing, and sewing equipment. It contained compartments for ink and an adjustable writing surface covered with green cloth; a place for scissors and powder, pomatum, and perfume bottles; and a removable dressing glass. There was even a space to store rings and a clever little windlass for rolling up lace as it was worked.