Featured Antique Leather Writing Folio (ca. 1900(?)

So.

I picked this thing up on Sunday morning at my local flea-market. It was dusty, it was faded pale as sour milk, it was marked and worn and beat-up...but...it was in fantastic structural condition.

$15.00 I paid, and I took it home and started to clean it off, and then laid into it with the boot-polish and beeswax to breathe in some new life!



I have no clear idea how old this is, but I believe it to have SIGNIFICANT age, and I estimate a date of somewhere between 1900 - 1920.

I base this on the construction of the piece, the shape/cut of the pocket patches, the fact that it has no card-holders, only space for stamps and maybe a business-card or train-ticket etc. There's no zippers, no snap-buttons, no plastic of any kind. There's also no identifying marks apart from "E.B" in one corner (presumably the original owner's initials).

The style of the pockets is almost identical to several antique wallets which I've seen, which all date to the first decade of the 1900s, so I think this would date to around that era as well. It has the same, basic layout as wallets of the era, just bigger.

There's no maker's marks, no stickers, no stamps, no logos, trademarks, dates, pattent-numbers...nothing.



^^^Nice tooling-work around the belt-loop^^^

As far as I know, it is the original belt.



All stocked! Blotting paper, calling cards, a sterling-shafted dip-pen, and I was lucky to find that Moleskine notebooks fit inside really well!!

 

Fantastic job. I love how you put together the parts

 

By my reckoning, something like this is AT LEAST 100 years old. The styling is very pre-WWII and even pre-WWI. It basically looks like an enlarged version of a turn-of-the-century wallet (of which I have had a few, over the years). That's what makes me feel that I can date it so accurately.

I am amazed that it has held up this well. Usually old leather products like this are completely unusable and disintegrate at the lightest touch, but this one is fine! Nothing wrong with it at all!

 

Well. The folio is now fully restored.

I sewed in a new pen-loop to replace the other one. It's a similar colour of leather, and in time, it'll age just like the rest of it.

I also sewed in a new elastic strap to replace the old one so that the notebook can hang inside like it would've done when it was new.

It's now fully restored and ready for action!

 

Enjoy its use!

Beautiful piece.

 

It is lovely. I'm very pleased with it

 

Great. I am a great believer in using old things, if possible. I love your attention to detail.

 

Fully restored!!

OUTSIDE:


INSIDE:


^^^Notice new, black elastic strap sewn into the right-side fold, for holding a notebook ^^^

FILLED WITH STUFF:


As mentioned earlier, I also enlarged the pen-loop by like...a tiny amount - half a centimetre, probably - but it's now large enough to fit an actual pen, instead of just a pencil.