Small Collectables - Letter Openers

Meanwhile, nearly two millenia later

We humans have been letter writers for a very long time, even before the Roman Empire, letters were being written and delivered but they were not sealed neatly into envelopes, they would normally have taken the form of inscribed tablets, often of wax which could be recycled, on clay tablets, or in the form of a scroll.

Nothing much changed for a great many years. Paper had been invented in Ancient China but it was not until over a thousand years later that paper mills began to roll in Europe and not until the early 19th century that the production of paper took on a truly industrial scale, making the commodity cost effective for widespread use.

In the early 19th century, most letters would still have been sealed with wax. Although a form of envelope has been in use since around the 10th century, we had to wait until the mid 19th century for the first truly commercial envelope produced and it was not until around the turn of the 19th century that gummed paper envelopes came into mass production. Prior to that time the sender had to devise their own envelope or cover for any letter sent, sealing it with wax and their own impressed mark or seal.

The modern gummed paper envelope as we know it now has only been in existence for about the same length of time as postage stamps. Letter openers have probably been used for around this length of time, or perhaps a little longer. Typically, a letter opener has a more pointed end than a page turner, although this does not always run true and there is a cross over of styles.

Pictured to the left is a very large page turner from the Arts and Crafts period. It is decorated with sunflowers and is over seventeen inches long.

The Pen Knife - a writing implement

In past centuries, the most common writing implement would have been the quill pen. Although the feathers used varied in quality (apparently crow feathers are best for the finest writing), quill pens had to be sharpened frequently and a small knife was used for this purpose. This is the origin of the term 'pen knife'

As we would recognise it today, a small, sharp blade, folding away for safety, the pen knife has become a much more widely used tool while the quill has all but disappeared and is only used in a very few circumstances.

What I have here is, I guess, a pen knife but with a solid silver blade, it's hardly the sort of knife you could use to sharpen a quill. I have seen these variously described as peach knives, folding paper knives etc and their use was probably multi-purpose. This is a little stunner, mother of pearl decorates both sides of the handle and the small silver plaque has never been engraved. It is more than a century old.

The Paper Knife

One instance of a paper knife being mentioned alongside a pen and letter scales is given on a website for the village of Harting (look under the heading of 'The Village'), where we learn that the author of the Barchester novels, Anthony Trollope (d 1881), is not only buried in the churchyard but his writing implements, as detailed above, are on display in the church.

Paper knives were often dual purpose and must have existed about as long as books have been produced. Printed books were frequently supplied with the edges of the pages uncut. You would have to slip a paper knife in at the bottom of the page and slice up the folded edge to the opening at the top. But the paper knife was also a tool to assist in folding a piece of paper as well as cutting it to the required size for a note or letter.

What we have here are two small silver and Mother of Pearl paper knives, from around the end of the 19th century to Edwardian times.

Page Turner

Try searching for 'page turner' on the internet and you'll get back hundreds, perhaps thousands, of book reviews - it was a real page turner - or information about the Page-Turner family, so it isn't easy to discover the history of this item.

A page turner is a more or less broad piece of wood or other suitable material, usually shaped a little like a sword blade and normally quite thin. Stand one side on and you might not spot it. The general idea of them was to turn the pages of a book evenly, without putting any stress on the edges of the pages and without getting the paper dirty from your fingers.

There is a right way to turn the pages of a book, and it isn't by licking your finger and flicking the bottom of the right hand page. Of course, in the modern mass production era, no-one really understands how to respect the written word. When books were rare items to be treasured, a lot more care was taken in the handling and storage of them.

Here we have a variety of page turners, silver handle and ivorine, bone, plastic, and wood. Ivorine is a plastic which has fine, slightly darker stripes running through it to mimic the veins of ivory.

The two on the left are more properly paper knives, in fact, the extreme left very usefuly tells us it is a paper knife.

Trench Art

To the right is a good example of a trench art.letter opener. Made from a bullet casing and a piece of what was probably scrap brass from used munitions, the handle has a suitably flattened and shaped military button frront affixed.

Many of these trench art letter openers turn up in auction but not all are as old as you might think. The genuine article was made by soldiers in the trenches during the two World wars. Especially sought after are those dating to World War I and really good examples can fetch quite high prices.

Of course, this is not the only kind of trench art item you can find, as a quick search of a site such as ebay will show you, and a collection of trench art items could equally well fit in a shoebox as a collection of letter openers..

If your appetite for trench art is whetted, I've included an eBay module to show some of the items available, a little further down this page.

Size doesn't matter!

The letter opener to the left is a bone crocodile which has, sadly, lost the very tip of his tail. I've had him for a good many years and he was a vintage item when I bought him but I suspect that somewhere there is someone making these even today.

Below is my selection of brass letter openers which vary in size considerably. Smallest, of course, is the Lincoln Imp on the left, being less than 3.5 inches, while the horse hoof on the right is fully 8.5 inches.

Between them we have the Welsh Jenny Jones (name inscribed on the blade), a rather iconic figure in her day, a pistol shaped letter opener, A gorgeous Arts and Crafts letter opener in beaten copper (made from a piece of narrow piping) in the form of a sword with copper twist, and a rather magnificent rearing stallion.

There is such a variety of letter openers, paper knives and page turners to choose from that it is really difficult to choose which of these is my favourite, I like them all for different reasons. This is one type of collection that it is very easy to add to and you could also make an excellent collection in any one part of this category.

Display could present some problems but there is a definite option of mounting them and framing them so that they can be hung on a wall. You might even choose a formation similar to the lens picture.

Below is a modern paper knife in polished steel with a handle of large glass beads interspersed with smaller ones in a very attractive pattern.

A Modern Icon

... and future collectable.

This is the 'Comma'. Made in pewter and designed to be both letter opener and paperweight, it is a modern design icon and a future collectable. You can still buy these new but the Comma first appeared in 1991, when it was created for a competition by Alan Pickersgill, a student at Manchester Polytechnic, who won a prize for the design.

The apparent hallmark is indeed a mark of quality. It consists of 'ARW' for A R Wentworth, the firm which cast the piece, '92' for the percentage of tin in the pewter, 'ABPC' = Association of British Pewter Craftsmen, and the 'crossed arrows' come from the City coat of arms of Sheffield, where the Comma is made.

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