A Pair of c.1920s Leather & Pine ‘Walker’s Age’ Octavo Cabinets

SOLD
Origin: English
Period: Early Twentieth Century
Provenance: Unknown
Date: c.1915-25
Height: 7.5 inches (each)
Width: 13.75 inches (each)
Depth: 9.75 inches (each)

The two banks of six drawer cabinets comprising of twelve individual drawers having pine and card carcasses brass swing handles and leather clad fronts in green and blue each with alphabetical labelling from A-Z, the interiors with patent lock-clips surviving from a Boots chemist shop counter from the first quarter of the twentieth century.

The drawers are in good decorative and useable order with no major losses or damage. They have knocks and wear expected with shop use and there is some peel here and there to the labels and edges. The interior to each draw has been lightly cleaned.

We know the drawers were used in a Boots shop simply because of the myriad of branded contents (which have been retained), which included bandages, appendages, medications and ephemera all of which one would associate with a busy chemists shop. These can be provided with the drawers if so desired but they have been removed for safety reasons in the first instance.

One of the drawers is lined with the ‘Walker’s Age Cabinets’ advertisement boasting that the drawers are “Neatness, cheapness and utility combined” and that they “will be found most useful for business, literary men, and others, who require a hand receptacle for papers in daily use… Strong and handsome”.

Incredibly useful, brilliantly decorative.
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