Lovely Hand-carved Double Sided Five Pattern Butter Mold/Stamp carved snake mask 7 pp plus one loose

7 pp plus one loose page

Approx 60 full page engraving with blank backs

It stands straight without wobble on its flat bottom and is carved on the back with what appears to be a triangle and a 6 or a 9 and a "V" like mark

with the carved divets on the slide lid dictating the starting position for the first two rows of letters

I can't get the cap off the latter

Lovely Hand-carved Double Sided Five Pattern Butter Mold/Stamp carved snake mask 7 pp plus one looseI'm not in the least an expert on butter molds and the like, but I do spend a whole lot of time looking at carvings, and think I can recognize lovely things when I see them and this, to my eye, is very much that! It's also unusual in my experience to find a number of different patterns carved in into both sides of a block as here, in an irregular configuration, almost as if practicing in advance of producing a single stamp. I take the carvings to