Howard's Very Sweet Homemade Pencil Box, 1864 doll house balustrades with the paint cakes retaining

with the paint cakes retaining their embossed images--a variety of seashells on their faces

Its prior owner seems to have added an extra underline under BIG and a couple of extra exclamation points at the end--and also to have banged it around some and sliced it a few times with a blade

and also as if one should hold it up in a lightening storm to harness a bolt

with arms wrapped around the shoulders and tail held between the toes

it occurs to me how deeply embedded is our tendency toward linear organization

Howard's Very Sweet Homemade Pencil Box, 1864 doll house balustrades with the paint cakes retainingI've got a special weakness for old pencil boxes like antique school slates, the wooden frames of which often bear the carved initials of their onetime owners, so do pencil boxes tend to carry the traces of their users in a wonderfully intimate way. Which is very much the case with this very primitive one, found in Upstate New York, with HA emphatically carved into the face of the top, and then Howard, in cursive, inside, twice. And happily Howard had