There are a number of these boxes at the Winterthur Museum in Delaware. They may have some information on them.

 

 

Bob Cottrell, Director
Remick Country Doctor Museum and Farm
PO Box 250, 58 Cleveland Hill Road, Tamworth, NH 03886
Phone: 603-323-7591 or 800-686-6117
Email: [log in to unmask].
Website: www.remickmuseum.org.

 

"Explore over two hundred years of self-sustained living as we preserve the agricultural way of life in New Hampshire."

 

 

 

 

In our collection we have a mean spirited trick box that I know full well exists in other places (I personally have a couple of my own, being mean spirited myself).

Anyway, the information with this little box tells me it is apparently Civil War era, and also said (which may or may not be true) it was a prison craft.

It is a tiny carved wooden box, about 2” x 2” shaped like a little book.  Apparently in one’s mean-spirited-ness you were to hand this to an unsuspecting victim, who would pull back a slide lid, and a hidden arm with an attached spike would pop out and stab the poor soul but good.  This box is particularly nasty.  Mine are not so much – I have an old domino box with a hidden snake and a newly made box with a mouse.  Both have the spikes but are not nearly as sharp as the book box. 

I have seen these in other private collections of equally unpleasant people who wish to do a little bodily harm to their friends.

So…my question is this…what are these boxes called?  Anybody know of any other information?

Candace Perry

Schwenkfelder Library & Heritage Center

 

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