Silver stamp boxes came in two main forms: for the desk or portable (either in a pocket or suspended from a chain) with the latter often in combination with another use such as a sovereign holder or vesta case.
The larger desk boxes, sometimes including a damper for wetting the stamp, often had stamps under a glass front to indicate the class of stamp held below the sprung cover and within a sloping compartment to ease retrieval. Although they appeared from the 1860’s, the heyday of silver stamp box and cases were the decades either side of 1900.
