Sepia Saturday: Stamping tools

Neil has all sorts of items tucked away in his shed but he knows where everything is and the history of each item. About ten years ago I began a project of photographing each item but it got too hard and I didn't keep going but the prompt for this week's Sepia Saturday had me going back through my files to find the photos that I did manage.

Neil's family used to own a general store and these three items were in use in those days in the early 1900s.

The first item is a small box that holds a set of ten metal marking stamps, of the numbers 0 to 9. It was produced by Axminster of Devon (telephone 3114)

The second item is also a box of stamps. This time the stamps are designed to be used with an ink pad. I only photographed one of the stamps and it is clean of ink so may never have been used. I didn't check the other stamps.

The third item is a box of metal stamps, one for each letter of the alphabet plus a few other symbols like '&'. They would have been used to stamp words onto metal.

This post has been in response to the theme photo for Sepia Saturday, a type-setter at work. You can head on over to the webpage to see what other bloggers have made of the theme.