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

7 pp plus one loose page

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

S Mangulian or similar

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

Very sound and sturdy

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