The Railway Pencil Box

Illustrative entry. A pine pencil box that started at a model railway workbench and ended up teaching someone how to draw to scale.

A passage imagined from start to finish

This fictional entry shows what the Keeper records about an object and its passage. It is here to read and explore.

Format / material: Pine box with a sliding lid, graphite pencils and steel rule
Condition: In the example: 190 × 52 × 33 mm. The lid catches near the end and a corner is chipped. The box contains two pencil stubs and a 150 mm steel rule. The rule's graduations are legible. Its accuracy has not been checked.

Item story

In this imagined record, the Keeper finds the box at the back of a workbench drawer. The sliding lid sticks for the last inch. Under it are two pencil stubs, a short steel rule and a strip of masking tape marked ‘1:76’. A dark groove in the pine is just wide enough to cradle the rule. Someone put it back in the same place for years. The Keeper uses the box while learning to draw a room to scale, then passes it to a pupil laying out a first railway platform. The pupil adds a pencil long enough to sharpen. The short rule stays where it always went.

Keeper Mark

I would leave the groove alone. It tells the next keeper where the rule belongs.

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