Old Marble (Faux) Specimen Ruler with Hand-carved Numbers folk art cake This 1858 copy of American

This 1858 copy of American Text Book for Letters penmanship instruction book

I first picked this up because I liked it as a box--old

an audience of Peru"

nailed to old wooden frame

Old Marble (Faux) Specimen Ruler with Hand-carved Numbers folk art cake This 1858 copy of AmericanA little searching turns up that Italian marble pietra dura "specimen" rulers were a thing, popular in the late 1800s as Grand Tour souvenirs. This, however, is not that it appears to be to be all one piece of marble, with carved lines to delineate inches and the variations in color done with some sort of dye. I tend to like aspirational things imitating other things, but what I especially like about this one, which makes it quite singular, is that