Ivories

Ivories (1875) by William Maskell
South Kensington Museum (precursor to the V&A) • ISBN: none (Victorians hadn’t invented the barcode for books yet)
Condition: Good — courtesy of Crappy Old Books

Open this compact Victorian time machine and step into a world where scholarship wears a stiff collar and carries a lorgnette. William Maskell—high-church liturgist turned connoisseur with a talent for cool understatement—guides you through a cabinet of marvels carved from the tusks of history: Roman consular diptychs that announce prestige with a flourish; Byzantine panels that glint with theological side-eye; medieval caskets, combs, croziers, pyxides, and the occasional saint who looks like he’s had quite enough incense for one lifetime. It’s the decorative arts, but narrated by a man who files his adjectives alphabetically and never knowingly overstates a provenance.

This is not a coffee-table book; it’s a museum in pamphlet form—a lucid, unfussy tour of objects that once lived on altars, in pockets, and under glass. Expect numbered entries, judicious dates (“circa” doing Olympian heavy lifting), and that delightful Victorian habit of comparing everything to something in a different museum six minutes away by hansom cab. Maskell does the slow magic trick: by the end, “ivory” isn’t a material, it’s a grammar—of line, relief, and light.

And yes, we read with 21st-century eyes. The book is a document of its era, concerned with art, craft, and devotion, not with the ethics that modern readers rightly bring to the subject. Consider it a primary source on taste and taxonomy, not a manifesto for procurement. The marvels here are the hands that carved, the minds that commissioned, and the scholarly calm with which Maskell lays them out for inspection.

As for this particular copy: graded Good by Crappy Old Books, which means sturdy, honest, and entirely prepared to be consulted without flinching. Think “sound binding, respectable pages, mild Victorian gravitas,” rather than “mint, hermetically sealed, never allowed to see a lamplight.” No ISBN, naturally—1875 preferred plates and pedantry to digits and databases.

File under: Decorative Arts → Ivory Carving, Museum Catalogues with Backbone, and How to Admire a Diptych Without Spilling Your Tea. Recommended for art historians, ecclesiastical magpies, makers who like to see what virtuosity looks like under a magnifying glass, and anyone who suspects footnotes were better when they said “cf.” more often.

Crappy Old Books: we sell the past with all its patina—and occasionally a faint aroma of the reading room—so you can argue with it in the comfort of your armchair.

Keep browsing: See more History books Other books by William Maskell