Antique and Vintage Letter Openers

Letter openers are products of an age when communication was a good deal more ceremonial than it is today. Correspondence would arrive by post, and one would sit down at one's writing desk to open up the day's mail. Letter openers were typically made of silver, bronze, or ivory, with handles resembling everything from the hilts of swords to the heads of mythical beasts. A stylish companion to pens and other writing instruments, letter openers were produced by firms such the Tiffany Studios, Georg Jensen, and Sheffield. Unfortunately, letter openers are routinely mistaken for paper-knives, which resemble letter openers and were often made of the same materials, although they had a different purpose. In the Victorian Era when paper-knives were produced in great numbers, uncut pages in books were common. They occurred when long sheets of paper were printed, folded into “signatures,” collated, and then bound. Often the edges of the folds would be trimmed during the binding process, but just as frequently they weren’t, which is where a paper-knife came in handy. Before digging into a book, readers would sit down with a paper-knife, whose thin, wide blades and surprisingly dull edges were designed to follow the creases of a book’s still-folded pages and gently cut them apart. Thanks to this specialized use, paper-knives can be differentiated from letter openers because they are not as sharp, both on their edges and at their tips. If they were too sharp, the blade edge would not follow the crease of the fold as readily.