Lovely Hand-carved Double Sided Five Pattern Butter Mold/Stamp carved snake mask S Mangulian or similar

S Mangulian or similar

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

definitely looking ready to stop some doors

Color all the richer in person

I can't get the cap off the latter

Lovely Hand-carved Double Sided Five Pattern Butter Mold/Stamp carved snake mask S Mangulian or similarI'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