Antique Card Cases
A flat pocket case, about the size of a hand, made to keep a small stack of visiting or calling cards clean and uncreased.
Antique Card Cases
Card cases belong to the nineteenth-century ritual of leaving a card at the door. They were made to sit in a pocket or reticule without bending the cards inside, and they faded as the custom did, the form shading into the pocket wallet and the cigarette case by the early twentieth century.
On Sellingantiques the category is dominated by shell rather than silver. "Pearl" and "mother" each appear in 26 of 69 titles, tortoiseshell in 10, and the single most repeated listing is a Victorian English mother-of-pearl and abalone visiting or calling card case, some with tortoiseshell alongside, a few with silver mounts or inlay.
Around those sit three smaller groups. Asian export work in carved wood, sandalwood, ivory, lacquer and Shibayama from China and Japan, with Vizagapatam ivory and carved ebony from India. Leather and hide cases, including crocodile wallet forms with gold mounts. And a small handful of decorated British woodwork: Tunbridge ware, Killarney treen, penwork, papier mache.
Dating is loose across much of the group. Eighteen listings say only "Victorian" and fifteen only "19th Century", while 29 carry a clean year, and the dated field runs from 1850 to 1930. A few titles filed under the heading are card-related rather than card cases: a playing-card case, a cribbage game case, a coin purse, brass floating-card pocket compasses.
Where The Range Splits
Origin and technique decide the top. Japanese Meiji work occupies the entire upper end of the archive, iron Komai decoration and ivory with gold lacquer and Shibayama inlay, with a Canton carved ivory case and an Indian Raj carved ebony case close behind. Plain Victorian shell cases sit at the bottom of the range.
Between those poles, worked surfaces read higher than flat ones. "Carved" appears in eight titles and clusters in the upper half: deeply carved Chinese wood, carved mother of pearl, floral engraving, an engraved shooting scene. Silver mounts and silver inlay lift shell cases above their plain equivalents, as gold mounts do the crocodile wallets.
Unusual bodies also carry weight, partly because they are so thin on the ground. Penwork, papier mache, enamel, shagreen, Tunbridge ware, Killarney treen and Vizagapatam ivory each turn up exactly once, and they sit high. A specific year in the description reads as stronger than a reign or a century, and the vaguely dated examples cluster low.
Antique Card Cases Retail Price Guide 2026
Typical UK retail prices for card cases, calculated from the Sellingantiques database of over a million retail prices indexed since 2003. This retail price guide relies exclusively on Sellingantiques data; no external sources or auction records are used, so the figures do not describe the wider market.
Dated card cases on Sellingantiques run from 1850 at the earliest to 1930 at the latest, that last one an Art Deco folding wallet in tortoiseshell and silk.
The Antique Card Cases Glossary
- Visiting card case / calling card case
- The same object under two names; "visiting" appears in 11 titles, "calling" in nine.
- Mother of pearl (MOP)
- Iridescent shell used as veneer or inlay, the commonest material in this category and often shortened to MOP in titles.
- Abalone
- A darker, more strongly coloured shell, used alongside mother of pearl for contrast panels.
- Tortoiseshell
- Sheet shell used for facings and inlay, in 10 titles, sometimes written "tortoise shell" or "tortoishell".
- Shibayama
- Japanese inlay of shell and other materials into ivory or lacquer; three listings, all at the top of the range.
- Aide memoire
- A notebook-form case meant for jottings rather than cards; one listing uses the term.
Antique Card Cases: Frequently Asked Questions
What material are most card cases made from?
Shell dominates the record. "Pearl" and "mother" each appear in 26 of 69 titles, so well over a third of everything listed is faced or inlaid with mother of pearl, usually with abalone for contrast.
Tortoiseshell follows in 10 titles. After that come leather and crocodile, Asian carved wood and ivory, and a thin scattering of British decorated woodwork.
Which cases sit at the top of the range?
Japanese Meiji work takes the whole upper end: iron Komai decoration, and ivory with gold lacquer and Shibayama inlay.
A Canton carved ivory case and an Indian Raj carved ebony case also sit near the top. Plain Victorian shell cases sit at the bottom.
How closely are these dated by dealers?
A third of the category carries no closer date than a reign or a century: 18 listings say simply "Victorian", 15 only "19th Century".
Twenty-nine give a clean year, and that field runs from 1850 to 1930. Where a decade is named the 1860s lead with seven listings, then the 1900s with six.
Dealer dating is not always self-consistent, and one brutalist calling card case is dated later than 1960.
Are silver card cases common in this category?
Not in this archive. Silver turns up as mounts and inlay on shell cases, and gold as mounts on two crocodile wallets, rather than as the body of the case.
No silversmith, retailer or workshop name appears anywhere in the group, so these cases are described by material and origin instead.
Do all listings under this heading hold cards?
Most do, but roughly one in eight of the listings is a card-related object rather than a case for visiting cards.
Those include a French Ecarte case with playing cards, an Edwardian cribbage game case, a coin purse, an aide memoire, and four brass-cased floating-card pocket compasses. Titles are worth reading closely.
How often do card cases appear on Sellingantiques?
It is a slow-moving category, running at about five listings a year.
Even so, 32 different dealers have handled one, which means almost every seller has had a single case pass through rather than a run of them.