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Message:: [QUOTE="Shangas, post: 3950915, member: 360"]A pounce pot is a desk-accessory. You keep it on your desk along with your inkwell, candlesticks, pen-trays, pen-cleaners yadda yadda yadda. It's filled with "pounce", which is any kind of fine, dry, absorbent powder, or dust. Traditionally it was crushed bones, crushed shellfish-shells, etc. I just filled mine up with sand. It does exactly the same thing. It's what people used to dry the ink on their papers before blotting paper came along. You write whatever - signature, letter, so on...and then you pour the pounce onto the paper. The pounce soaks up the excess ink, and stops it from running, staining, bleeding, feathering, etc. Then you pick up the paper and either blow the sand off, shake it off...or if you want to be neater - you pour the sand back into the pounce pot. Most pounce pots are specifically shaped (like mine is) so that you can just pour the sand back inside the pot, without having to open the lid. That way you can recycle the same sand over and over and over again almost endlessly. It also keeps sand off the floor. They really died out in the Victorian era, when blotting paper replaced pounce as the ink-drying method of choice. This one is from 1874, I think, which seems very LATE for a pounce pot.[/QUOTE]