This cabinet is particularly interesting because the craftsmen who made it left a letter hidden inside, which gives a vivid description of the hard times 'when cabbage and corn were often the best food we could get hold of'. Such records of the personal life of craftsmen are very rare indeed. Writing-cabinets were fashionable furnishings for a library or study. They implied that their owner was both wealthy and educated, a person who needed a special place to house his papers and personal treasures. In Würzburg in Germany, a cabinet of this kind was called a Trisur, a term relating to 'treasure'. In the southern German states they were often decorated with boulle marquetry, which uses both woods and metals in its veneers, and takes its name from André-Charles Boulle, the best-known cabinet maker to Louis XIV in Paris. On this cabinet, a simplified version of the boulle technique is used to create the owner's arms on the main doors, standing out against the more traditional wooden marquetry which shows flowers and scenes of interiors. The rather piecemeal design of the marquetry may have been the result of young craftsmen wishing to demonstrate that they could undertake a variety of work, from floral marquetry and scenes of interiors, to marquetry of birds, and the use of metals and other materials such as horn.