A pad for travellers

How strange! A certain Sydney Grew has posted this very piece of - whatever it is - on another forum within the past 24 hours! If I didn't know better, I might have been tempted to assume that you and he were the same person rather than someone who just happens to come up with the same post in two different places within a very short space of time from one another!

It could not be used today, of course, because there'd be nothing on which to hang the thing but, in any case, from the fact that I have not seen a more cumbersome device in a very long time I can only assume that the parent company of this Wryteezy Company must have been Heath & Robinson Ltd.

Who can say? I suppose that this would at least in part depend upon how many of them were ever made and sold and how popular they might have been at the time that they were so. As to whether it would qualify as an "antique" in the sense of being identifiably more than a century old, that would depend upon the date of your published source - I mean gerard's published source...