With fitted gilt-tooled leather interior, letter compartment in the lid, ink and sand bottles with stoppers, recessed tray housing paper knife, plume, rule, seal and other items (two missing, some damage) with mother-of-pearl handles and inlaid silver shield-shaped cartouches, sprung surface for access to silk-lined inner compartment and two-air cylinder movement with fine sectional comb in 24 pairs of teeth (complete), bass teeth on the right and tin cover inscribed "Abrm. Chapuis Zoller, fecite à Gèneve 1815", in burr-wood-veneered case with brass feet, mother-of-pearl escutcheon and cartouche, wd. 9 ¼ in. (23,5 cm), cylinder 2 in. (5 cm), some wear in governor-train, missing Geneva stopwork, otherwise in good playing condition, case with corner split, two small sections of replacement beading. With key. - Literature: Luuk Goldhoorn, "An Unusual Necessaire", in: "The Music Box" (MBSGB), Vol. 23, no. 7, pp. 219-221; Eduard C. Saluz, "Klangkunst" (Zurich, 1996), p. 24 for a movement by Désiré Chapuis. - In his article, Goldhoorn describes several noteworthy features of this movement, including the comb with its pairs of teeth of varying thickness (without lead weights or dampers at this early date) and the stop/start lever mounted on the underside of the bedplate and activated from the front of the case. According to Goldhoorn (quoting research by Suzanne Maurer), Abram François Chapuis (1777-1832) was the son of watchmaker Jean Pierre Chapuis. After marrying Suzanne Françoise Zoller in 1803, Chapuis adopted his wife's surname as an appendage to his own. A short-lived partnership with watchmaker Jean Paul Désiré was entered into in 1810 and dissolved after a year. While musical sewing necessaires enjoyed great popularity from the 1820s onwards, musical writing necessaires are considerably rarer. - A fine musical box from the early days of Geneva production.