What mystery tool is this?

Pointing to the rusty metal contraption there on the auction table, I asked the same question of each person who approached us.
 
What do you think that is?

Each peered at it, picked it up and offered some wild answers. Several other auction-goers were standing there with me, and we had looked it over and couldn’t figure it out. We all guessed at it but didn’t come very close to identifying it.

A small item, this mystery tool resembled a table with four legs. It had a hand crank with two open wheels on one side and a solid turn wheel on the other. Maybe it was a tobacco cutter, someone offered.

I turned it over, around and under, and we looked at it from front to back. I lifted up an arm on the top and discovered a solid roller attached to it and a ribbed roller beneath it. At one end was the rusty remnant of a knife blade.

Obviously, something paper-thin would’ve been fed through the blade. That ruled out the tobacco cutter, unless it was used to cut dried tobacco leaves.

“A money maker,” someone said jokingly. “A chopper,” another said.

“It’s some kind of –,” practically everyone pronounced, ending their statement by filling in the blank.

One man answered the question with the all-too-obvious answers, the ones we had already come up with by just looking at it. That didn’t sit too well with one of the original of us who had been studying the thing for a while. No one likes to be treated as stupid – innocently or not.

“It’s some kind of embosser or engraver,” one man said. “You got to be old to know (what it is),” chimed in his friend, jokingly indicating that we all were much too young to recognize the thing.

I wasn’t around when the auctioneer finally got to the item, but I’m sure he didn’t know the answer either. He likely just made something up and offered it up for bids.

Stuck to the item was a yellow paper disc with a number: Someone had left an absentee bid on it. At least one person knew what it was or just liked the look of it.

The metal contraption wasn’t the only item that was the subject of our guessing game. On another table was a wooden shelf-like object with a cathedral top and pocket bottom for holding something. A small aged pouch with a draw string hung near the top. Inside the pouch was a handful of kidney beans.

A seed box, someone said, maybe it was tied to a horse. That wasn’t likely because it had a hole at the top as if it had hung on a nail on a wall, possibly near a door.

When the auctioneer got to it, he simply called it a shelf, and it promptly sold for about $5.

From time to time, obscure items like these come up at auction, made for a long-ago purpose that is foreign to us. Each of these will likely be sold as collector’s items with their nice vintage patina or they could easily be blended into a décor as a great conversation starter.

Do you recognize either of them? What were they used for? I’d love to know.