The marble-topped and brass-inlaid bookcase with its ormolu-mounted base displaying a palm-and-laurel enriched acanthus-spray, is conceived as a glazed 'pier-commode', and designed in the 'antique' manner appropriate for fashionable French-style drawing-rooms or living-rooms of the George IV period. Its door frames' tortoiseshell-veneer, adapted from a French 17th Century armoire vitre, is inlaid in the Louis XIV 'boulle' manner with Venus-shell badges displayed in spandrel cartouches, which are tied by flowered and acanthus-wrapped ribbon-bands, and which derive from 'arabesque' patterns published by Jean Bérain (d.1726), Louis XIV's Dessinateur de la Chambre et du Cabinet du Roi.
The commode-bookcase is likely to have been commissioned by the bibliophile George John, 2nd Earl Spencer (d.1834), who shared the taste for French decorative arts with George, Prince of Wales, later King George IV. It was designed to harmonise with items in his celebrated collection of French furniture assembled at Spencer House, London around 1800 (see: J. Friedman, Spencer House, London, 1993, p. 213). A brass-inlaid box in the 'Louis Quatorze' style that had belonged to Lavinia, Countess Spencer (d.1831) was sold anonymously in these Rooms, 7 July 1994, lot 116