We had a pair of book ends almost identical to that. As I'm looking up prices for all the belongings we need to replace in the house, I didn't expect to find those bookends so easily. Or find so many. It turns out in my dad's day, it was a custom to take the baby shoes of your child — probably when it was about a year old — and bronze them to make a bookend as a commemoration. The one in our house literally contained my father's baby shoes inside, as do all those you see in the link.

What an interesting thing to do. I wonder when and why we stopped doing that. Perhaps WWII when the war demanded all our metal resources?