Crown Prince Nicholas Alexandrovich, the future emperor, began this album in 1889 when he was just 20 years old. Over the next 24 years, until 1913, he personally sketched in watercolor every piece of jewelry he received as a gift: cufflinks, rings, cigarette cases, keychains. In total, there were 305 watercolor drawings on 82 pages.

Next to each drawing, the crown prince, and later emperor, noted the date and occasion in his own hand - birthday, name day, engagement, wedding, coronation, birth of children, Easter, Christmas, as well as the name of the giver. Among the items are works by Fabergé and Cartier. According to researchers, the album was kept with almost accounting-like methodicalness and a clear personal attachment to each item.

After the revolution, the album was considered lost and was rediscovered in the 1990s in the archives of the Moscow Kremlin Museums. In 1997, the London publishing house Ermitage released its facsimile edition - for the first time, the album was reproduced in full, page by page, in its original form. The accompanying text was written by Alexander von Solodkoff, a specialist in Russian jewelry, and the essay on the archival find was by Irina Bogatskaya, curator of the Kremlin Museums.

The edition was supplemented with unpublished private photographs of the Romanov family - most of the images come from the archive of Princess Irina of Prussia, sister of Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna. The book was released in a high-quality cloth binding on 216 pages, in a green cardboard case, and was distributed through London’s Christie’s in the late 1990s, quickly selling out among collectors.