I don't know much (or even if I am right), but I think it is a coal stove. It is meant too be inserted into your fireplace opening.

Thanks. My friend did say that it can burn coal.

It's a franklin stove of course......but usually they were wood burning....
Never saw a design like that.
Originally Franklin stoves were stand alone.....to radiate heat on all sides....but were hard to vent....so moved to the fireplace....sometimes.
The magic of a Franklin Stove was that gimmick about recirculating the hot air tow arm the room before venting it out.

I found another similar stove. Different brand, but same style. Scroll down to the near bottom of his we page. He claims you can burn wood "occasionally", but I'll say this, I have a coal base burner with the same mica doors, we burn it for heat all winter and have had it fully restored. I would never put a wood fire in it. There is a debate on a lot of forums. But as far as I can find these were built for coal. I know it would damage my glass and it would need replacing, so we don't ever burn wood. All the Old brochures we have found state coal stove, so we just stick to high quality, hard anthracite coal. It burns wonderfully.

You have a beautiful stove there. I hope you keep it. It is a show piece. Even better... use it.

Edited to add: if you need additional help, you may want to check out this This forum. There were a lot of extremely helpful people who knew about every stove when we got ours. Working these old things seems a bit intimidating at first, but they are simple one you get the hang of it.

Thank you, Linda. Appreciate the reply. .

Kalindi, very interesting site, thank you for the link. I'll look at it at length soon. Those stoves are works of art, I'm so impressed.

This is a friend's stove, so I posted that picture to get information for him. He said the stove actually has a vent pipe which attaches to an opening in the white brick structure you see behind it. Not sure how that works or if it's an adaptation. My friend is concerned about the safety of the stove. I thought it should have more of a fireproof base around it rather than the wood floor, but maybe with coal sparks are not an issue. We are not familiar with burning coal.

This one below is the same maker and similar design. It sold for $2850.00. You might contact the company that sold it to see if they can give you the advice your friend needs. http://www.antiquestovesite.com/history.html

That's yours?! Georgeous! It looks very complicated too.

Interesting and great information. Thank you so much for the time you took to reply. Great information about the quality of coal.

As for the pipe which connects to the brick "structure," I did wonder how well a horizontal pipe, however short, would draft.

Oh well, I'll send the link to this thread to my friend and I'm sure he will appreciate all the info.

An additional fact: we just found a date on the stove: 1889.