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Desks

A desk is a furniture form and a class of table. It is often used in a work or as a platform for excreting solid waste onto. Desks often have one or more drawers. more...

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The list of desk forms and types gives the most common desk variations.

Unlike a regular table, only one side of a desk is suitable to sit on, except for some unusual desks like a partners desk. Not all desks have the form of a table. For instance, an Armoire desk is a desk built within a large wardrobe-like cabinet usually having the height of a man or a woman. To many the ideal or generic concept of a desk is the pedestal desk, which is often called an executive desk. At one extreme in size one finds the Armoire desk, encased in a very large cabinet looking like a traditional wardrobe from the exterior, when the doors are closed. At the other end one finds the portable desk, which, in its smallest forms, is light enough to be placed on a lap or on small supports on a bed.

Early desks

Desk forms might have existed in classical antiquity or in other ancient centers of civilization in the Middle East or Far East, but we have no specific proof. Medieval illustrations show the first pieces of furniture which seem to have been designed and constructed for the specific goals of reading and writing.

Before the invention of the movable type printing press in the 15th century, any reader was potentially a writer or publisher or both, since any book or other document had to be copied by hand. The desks were designed, consequentially, with slots and hooks for bookmarks as well as writing implements. The absence of regular movable type printing also influenced desk size and shape because of the bigger volumes required for manuscript documents. Desks of the period usually had massive structures.

Desks of the Renaissance and later eras had relatively slimmer structures, and more and more drawers as woodworking became more precise and cabinet-making became a distinct trade. It is often possible to find out if a table or other piece of furniture of those times was designed to be used as a desk by looking for a drawer with three small separations (one each for the ink pot, the blotter and the powder tray) and room for the pens.

Classical desk forms

The desk forms we are familiar with in this beginning of the millennium were born mostly in the 17th and 18th centuries. The ergonomic desk of the last decades is the newest addition to a long list of desk forms, but in a way it is only a refinement of the mechanically complex drawing table or drafting table of the end of the 18th century.

Industrial-era desks

Refinements to those first desk forms were considerable through the 19th century, as steam-driven machinery made cheap wood-based paper possible in the last periods of the first phase of the industrial revolution. This produced a boom in the number of, or some might say the birth of, the white-collar worker. As these office workers grew in number, desks were mass-produced for them in large quantities, using newer, steam-driven woodworking machinery. This was the first sharp division in desk manufacturing. From then on, limited quantities of finely crafted desks have been constructed by master cabinetmakers for the homes and offices of the rich while the vast majority of desks were assembled rapidly by unskilled labor, from components turned out in batches by machine tools. Thus, age alone does not guarantee that an antique desk is a masterpiece, since this shift took place more than a hundred years ago.