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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.
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 proofs. 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 practical movable type Printing press in the 15th century, any reader was potentially a writer or a publisher or both, since any Book or other document had to be copied by hand. The desks were designed in consequence, 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.
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.
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 to our present day limited quantities of finely crafted desks were constructed by master cabinet makers 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.
More paper and more correspondence drove the need for more complex desks and more specialized desks, such as the Rolltop deskRolltop desk A rolltop desk is basically a 19th century reworking of the pedestal desk with, in addition, a series of stacked compartments, shelves, drawers and nooks in front of the user, much like the Bureau a gradin or the Carleton house table. Unlike which was a mass produced slatted variant of the classical Cylinder deskThe cylinder desk is a form of desk which resembles a Bureau Mazarin or a writing table equipped with small stacked shelves in front of the user's main work surface, and a revolving cylinder part which comes down to hide and lock up the working papers whe. It provided a relatively fast and cheap way to lock up the ever increasing flow of paper without having to file everything by the end of the day. Paper documents started leaving the desk as a "home", with the general introduction of filing cabinets. Correspondence and other documents were now too numerous to get enough attention to be rolled up or folded again, then summarized and tagged before being pigeonholed in a small compartment over or under the work surface of the desk. The famous Wooton deskThe Wooton desk is a variation of the Fall front desk. It is the embodiment (in the field of desk design and construction) of the phenomenon of conspicuous consumption which swept over moneyed society in the United States at the end of the 19th and the be and others were the last monstrous manifestations of the dying "pigeonhole" era.
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