Office, Office Desks

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Office Desk Refinements to those first desk forms were substantial 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 shaped a boom in the number of, or some might say the birth of, the white-collar worker. As these office workers grew in amount, desks were mass-produced for them in large quantities, using newer, steam-driven woodworking machinery. This was the first sharp separation in desk manufacturing. From then on, inadequate 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 century ago.

More paper and more messages drove the need for more complex desks and more specialized desks, such as the roll top desk which was a mass produced, slatted variant of the typical cylinder desk. It provided a comparatively fast and cheap way to lock up the ever increasing flow of paper without having to file everything by the end of the day. Document started leaving the desk as a "home", with the general introduction of filing cabinets. Mail and other documents were now too plentiful 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 well-known Wooton desk and others were the last, grotesque manifestations of the dying "pigeonhole" era. The new desks can be malformed into many different shapes and angles, idle for artists.

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