I tried placing it on my secretary desk, but it was too big—too heavy—to be supported.
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This compact Secretary Desk ($199.99, normally $149.993) has a pull-out tray for jamming on a laptop when deadlines loom, and stows away when it's time to kick back.
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I sat at my secretary desk in my bedroom in a Manhattan apartment my wife and I just moved to, and I did almost nothing while I felt the waves of adrenaline crash around me, my body behaving like the ceiling was caving in, even though everything was, ostensibly, fine.
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The slant top desk can be considered in some ways as the ancestor or the little brother of the secretary desk for it is, for all practical purposes, a secretary desk without the massive bookcase on top of it. It can also be considered as the descendant, in form, of the desk on a frame, which was a form of portable desk in earlier eras. Modern slant top desk Slant top desk in the block front seashell style, 18th century. Side view of a slant top desk.
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Also, the general public usually calls this kind of desk a secretary, or secrétaire. In a taxonomic sense one could sometimes say that all desks which have the capacity to close off the working surface are secretaries, while all others are simply desks, but such a division would be too broad to be useful. To add to the confusion, certain forms of the secretary desk are called escritoire, usually when the bookcase section is covered with glazed panels instead of wooden doors, but the term escritoire is also sometimes used to define a very portable writing slope, which is it at the other extreme in terms of bulk and weight. Chippendale desk When a secretary desk is cut in half vertically, so to speak, to provide a secretary desk half as wide as usual on one side and a glassed door cabinet on the other, this big piece of furniture is called a side-by-side secretary.
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A secretary desk or escritoire is made of a base of wide drawers topped by a desk with a hinged desktop surface, which is in turn topped by a bookcase usually closed with a pair of doors, often made of glass. The whole is usually a single, tall and heavy piece of furniture.
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The whole book can be viewed as the struggle individuals go through as they attempt to find meaning in their lives. Victor Eremita bought a secretary (desk), which was something external, and said, "a new period of your life must begin with the acquisition of the secretary".Either/Or Part I, Swenson, Preface, p. 4-5 "A" desires the absolute highest.
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Secretary desk Like the slant top desk, the main work surface is a hinged piece of wood which is flat when open and oblique when raised to enclose secondary work surfaces such as small shelves, small drawers and nooks stacked in front of the user. Thus, like the Wooton desk, the fall front desk and others with a hinged desktop, and unlike closable desks with an unmovable desktop like the rolltop desk or the cylinder desk all documents and various items must be removed from the work surface before closing up. When closed, the secretary desk looks like a cross between a commode-dresser, a slant top desk and a book case. The secretary is one of the most common antique desk forms and has been endlessly reproduced and copied for home use in the last hundred years.
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The devices and the interest in them were a result of the technological ferment which arose in the United Kingdom during its Industrial Revolution, and gradually spread to Europe. The mechanical desk fad gradually died at the beginning of the 19th century. By the middle of the 19th century desk mechanisms were mostly simple affairs meant to extract or retract sliders or supports from a secretary desk, to give but one example.
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A fall front desk. The fall front desk can be considered the cousin of the secretary desk. Both have a main working surface or desktop which does double duty as a cover to seal up papers and other items located in small shelves or small drawers placed one on top of the other in front of the user. Thus, all working papers, documents and other items have to be stored before the desk is closed.
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The secretaire en portefeuille is much like a fall front desk which has been reduced in depth to a bare minimum. Like the fall front desk and the secretary desk the secretaire en portefeuille's desktop lifts up to cover internal areas and must thus be cleared of all work before closing up. By its mobile nature and its relatively light weight it was sometimes used as a fire screen desk. It was also sometimes known by that name.
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One year later, after a confirming plebiscite, he became Napoleon III, Emperor of the French. Soon, he was on a search for an empress, and Miss Howard found herself cast aside. Napoleon, after having been rejected by Carola of Vasa of Sweden and other high-standing members of the nobility, chose Eugenie de Montijo. Miss Howard was sent away to Le Havre when Napoleon announced this marriage, and her secretary desk was emptied of its compromising letters.
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An armoire desk is a writing-table built within a large cabinet, usually high. The cabinet is closed by two to four full-height doors, to keep out dust or to give a tidy appearance to a room by hiding the cluttered working surface of the desk. This form of desk is usually placed against a wall, like its antique uncle, the secretary desk. Computer armoire desk Small or home offices are the usual habitat of the modern armoire desk.
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In such a case, the secretary is also known as a mechanical desk like many other desk forms which have some sort of mechanism pushing out elements of the desk and then pulling them back in automatically. A secretary desk is, despite its name, generally not used by a person with the title of secretary, since this kind of desk is an antique form which is now extremely rare in the modern office, where a secretary (frequently called an administrative assistant) normally works.
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81 Guérdions were used near sofas for visitors' gloves and other objects, and were often round with a tripod base. Console tables were used at entrances mainly for decoration, and were usually paired with a mirror or painting above. Another major change from Baroque furnishings was that bureau cabinets or secretary desk surpassed writing tables (used in the 16th and 17th centuries) in popularity. Bureau cabinets were usually ornate, and were considered useful, as one could write, study or prepare oneself, yet store everything at hand.
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Unlike the rolltop desk, the tambour desk uses straight, perfectly vertical rows of shutters, and the work surface rests on a few drawers, which in turn are supported by short legs instead of pedestals. In addition, half of the desktop folds back on itself when not in use. The desktop is supported by sliders, like a secretary desk or a slant top desk when it is unfolded. The tambour desk is an antique form indigenous to the United States of America and should not be confused with the British tambour writing table.
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The 2000 refurbishment of the Red Room led by First Lady Hillary Clinton with advice from the Committee for the Preservation of the White House, and White House curator Betty Monkman retained the general form of Clement Conger's 1971 design. The color for walls and upholstery was changed to a deeper carmine red that historians considered more typical of nineteenth-century American manufactured textiles. The wide decorative tape, like those used in the Kennedy administration was installed above the dado. The most significant recent addition to the Red Room is a tall rectilinear secretary desk attributed to Charles-Honoré Lannuier.
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Unlike the secretary desk, the fall front desk's desktop panel is in a perfectly vertical position when in its closed position. Often, there are no additional shelves or drawers above the section which is enclosed by the desktop. Thus, the fall front desk is identical in shape to a Bargueño desk which would have been placed on a stand of drawers, or more precisely to the form known as Desk on a chest or as "chest-on chest". The fall front desk is also called a drop front desk or drop-front desk, and sometimes also a drop lid desk.
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The Wooton secretary desk usually rests on a four-legged quadruped support equipped with casters. The main body of the desk is filled with a dozen or several dozens (depending on the model) of small drawers and nooks for papers and small objects. As in a "secretaire a abattant" or in a fall front desk the main working surface or desktop is hinged and lifted completely from the horizontal to the vertical in order to lock up the desk, forcing the user to gather up and store all papers and implements beforehand. Unlike the secretaire a abattant however, the Wooton desktop hides only a few of the small drawers and nooks.
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A few fire screen desks had no screen per se but were simply lighter, narrower, and extremely thinner versions of the high secretary desk put on some form of permanent trestle mount. Their high form shielded the user's face from the heat of the flames while the open trestle mount at the bottom exposed the feet. They were basically a smaller version of a French form called Secretaire en portefeuille. The fire screen desk was often designed for use by a person of a specific gender: those designed for use by a female frequently had complex ornamentation and were generally smaller (light enough to be transported easily by a lady's maid) than those designed for use by a male.
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Most people usually refer to it as an executive desk, in contrast with the cubicle desk which is assigned to those who work under the executive. However, the term executive desk has been applied to so many desk forms as to be misleading, so the less-used but more precise "pedestal desk" has been retained here. The pedestal desk appeared, especially in England, in the 18th century but became popular in the 19th and the 20th, overtaking the variants of the secretary desk and the writing table in sheer numbers. The French stayed faithful to the writing table or bureau plat ("flat desk"), which might have a matching paper-case (cartonnier) that stood upon it.
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An Indianapolis, Indiana, entrepreneur (who was later to become a Protestant preacher) called William S. Wooton obtained patents for his design and established a company in 1870. Production continued until about 1884. The Wooton desk is their better known secretary desk; the Wooton desk company also produced a so-called rotary desk, which is in fact a pedestal desk whose pedestals have segments which turn on themselves to expose more drawers and nooks. The Wooton desk was introduced at the end of the 19th century, at a time when office work was changing in a drastic fashion with an increase in paperwork that led to the introduction of filing cabinets, among other things.
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The term is also applied sometimes to very big pieces of furniture made up of three elements, one of them being a half-wide secretary desk. On most antique secretaries and also on most reproductions the user has to pull out two small wooden planks called sliders (sometimes "lopers") in order to support the desktop, before actually turning the desktop from its closed, angled, position to its normal horizontal working position. However, in quite a few of the antique versions a system of internal gears or levers connected both to the sliders and the hinged desktop automatically pushed the sliders out at the same time as the user pulled on the closed desktop to put it in its horizontal position. When the user closed it afterwards, the sliders would then retract automatically.
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In certain spinet desks the inner desktop surface can be drawn out a few inches, adding working space. Front of spinet desk, closed Side of spinet desk, partly open The image of the front of the spinet desk shows it in a closed position while the image of the side shows it in a partly open position, just before the hinged mobile part of the top is placed on the fixed part of the top. By this capacity of hiding or revealing the main working area the spinet desk could be said to be a smaller, less obtrusive cousin of the rolltop desk and the cylinder desk. Like them, and unlike the secretary desk or the fall front desk, it can be closed up without disturbing too much the paperwork and various documents and implements left on the main desktop surface.
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Roussel's stamp, with its fleur-de-lis between the P and ROUSSEL, is often seen,Illustrated in James Parker, et al., Decorative Art from the Samuel H. Kress Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1964:86 fig. 69, on a tall rectangular drop- front secretary desk, ca 1775-80, with panels of architectural marquetry derived from engravings and gilt-bronze moldings and mounts of generally current design. but such quantities of goods made by others, both new and old, passed through the shop, and so much cabinetwork from Roussel's workshop was sold and stamped by other marchands-ébénistes,For example, Roussel worked for Pierre II Migeon (Watson 1966:557). that it is not easy to recognize any consistent sequence of characteristic styles, characteristic constructions,Geoffrey de Bellaigue discusses a fitted drawer that does not function in the piece it has been incorporated into, a mechanical table stamped by Roussel at Waddesdon Manor (Bellaigue, The James A. de Rothschild Collection at Waddesdon Manor: II. Furniture, Clocks and Gilt Bronze, 1974:492-97, cat. no. 101).
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