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 A bookcase, or bookshelf, is a piece of furniture with horizontal shelves, often in a cabinet, used to store books or other printed materials. Bookcases are used in private homes, public and university libraries, offices, schools, and booksto ...

usually closed with a pair of doors, often made of glass. The whole is usually a single, tall and heavy piece of furniture.

History

Like the slant-top desk, the main work surface is a hinged piece of wood that 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 Wooton desk is a variation of the fall front desk. History Indianapolis, Indiana entrepreneur, William S. Wooton, obtained patents for his desk design in 1874. The desk was introduced at a time when the small business owner was seeing an inc ...

, the

fall-front desk The fall-front desk can be considered the cousin of the secretary desk. Both have a main working surface or desktop that 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 ...

and others with a hinged desktop, and unlike closable desks with an unmovable desktop like the

rolltop desk A rolltop desk is 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 à gradin or the Carlton House desk. In contrast to these, t ...

or the

cylinder desk The cylinder desk is a desk that 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 that comes down to hide and lock up the working papers when ...

, all documents and various items must be removed from the work surface before closing up. When closed, the secretary's desk looks like a cross between a commode-dresser, a slant-top desk and a bookcase. The secretary is one of the most common

antique An antique ( la, antiquus; 'old', 'ancient') is an item perceived as having value because of its aesthetic or historical significance, and often defined as at least 100 years old (or some other limit), although the term is often used loosely ...

desk forms and has been endlessly reproduced and copied for home use in the last hundred years. Among home desk forms, it is the tallest, biggest and heaviest, excluding wall units and modular desks, which typically can be disassembled for moving, or some of the biggest of the armoire desks, which are usually delivered unassembled. The desk described here is most correctly termed a ''secretary and bookcase''. There is no unanimity on this term, even among specialists. In Europe the same piece of furniture has been called ''bureau and bookcase'' and then desk and bookcase. 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. 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''. 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. 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 A secretary, administrative professional, administrative assistant, executive assistant, administrative officer, administrative support specialist, clerk, military assistant, management assistant, office secretary, or personal assistant is a ...

, since this kind of desk is an antique form which is now extremely rare in the modern

office An office is a space where an organization's employees perform administrative work in order to support and realize objects and goals of the organization. The word "office" may also denote a position within an organization with specific ...

, where a secretary (frequently called an administrative assistant) normally works. Similar desks may be found in homes across Europe and North America used in backyards and patios to support modern remote work outdoors where weather permits.

References

* Aronson, Joseph. The Encyclopedia of Furniture. 3rd ed. New York: Crown Publishers, 1966. * Boyce, Charles. Dictionary of Furniture. 2nd ed. New York: Roundtable Press Book, 2001. * Gloag, John. A Complete Dictionary of Furniture. Woodstock, N.Y. : Overlook Press, 1991. * María Paz Aguiló Alonso. Escritorios y bargueños españoles. Spanish bargueños and writing chests. Ministerio de Economía y Empresa. Madrid 2018. . {{Authority control Desks History of furniture ja:机 pt:Escrivaninha sv:Skrivbord zh:书桌

History

See also

References