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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.
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 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'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 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[ according to whom? ] 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.[ according to whom? ] 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, 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. 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.
An armoire desk is a writing-table built within a large cabinet, usually 1.5–2.0 metres 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.
A desk or bureau is a piece of furniture with a flat table-style work surface used in a school, office, home or the like for academic, professional or domestic activities such as reading, writing, or using equipment such as a computer. Desks often have one or more drawers, compartments, or pigeonholes to store items such as office supplies and papers. Desks are usually made of wood or metal, although materials such as glass are sometimes seen.
A pedestal desk or a tanker desk is usually a large, flat, free-standing desk made of a simple rectangular working surface resting on two pedestals or small cabinets of stacked drawers of one or two sizes, with plinths around the bases. Often, there is also a central large drawer above the legs and knees of the user. Sometimes, especially in the 19th century and modern examples, a "modesty panel" is placed in front, between the pedestals, to hide the legs and knees of the user from anyone else sitting or standing in front. This variation is sometimes called a "panel desk". The smaller and older pedestal desks with such a panel are sometimes called kneehole desks, and were usually placed against a wall.
A writing table has a series of drawers directly under the surface of the table, to contain writing implements, so that it may serve as a desk. Antique versions have the usual divisions for the inkwell, the blotter and the sand or powder tray in one of the drawers, and a surface covered with leather or some other material less hostile to the quill or the fountain pen than simple hard wood.
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 the other in front of the user. Thus, all working papers, documents and other items have to be stored before the desk is closed.
The Wooton desk is a variation of the fall front desk.
The slant-top desk, also called secretary desk, or more properly, a bureau, is a piece of writing furniture with a lid that closes at an angle and opens up as a writing surface. It can be considered related, in form, to the desk on a frame, which was a form of portable desk in earlier eras.
There are two kinds of trestle desk: as with trestle tables, some have trestles joined by one or more stretchers, and some have free-standing trestles. They can be dismantled, with the desk top removed from the trestles, for storage or transport.
A mechanical desk is usually an antique desk type which was produced during the 18th or the 19th century. At one extreme there are desks furnished with a multitude of panels that swing out while stacks of small drawers pop up when a user lowers or extracts the main writing surface or desktop from a closed position, thanks to some well placed levers and gears. At the other extreme are mechanically simple desks like the Wooton desk whose two panels open up separately by hand and whose desktop is also opened in a separate manual operation, without exploiting any gears or levers. The term is used quite loosely.
A tambour desk is a desk with desktop-based drawers and pigeonholes, in a way resembling bureau à gradin. The small drawers and nooks are covered, when required, by reeded or slatted shutters, tambours, which usually retract in the two sides, left and right. It is a flatter and "sideways" version of the rolltop desk.
A Davenport desk, is a small desk with an inclined lifting desktop attached with hinges to the back of the body. Lifting the desktop accesses a large compartment with storage space for paper and other writing implements, and smaller spaces in the forms of small drawers and pigeonholes. The Davenport has drawers on one of its sides, which are sometimes concealed by a panel. This stack of side drawers holds up the back of the desk and most of its weight.
In cabinetry, the bargueño is a form of portable desk, made up of two chests, the bottom one usually having drawers and the top one having a hinged desk surface which also serves as a side-mounted lid. It is basically a chest or box with one of the side panels, rather than the top panel, serving as a fold-out writing surface. The interior of the desk is equipped with small drawers, pigeonholes, etc., for storing papers and supplies. The bargueño has also been used for sewing or as a jewel chest.
A spinet desk is an antique desk with an exterior shape similar to a writing table, But slightly higher and is fitted with a single drawer under the whole length of the flat top surface. The spinet desk is so named because when closed it resembles a spinet, a musical instrument of the harpsichord family.
A Plantation desk is an antique desk form. It is thought to have been originally used as a mail desk by postmen. The form is known to have been used on Southern plantations in the United States, but it is not limited to them. For some time communities of Shakers in New England built a large version of this form of desk. It was quite popular in the 19th century.
A Moore desk is not one but two large antique desk forms.
The desk on a frame is usually an antique form made up of two pieces of furniture. The first piece is a fairly large and closable portable desk with a slanted hinged top giving access to the writing surface and utility nooks and small drawers. The second piece is a stand made for it in the same style and material. It is also sometimes a single piece of furniture which looks as if it were made up of the two previous pieces but is in fact solid and nondetachable. This form was popular in Colonial America and was often done in the Queen Anne style.
A chest is a form of furniture typically of a rectangular structure with four walls and a removable or hinged lid, used for storage, usually of personal items. The interior space may be subdivided.
A chest of drawers, also called a dresser or a bureau, is a type of cabinet that has multiple parallel, horizontal drawers generally stacked one above another.
A desk is a piece of furniture intended for writing on, hence writing desk is redundant. It is usually found in an office or study.
A drawerDROR is a box-shaped container inside a piece of furniture that can be pulled out horizontally to access its contents. Drawers are built into numerous types of furniture, including cabinets, chests of drawers (bureaus), desks, and the like.
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