Every organized person has a designated place to do bills or write letters or cards to friends, although there is a school district in Ohio that is actually considering no longer teaching children to write using cursive, based on the idea that people don’t actually do any writing any longer. That will give the mind pause to consider. If you look back, when was the last time you actually wrote a letter or card by hand?

There are some computer buffs that gave up writing when they learned to type, but I don’t think we should just stop teaching our kids cursive. How will they sign their names or verify and read other people’s signatures? How will they read the letter that Grandpa wrote to Dad when he went off to war? Not teaching cursive just does not seem right, even though there is no overarching or compelling reason to continue. It reminds me of Latin – no one speaks it, but there are people out there who still learn it, because it is the basis for so much of our language, and is a basic key to understanding many English words. Which brings up the question: will the writing table desk be needed in the future?

Well sure, where are folks going to put their laptops without one? A writing table desk is a small table, usually about a yard and a half wide, with a single layer of drawers directly beneath the tabletop and four legs of any design to hold it all up. That is a very meager and utilitarian description because writing tables have come in both elegant traditional and simple modern designs from many different countries. People have been writing letters and contracts on them for hundreds of years.

The world has revolved around them if you consider how many legal documents, personal letters, and books of all kinds have been written on them. They are the truly unsung heroes of educated people’s lives. Wars have been started and stopped on the foundation of writing table desks and great literature has been created without them even being acknowledged. Yet nothing could have been written without them.

Writing table desks continue to keep people organized by providing that space we first spoke of to do bills and write cards. And they lend themselves perfectly to use by a laptop. It is as if they were created for them. A desk top computer is simply too large to be placed on one, but a laptop fits perfectly, and then can sometimes be placed in the large drawer underneath, if it fits, when it is not in use. And if you think about it, the laptop is the place we do our writing now. We just do it in e-mail or Word documents and ships them out over the wires and impulses – but they are exactly the same thing in a new form. We may pay our bills online but still need an organized space to do it. The fact that we continue to use writing table desks means they are not dinosaurs, but quiet heroes that continue to organize literate people who rarely acknowledge them.

Read more about these marvels of the furniture world at Writing Desk Specialist.

Have you ever wondered where the idea for your roll top desk came from. Like most great designs they have evolved from previous works. In this case we can identify three distinct types of desks that influenced the final design of the now classic roll top desk.

The Carlton House desk is a typically stunning antique writing desk. It has a nice set of drawers for holding writing implements and paper.  These drawers form a u-shape around the writing surface. Although there are only a few drawers below the writing surface we can immediately see how this desk led to ideas carried into the roll top design.

Next is the tambour desk. Here we really start to see ideas that have ported into the roll top, namely the tambour or rolling door. In this case the doors open sideways to reveal pigeon holes and drawers. The concept was later adapted to fit a rolling door sliding downwards. The larger stack of hiding spots were another feature that made it into the roll top as was the larger array of drawers found below the desk.

Lastly we have the cylinder desk. Just like the roll top it is a desk of drawers upon which sits a writing surface and some compartments for your writing gear. Some differences include the closing door. A cylinder desk sports a solid cylinder that rolls shut, there is no tambour (slats making up a flexible door). The cylinder desk will have standard pigeon holes but no secret compartments as is often found in a roll top. That being said the cylinder desk itself is a beauty.

These three important antique styles each lent features the the American classic roll top desk.  First made in the early nineteenth century they are still going strong. Of course they have gone through some adaptations and now can be seen to house computer components. They still represent some of the finest designs in American furniture making.