This essay channeling Balzac in Paris is included in my new book The Modern Salonnière. The 34 other essays in the book feature similar literary adventures…
View More Balzac as a Human ComedyTag: writing desks
As an author, I am always fascinated with writing desks of my literary heroes. I’ve written about Virginia Woolf’s and Honoré de Balzac’s, to name a few.
I also look for fabulous examples of writing desks being produced today that might have suited authors to a tee, one such post taking vignettes of Currey & Company products and putting famous authors in them. Anaïs Nin is one of the most famous diarists of all time. She left voluminous annotations about her life totaling 35,000 hand-written pages, which she composed between 1914 and 1977. Her initial journals were bound volumes but by 1947 her correspondence had grown so extensive she wrote by hand on loose sheets of paper that she kept in order and filed fastidiously. By the time she prepared the material for publication, her diaries numbered 69. I placed her in a lovely light-filled space furnished with pale shell-encrusted furniture and a feminine writing desk.
“I want a garden, a small house, grass, animals, books, pictures, music,” wrote fiction writer Katherine Mansfield, one of New Zealand’s most famous authors. “And out of this, the expression of this, I want to be writing.” Though she lived a short life—dying at only 34 years old—she left a meaningful body of collected short stories that include “The Garden Party,” “Bliss” and “Prelude.” I placed her in a loggia with a buxom chair and ottoman for reading over her drafts, and a table set with a typewriter where she could correct the pages she wanted to change.
Since poet Elizabeth Bishop created her works within a record-setting number of rooms of her own—her life taking her from Nova Scotia, New York, Key West and Maine to San Francisco, Paris, Mexico, Brazil and Boston—I gave her a voluminous space with an industrial chic edge. I adore taking vignettes like these and giving them added meaning by placing literary giants in them.
Eudora Welty Finds Her Voice
When a writer begins to grapple with how to mine the outside world for inspiration, the process can be challenging. In her memoir, One Writer’s…
View More Eudora Welty Finds Her VoiceExploring Frankfurt with Goethe
I am returning to Frankfurt am Main next week to attend Heimtextil for the second time, an experience I truly enjoyed last year for the…
View More Exploring Frankfurt with GoetheThe Sensuous Delight of Place
Like Katherine Mansfield’s enigmatic stories, the book Place by Tara Bernerd feels like “a thread with a subtly woven texture embracing ecstatic feeling, sensuous delight.” The…
View More The Sensuous Delight of PlaceA Backward Glance on rue de Varenne
The narrow sidewalks push their black iron batons up out of the ground to protect the buildings hemming them; the rain turns the cobblestones to…
View More A Backward Glance on rue de VarenneThis Side of Paradise
I looked forward to meeting Michael Berman during the Spring 2016 High Point Market when he was there to debut his Califolio collection for Theodore…
View More This Side of ParadiseHow to Set a Mood
The 1968 version of The Thomas Crown Affair starring Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway is a mercurial mélange of masculine and feminine charisma in equal…
View More How to Set a MoodI Met Virginia Woolf in This Room
Who else is relieved that Lady Edith Crawley, played by Laura Carmichael, is finally finding happiness on Downton Abbey? Having binged on all of the…
View More I Met Virginia Woolf in This RoomDining with History
A month from Sunday, I’ll be winging my way to Paris to attend Maison & Objet, and I’m thrilled to say I’ve been invited to…
View More Dining with HistoryTimothy Oulton Design Adventurer
“As the momentous words ‘England is now, therefore, in a state of war with Germany’ came somberly over the radio, Major James Bigglesworth, D.S.O., better…
View More Timothy Oulton Design Adventurer