Tag: 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.