Upon first thought, a collection of desks might seem like a mastodonian assemblage. So it would be if the collector placed them all in a row or all in a single room! But the house of to-day can accommodate--indeed, finds necessary--more than a single desk in its furnishings. And so the collector of old furniture has another impetus in his search, a utilitarian one. Under the term “desk” we may include the various escritoires, bureau-bookcases and the secrétaires. All of these, in common with our cabinets, tall-boys, and so on, had their origin in the chest or coffer of the Middle Ages. To the bottom of the chest came to be added a drawer. Next, side doors instead of a top lid came into fashion, and in this manner followed the many steps that led to the development of the piece of furniture we designate, for convenience, the desk. It is not possible to tell just when the earliest desks were made. The desk is a composite affair, combining a cabinet, a bureau, drawers, and a writing-table. In Ghirlandaio’s painting “Saint Jerome in His Study”--a work of about 1480, found in the collection of the Ognissanti in Florence--we see depicted a portable desk of the “schoolmaster” type; and another painting of the same period and in the same collection, the “St. Augustine” by Sandro Botticelli, depicts a desk with drawers. In other paintings by the old masters, and in very early engravings, we see delineated the various pieces of furniture in contemporary use designed for writing purposes, as well as others for the account-keeper. All suggest to us the probable units which combined to produce the escritoire and the secrétaire of later centuries, and lend interest to the collector’s enthusiasm for searching out pieces of the sort. When living was so much less complex in the matter of domestic doings than it is in our own time, there was far less need of such objects as desks. Whole families, even of the prosperous classes, could get along without them very well. Your Mona Lisa of the Renaissance could have carried her household accounts in her head, and probably did, while the housewife of the Northern countries had little use for a place to keep quires or reams of correspondence paper. Nor had they, in all probability, entered into the sphere of feminine prowess in home-banking matters that made necessary a writing-bureau sacred to personal command. The finest examples of the craft of the old master cabinet-makers of the seventeenth century and the eighteenth were originally produced for wealthy patrons who paid well for the master’s skill. While such pieces must naturally be beyond the reach of the collector of moderate means--except in rare instances where complete ignorance of their value is combined with a desire to part with them--they are still always interesting to note, and many of them have been reproduced with wonderful skill by some of the leading masters of the craft of furniture-making to-day.