Those that will love and search for an antique desk know that furniture has a history. It is more than simple utility. There is an art and form to furniture-making that can turn a mediocre house into a place to treasure. These antique searchers know that people attach meaning to their pieces of furniture and it’s this meaning from long ago that makes the hunt for antique furniture so special.
As it is now, it was then. That just right piece of furniture made homes more livable, made the place someone came to at the end of the day more attractive – more of their place.
This is why the antique desk is special. There is meaning attached to it from the intellectual and business pursuits of some person long ago. A place where ambitions were formed and more importantly, where achievement was pursued.
It is distinct from the antique table. A table from long ago was most likely used in the pursuit of more fleshly pleasures. One can imagine robust card games, indulgent meals, and maybe ribald reveling with drink and passion all around its sturdy hefting of food, game and drink.
The antique desk, however, is something different. Shaped and formed like the table, it is sober and serious in its function. It’s form proclaims that it was not made to gather around, it was made as a place for the solitary person to sit. It was here that books were written, where business matters were attended, decisions contemplated and made. At that old desk a man who was a striving failure or earnest success could have sat, desperate maybe, serious probably.
Around that desk a young man from long ago asked his father for advice, a mother penned a letter to a son away at war, a grandfather wrote his will. When we bring the vintage desk into our house or office, we attach to it our own meaning, we add to its history.
And soon the thing really becomes ours if we don’t just let it sit idle as decor. Just as a china hutch is not fully ours until it contains our dishes and glassware, to fully attach meaning to a desk, we have to use it. Keep on it the books we are reading, stack it with the papers that represent our own pursuits and ambition, have someone pull up to it to talk with us.
Once you do that, once you use your old desk, it adds one more thing in meaning, probably the most special of all. It becomes part of the meaning that you pass on to others one day. This thing with a history you will never know is now part of a history that you are making right now. It becomes your desk, richer in history and meaning because it found its way to your home.