Reformatting Desk

This week I decided to spend some time and clean up, or rather, defragment my desk. I don’t know about anyone else, but I can’t think in an organized fashion if my workspace or study is chaotic and inaccessible.

My bookshelves in a state of confusion. See if you can spot: 1. Sandtrooper, 2. Gargoyle, 3. Engraving of Erasmus, 4. External Hard Drive, 5. Tin lantern. 6. Goose quill pens (2)


Chaotic desk. All my productivity has to be outsourced to places with enough space to write.

I haven’t devised any effective way to catalogue and shelve my book collections yet. The skull represents mortality. A common accessory for the medieval scholar.

Newly reformatted bookshelf, with notebooks, jade lion bookend, small-format book collection. Atop is a map case, gargoyle, and several curious artifacts: a Hopewell effigy pipe and a Harappan seal. The flasks contain life-extension elixirs.

Some order restored to the desktop. Where I have a flat space to work I prefer to use dip-nib pens for writing.

A campaign writing desk or chest, containing important correspodence, ink bottles, and slots for sealing wax, seals, writing utensils, etc.

Set up for taking notes from a book or manuscript. The white paper under the leather weight is for blotting wet ink and preventing the paper weight from “printing” on other pages.

Erasmus writing in his study, as depicted by Durer. I can’t ever hope to be as erudite as he, but old engravings like this offer a wealth of ideas for constructing office or study space.