A desk is just a desk -- or is it?

I recently returned from a road trip to the places where Laura Ingalls Wilder lived. Being a writer, I noticed the desks that were on display at De Smet, South Dakota, and Mansfield, Missouri. Two belonged to Laura, and the rest to her daughter, Rose.

And I realized that desks have evolved over the years.

In 1894, when Laura moved from De Smet to Mansfield, she took along a lap desk. Most of us have seen something similar: about 18 inches by 12 inches and 3 or 4 inches deep, with a top that lifts up so that you can store stationary and writing implements inside. Lap desks were great for a society that was always moving (usually farther west) and that wrote with pen and ink.

By the early 1930s, Laura was well settled in Mansfield, where she lived out the rest of her days. She wrote her books on a desk more than three feet wide. It has a pull-down writing area that, when closed, would cover the cubbyholes at the rear of the desk. Although it would be possible to put a typewriter there, the desk is set up with a pad of paper. Since the curators left things pretty much the way it was when Laura died, she might not have adopted the “more modern” mode of writing using a typewriter.

The museum at Mansfield also has three of Rose’s desks. Rose was a newspaper correspondent as well as a novelist, and two of the desks there are the type you see in newspaper offices in old movies. These desks are possibly 4 or 5 feet wide by 3 or 4 feet deep and have a lowered typewriter shelf in the middle.

But it was Rose’s desk in the house at De Smet that had me salivating. No photos were allowed, so I have to rely on my memory. And now I wish I’d taken more time to look at the desk. I think this was the largest desk of all, built in an E shape without the middle prong. Or, if it were a house, I would describe it as having a long main wing with shorter wings extending from the front on each side. It is all the same height (with the possible exception of a lowered typewriter shelf where the doors to the main hall would be located). Instead of an entrance courtyard, there is a cut-out for a chair, and the shorter wings have built-in bookcases where the walls would be. Does anyone know how to steal a desk without getting caught?

Even though the room was filled with Rose’s possessions, she never lived at De Smet, and I don’t know when she owned this desk. It may have been one of her latter desks, possibly even the one she was using at her death in 1968. And big as it was, desks got even larger once PCs started replacing typewriters as the mode of writing. Think of all the space needed for a monitor and a printer and a keyboard and a hard drive.

But now we’re back to the lap desk, which we call a laptop or a notebook or an iPad. And we are also back to being a society on the move, even though our travels are usually temporary forays away from home rather than searches for new ones.

So are we progressing or regressing? I’ll let you answer that question.

Kathryn Page Camp