A cluttered desk is a cluttered mind. From Georgian to Mid-Century, which era will boost your productivity? Francesca Peacock Francesca Peacock is an art, books and culture writer. Why is a raven like a writing desk? It’s a question the Mad Hatter asks Alice at the poor girl’s confusing tea-party, before remarking that it’s a riddle without an answer. He, and the March Hare and the Dormouse, can’t think of a single link between the bird and a desk. It’s a question I found myself returning to this week, when exploring the endless possibilities of antique writing desks: from bureaus to elegant escritoires and sexy roll tops, surely one — just one — of them must have something in common with a raven.   When you’re writing your witty tweets, verbose Instagram captions, and heartfelt correspondence with one’s lovers (I find that quill and ink has a far higher success rate than a mere text message), how are you sitting? Are you typing from bed, the kitchen table, the loo — anywhere other than a desk? Early 19th Century Regency Period Rosewood Davenport Desk Available from Patrick Sandberg for £3,800 You see, the poor writing desk has rather gone the way of the typewriter, the chaise-longue, and the grandfather clock (as the Mad Hatter says, “If you knew Time as well as I do, you wouldn’t talk about wasting it. It’s him”). They’re thought to be elegant, antiquated, and beautiful — but fundamentally rather redundant and unnecessary in the modern world. Who needs a desk dedicated to writing letters like a Davenport with a slanted top — although, at the time of writing, Patrick Sandberg has a particularly fine rosewood example — when every email can be composed from an iPad? Luckily for the poor old beleaguered writing desk, there are a few Luddites lingering in the world. Deep in the wilds of West London is The Old Cinema — a beautiful antiques shop housed in, as their name would suggest, an old picture house. I spoke to shop’s Will Hanness about the modern-day market for writing desks, and the picture he painted was not as bleak as a world of blandly-furnished We Works and (the worst of all modern inventions) standing desks might suggest.   Danish Midcentury Teak Desk by Gunnar Nielsen Tibergaard for Tibergaard c.1960, £3,995 The Chiswick-based shop gets about one desk in stock a week, with the examples normally ranging from beautiful Georgian bureaus with delicate drop-flap writing surfaces and countless cubby-holes and draws to stash your letters in, to mahogany turn-of-the century Carlton House desks — a style believed to have been designed in the 1790s for George V when he was still Prince of Wales. Sitting down at one of these — or a delicate French desk with curved legs — and the temptation to pretend you’re a Jane Austen heroine, a less-annoying Marie Antoinette, or a correspondent of Charlotte Brontë is undeniable.  But what if your writing desk inclinations are rather more modern, and you fancy trying your hand at some mid-century verse rather than a Regency diary entry? There are many brilliant 20th century desks on the market, from the Scandinavian cool of Gunnar Tibergaard Nielsen’s 1960s teak pieces — complete with stylish desk chairs — to more streamlined, metal designs from the Bauhaus school. Despite being more modern, these pieces are liable to set you back a fair amount more than my lusted-after Georgian bureau — a Nielsen desk and chair can reach £3000.  But my favourite 20th century works have to be those by the Hungarian artist and designer Mathieu Matégot: his desks are little more than bent pipes with a flat surface on the top, but their contortions — and those of his magazine racks, umbrella racks, and plant stands — brilliantly strain at the boundary between functionality and art.  After you’ve bought an antique writing desk, it will magically make you write a masterpiece — that’s how it works, right? It would seem to have been the case for all the writers whose desks are now for sale. Why else would someone in 2009 pay £20,000 at auction for Charlotte Brontë’s small, sloping mahogany desk, unless they thought it would help them pen their very own Villette? More recently, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “writing slope” — not even a full desk — sold for £6000 in 2015: a modern version of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner is surely about to be published any day now.  But, if you do buy an antique writing desk, I’ve got the subject for your masterpiece all planned out. After making time for your love letters, secret missives, and poetry, why not dedicate yourself to writing about why a raven is like a writing desk. C. S. Lewis’s explanation — “"Because it can produce a few notes, tho they are very flat; and it is never put with the wrong end in front! — has never satisfied anyone. A proper answer would surely be a book that everyone would read. 

From the Paleolithic to Picasso - the rise of ceramics. Billy Jobling Billy Jobling is Senior Writer and Researcher in the Post-War and Contemporary Art department at Christie's, London. ‘Needless to say Sèvres has killed ceramics’, wrote Paul Gauguin in 1889. ‘… With the American Indians it was a central art. God gave man a little bit of mud, with a little bit of mud he made metal and precious stones, with a little bit of mud and a little bit of genius.’ Gauguin’s own radical ceramic works, of which around sixty survive today, rarely appear on the market and can command hundreds of thousands at auction. These vivid, deliberately non-functional vessels were part of his engagement with the ‘primitive’ artistic spirit. The great Spatialist Lucio Fontana, who pushed clay into bold sculptural shapes, similarly claimed to detest ‘lacy designs and dainty nuances.’ His dramatic, Baroque-inspired figures and Crucifixions of the 1940s are especially sought after; a spectacular ceramic fireplace hit the record price of €1,450,200 in 2015. The delicate, decorative objects these modern artists so disdained are, of course, only part of the story. Pottery has been part of human life since the Palaeolithic era and covers myriad forms and functions, from the practical to the pretty and the earthy to the ethereal. Broadly, though, to make ceramics has always meant to work with your hands. The increasing interest in ‘craft’-based TV shows such as Channel Four’s The Great Pottery Throwdown speaks to a renewed popular appreciation for the handmade and tactile. In our age of NFTs and immaterial imagery, ceramics offer something to hold on to, and seem to be having something of a moment. This year’s ennoblement of Sir Grayson Perry, while also honouring Perry’s achievements as a broadcaster, writer and public figure, is testament to ceramics’ ascendancy in the field of contemporary art. Twenty years ago, Perry was the first ceramic artist to win the Turner Prize. His vases might look classical or domestic from afar, but incorporate subversive images and text that deliver biting social commentary and complex autobiographical themes. His Warhol-Basquiat tribute I Want To Be An Artist sold for a record-breaking £632,750 in 2017; twelve more vases have achieved prices over £100,000 since then. PERRY, Grayson b.1960 I Want To Be An Artist, price realised £632,750 Christie’s The ceramics of Pablo Picasso are a perennial—and accessible—auction favourite. Plates, plaques, bowls and vases produced at the Madoura pottery in Vallauris can be found for a few thousand dollars upwards. Inventive, colourful and often charming in design, these editioned works offer an appealing entry point to the Spanish master’s practice. A unique prototype of his Grand vase aux femmes voilées (1950), which sold for almost a million pounds in 2013, holds the record—still a bargain relative to his work on canvas. Collectors of a more esoteric persuasion might consider George Ohr, the self-styled ‘Mad Potter of Biloxi’, who died relatively unknown in 1918. His studio, a five-story wooden pagoda in Biloxi, Mississippi, overflowed with pots in transgressive shapes and colours, many of them rumpled, frilled or ‘scroddled’—made from scraps of differently coloured clay. Half a century after his death, a cache of some seven thousand pots was rediscovered in his son’s auto-repair garage. Artists Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol began buying Ohr in the 1980s, followed by celebrity collectors including Steven Spielberg and Jack Nicholson. He retains a devoted following today: exceptional works command thirty to fifty thousand dollars at auction. The equally rebellious Peter Voulkos, who founded the art ceramics department at the Los Angeles County Art Institute in 1954, reinvented ceramics during the years of Abstract Expressionism. ‘Calling Peter Voulkos a ceramist’, wrote Karen Rosenberg in 2016, ‘is a bit like calling Jimi Hendrix a guitarist.’ A master of functional pottery, he went on to work gesturally and monumentally—sometimes in front of a live audience—creating towering behemoths from paddled, wheel-thrown and slab elements. These ‘stacks’ have sold for major prices in recent years, but Voulkos’s chargers, bowls and plates can still be picked up for a few thousand dollars. LEIGH, Simone b.1967 Untitled VI (Anatomy of Architecture Series), price realised $819,000 Christie’s Among Voulkos’s students was the West Coast abstractionist Ken Price, whose psychedelic fired-clay sculptures drew on Surrealism and surf culture. His work was recently included in the Hayward Gallery’s group show Strange Clay: Ceramics in Contemporary Art, which closed on 8 January this year. The exhibition showcased the medium’s wild mutability in an array of works—by turns painterly and sculptural, cerebral, playful and technically dazzling—by artists including Price, Takuro Kuwata, Rachel Kneebone, Jonathan Baldock, Beate Kuhn and Leilah Babirye. At the Whitechapel Gallery in 2021, Theaster Gates’ exhibition A Clay Sermon explored the material, social and spiritual potency of clay, from its ritual and ceremonial uses to its role in colonialism. Alongside his own early hand-thrown pots, large stoneware vases and totemic ‘Afro-Mingei’ sculptures—which combine themes of Black identity and Japanese philosophy—Gates made a selection of historic ceramics from collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum. ‘As a potter’, the Chicago-based artist said, ‘you learn how to shape the world.’ Simone Leigh, who last year became the first Black woman to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale, uses ceramics—among other media—in similarly complex works that layer references to African traditions, ethnographic research, and feminist and post-colonial theory. After years working in relative obscurity, her star has risen over the past decade. A small-scale sculpture from her Anatomy of Architecture series, which conflate women’s heads with pitcher or vase-like forms, recently sold for more than $800,000 at auction. In Leigh’s hands and others, the future of ceramics in contemporary art looks brighter than Gauguin could have imagined.Heavy lies the hand that wears the Crown. How the royals unburden themselves through writing.

Can Alexander Larman tempt voracious collectors to stray from plain text, and into the colourful world of illustrated books? Alexander Larman Alexander Larman is the author of several historical and biographical titles including The Crown in Crisis & Byron’s Women. He is books editor of The Spectator world edition and writes regularly about literature and the arts for publications including The Observer, Prospect, The Chap and the Daily Telegraph. WATKINS-PITCHFORD, D.J. The Whopper, 1967. available at £950 from Ashton Rare Books When you think of ‘the Golden Age of children’s illustration’, which artists come to mind? The estimable likes of Quentin Blake and Axel Scheffler are perennially popular today, and in the middle of the twentieth century, everyone from Edward Ardizzone to DJ ‘BB’ Watkins-Pitchford produced extraordinarily interesting, brilliant work. To purchase a signed copy of BB’s The Whopper in its original dustwrapper will currently cost you around £950 from Ashton Rare Books, and The Bookshop on the Heath has BB’s own copy of The Countryman’s Bedside Book on offer at the moment, for a comparatively trifling £275.  RACKHAM, Arthur Rip Van Winkle Heinemann, 1905. Jonker’s Rare Books But in order to understand the true ‘Golden Age’ of the medium, you have to go back to the beginning of the century to the Edwardian era, at a time when artists from Arthur Rackham to Kay Nielsen were renowned for their mastery of form, colour and subject. Although the subjects dealt with might seem juvenile, there is absolutely nothing childish about the books that they illustrated – nor the prices that the titles command today, especially the rare signed limited editions that are eagerly sought-after by collectors.  One man who has been dealing in Golden Age children’s books since he began his career is Christiaan Jonkers, proprietor of Jonkers Rare Books in Henley-on-Thames. For Jonkers, it’s easy to say why the books became so successful, from the beginning of the twentieth century onwards. ‘It coincided with the beginning of mainstream colour printing. The four-colour process (where the impressions of four electronically engraved printing plates each printing a single colour, red, green, blue and black are superimposed to produce a multicoloured image) meant it became commercially viable to reproduce detailed watercolour paintings. Beforehand, colour was either added by hand using a stencil process or by lithography, both of which were expensive and time consuming and generally reserved for the grandest natural history books.’  DETMOLD, Edward Illustration from The Arabian Nights, 1924 available at David Brass Rare Books This meant that artists of great genius could emerge, but for Jonkers, there is one figure who is primus inter pares. ‘Arthur Rackham is the most prolific of the golden age illustrators and therefore the best known and most widely regarded.  It was his illustrations to Rip Van Winkle in 1905 which set the template for illustrated books of this period and he continued working until his death in 1939.’ Nonetheless, Jonkers also singles out other artists with distinctive styles. ‘The most notable of these is probably Kay Nielsen, a Danish artist who moved to London and later to California.  His work is very stylised and inventive with a strong fantasy element.  In later life, he worked for Disney and contributed some of the scenes to Fantasia.’  When it comes to lesser-known figures, Jonkers considers Edward Detmold underrated- ‘he is less well known than he should be.  He trained as a zoologist so his animal studies are very precise, but he also had a sparkling use of colour, which is evident in his work for The Arabian Nights and Aesop’s Fables’ – and he has his own soft spot for a lesser-known artist. ‘I particularly enjoy Harry Rountree’s rendition of Alice in Wonderland.  It differs from most of the grand illustrated books of the period in that the book is printed on coated paper throughout so there are illustrations on virtually every page, interspersed with the text.’  These illustrators’ most famous works were sold in limited edition formats, which are now hugely desirable. As Jonkers explains, ‘Although even in their standard format, these books are very much a deluxe production, the limited editions take this a stage further: they are usually on larger, handmade paper, bound in vellum and signed by the illustrator.  There is also the exclusivity of knowing there are only a small number (usually a few hundred) of copies produced.’ The prices are therefore commensurately high, but, as Jonkers notes, condition is vital. ‘It has a significant impact on the value of these books.  They are produced as objects of beauty so being damaged or in rotten condition rather defeats their purpose.  As booksellers, one of our most important services to our customers is to ensure that they are buying the best available copies of these books.  All the books we sell have been carefully checked for any repairs and that they have all the requisite illustrations in an undamaged state.’ Jonkers is in the enviable position of being the go-to bookseller for the original watercolour artwork from these books. He explains that ‘We usually have examples by most of the major illustrators for sale. We follow similar principles in selecting artwork to buy as we do with our books, selecting only the best examples from each illustrator’s range.  The price depends on a number of factors:  illustrators, subject matter, and quality of work being the most significant.  A small Rackham drawing might be £2000, whereas a full-size watercolour would start at about £10,000 but the choicest examples might be in excess of £100,000.’ Not all the work is so bank-breaking, however; Jonkers says that ‘Some lesser known illustrators work can be had from £500 upwards.’  ROUNTREE, Harry Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Nelson, 1908. Jonker’s Rare Books Christmas is, of course, a traditional time for these books to be given as gifts; as Jonkers points out, ‘These books were originally timed to be released for the Christmas market and were sold as ‘Christmas Gift Books’.  It is easy to see why they make such good gifts and will appeal to all book lovers, not just ardent collectors.  That said, we sell a steady stream of these books throughout the year.’ And there are also times when something really unique comes in, which will be snapped up by the eager collector.  ‘Occasionally, we find books which have had an original drawing added by the illustrator, making them unique and particularly special.  Usually these are a small pen and ink doodle; however some years ago we had the limited edition of Alice in Wonderland with Rackham’s illustrations, in which he had drawn a full page in watercolour of Alice and the Queen of Hearts playing croquet.  That was very special indeed.’  So if you fancied a Christmas present to remember, get thee to Henley, forthwith. Whatever you buy is likely to be wonderful, beautiful and unique – and, if you’re willing to spend the money, might even contain its own artistic delights, too.