The roll top desk is basically a nineteenth century reworking of a formerly well-liked sort of desk called the pedestal desk The pedestal desk was a big, stand alone desk that was made of a straightforward working surface that sat on either little, stacked drawer cupboards or on pedestals. This desk also had a huge drawer that fit under the centre of the work space that sat above the user's lap. The inventor of roll top desk took the design of the pedestal desk and went two steps further.

Even though it had the easy and big workspace that sat on two stacks of drawers, it also featured a further addition. This addition was fixed to the top and back of the working surface and contained shelves, storage compartments, nooks and drawers - all for storage. Many related this additional piece to the Carlton house desk or the Bureau a gradin. The roll top desk, however, was the slatted wooden cover that rolled or dropped down through slots that had been carved into the desk's raised sides. The slatted rolling top led people to compare it with the cylinder desks that were preferred in the eighteenth century, though it's really related to the tambour desk - a desk that also featured a closure piece of wooden slats.

The difference was that while the tambour desk featured slats that retracted to the sides of the desk, the roll top desk's slats rolled up into the top of the desk itself. The roll top desk quickly found renown as it was easy to transport. Its fast production was owed to the ease with which people could produce the wooden slats that rolled down over the top of the desk these slats were customarily kept together by their mutual attachment to leather or fabric foundation which kept the slats from becoming caught or stuck when they were opened or shut. The roll top desk started to be less used when the metal desks were initially introduced to the more modern offices. The metal desks were better for the types of documents that were being produced with the discovery of the typewriter.

These metal desks had less little nooks and had bigger compartments for the documents that required filing and the roll top took a rear seat to them. There were such a lot of roll-top desks that were made in previous times it's not tough to find them in any shop in the country. It is beginning to become widely common to see these desks in the home once more. They're even being constructed new. When you buy a new roll-top desk, you'll find that modern additions have been made. Plenty will be well placed to store their computers in these desks quite simply and can be locked to guard pricey hardware.