#officetour Milestones – The Modern Efficiency Desk
...In his 1917 novel The Job Sinclair Lewis makes note of a group of ambitious young clerks who work in the offices at Pemberton - "the greatest manufactory of drugs and toilet articles in the world" - and who sat at "shiny, flat-topped desks in rows"... while that may be a valid response today, in 1917 ambitious young clerks sitting at rows of "shiny, flat-topped desks" were, when not a revolution, then a relative novelty, and for all were highly indicative of a period of fundamental evolution and development in understandings of the office, of office work, of office workers, of office desks...