From Twitter via @CitizenWald came the tweet at the bottom of this post. And because it was about a Virginia Woolf desk, I had to find out more.
It turns out that Virginia Woolf designed this writing desk herself, and it was painted by her nephew Quentin Bell. It certainly doesn’t look like the messy desk in The Lodge at Monk’s House that Annie Leibovitz photographed several years ago.
The desk Woolf designed was just one artifact acquired as part of one of the largest and most significant private collections on women’s history by the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University.
The collection, assembled over a period of 45 years by noted collector Lisa Unger Baskin, includes the work of women from the Renaissance to the modern era. More than 8,600 rare books and thousands of manuscripts, journals, ephemera and artifacts are in the Lisa Unger Baskin Collection at Duke.
Materials from the collection will be available to researchers once they have been cataloged. Some items will be on display in the renovated Rubenstein Library when it reopens to the public at the end of August 2015.
So glad I was privileged 2 C @lisabaskin #book collection.Among favorites: Virginia Woolf desk http://t.co/UOlmDO0yPE pic.twitter.com/FX7QTFO4Bb
— CitizenWald (@CitizenWald) April 20, 2015
Alice Lowe
Catherine
Kaylee Baucom
Paula Maggio
Stefano Rozzoni
seanmcphail
suzannebellamy1
veronikakra
Vara Neverow
William Patrick Wend
Zoe Wolstenholme
