Like laptops today, writing boxes were common tools of working writers. Lord Byron used one, as did Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, and Charles Dickens. The poet Alexander Pope reportedly insisted that his writing box be placed on his bed before he woke so that he could immediately capture his thoughts in writing before leaving his bed. Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and Alexander Hamilton all wrote on writing boxes, too. In “The Laptops That Powered the American Revolution,” the historian Bethanee Bemis explains that during the Revolutionary War, Washington’s “most pivotal decisions” were issued from his writing box rather than from the battlefield.

Ordinary people used writing boxes, as well. Expanding literacy rates and the creation of the U.S. Postal Service in 1775 made letter writing more popular, and burgeoning travel among the leisure classes influenced the form and function of writing boxes. Like smartphone cases today, writing boxes were often designed to be gendered accessories. A “lady’s traveling box,” designed by Thomas Sheraton (and believed to be the general template for Austen’s writing box) featured both writing and dressing accessories like brooches, buttons, and sewing kits. Travelers’ writing boxes for young men included space for shaving materials as well as “journals in which they recorded their impressions and some made drawings of historic landmarks and objects.”

Mechanically, writing was still a complicated affair in the 1700s and 1800s. The writing box thus solved a practical problem. People needed a way to carry dip pens, pen nibs, and inkwells, as well as paper, stamps, and envelopes. As practicality led to widespread use, writing boxes became decorative, too. Designed and built by skilled artisans and woodworkers, writing boxes were embellished with high-quality velvet interiors, brass details, leather slopes, engravings, and clever hidden drawers. Writing boxes were personal possessions as much as emblems of social position.

When fountain pens and manual typewriters became widely available in the early-20th century, the need for writing boxes changed yet again. They eventually gave way to writing desks and general household or work desks. The disappearance of writing boxes wasn’t total, however. People sometimes still use lap desks, a modern descendent of writing boxes, and some antique writing boxes continue to circulate. Aside from those housed in museums, collectors and antique stores sell them online. Reproductions, representing an active, if niche, market, are often accompanied by a bottle of ink and a stylus for nostalgia’s sake and pitched as a salve from the fast writing that typewriters and then computers offered. Rather than speed and efficiency, writing boxes promise a slow writing practice characterized by the physical act of handwriting and the use of labor-intensive writing tools. They cast writing as an act of deliberateness and authenticity, values achieved at least partly by means of a writing tool that regulates pace.