Tiny desk gifts

A desk present is bought for a place rather than for a person, and the place is about a foot square: the strip in front of a keyboard, the corner by the monitor, the top drawer. That is the whole brief. Anything that has to be moved before somebody can work gets moved once and then put away, and that is why the pieces that survive on this page are flat, small or genuinely used.

Three purchases sit here and they behave differently. The pens and the pads go by the box, because a floor of desks needs a floor of them. The single notebook is a present for one person and is judged on its cover, since that is the part they look at. And the ornament, the small object with the joke on it, is the risk: it stands in somebody's eyeline for a year, and a joke that was only nearly funny in December is an object by March. Buy it only when you know them well enough to be sure.