Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the following individuals for their research assistance, critical comments, and access to objects during the preparation of this article: Luke Beckerdite, Allan Breed, Michael Brown, Ralph Carpenter, Linda Eppich, Jeffrey Greene, Morrison Heckscher, Patricia Kane, Alexandra Kirtley, Thomas Michie, Michael Moses, Peter Obbard, Michael Podmaniczky, Ron Potvin, and Gerald Ward.

1. Luke Vincent Lockwood, Colonial Furniture in America, 2d ed., 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1913), 1:246. The Brown desk-and-bookcase brought $12.1 million (Christie's, The Magnificent Nicholas Brown Desk and Bookcase, New York, June 3, 1989). A Newport desk-and-bookcase signed by Christopher Townsend brought $8,250,500 in 1999 (Sotheby's, Important Americana: Furniture and Folk Art, New York, January 16 - 17, 1999, lot 704).

2. Wendy A. Cooper and Tara L. Gleason, "A Different Rhode Island Block-and-Shell Story: Providence Provenances and Pitch-Pediments," in American Furniture, edited by Luke Beckerdite (Hanover, N. H.: University Press of New England for the Chipstone Foundation, 1999), pp. 162, 176. The attribution of these two objects to Providence was first suggested in Michael Moses, Master Craftsmen of Newport (Tenafly, N. J.: MMI Americana Press, 1984), p. 303. For the provenance of the Lisle desk-and-bookcase, see Christopher P. Monkhouse and Thomas Michie, American Furniture in Pendleton House (Providence, R.I.: Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, 1986), p. 96.

3. Norman M. Isham, "John Goddard and his Work," Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design 15, no. 2 (April 1927): 23. Homer Eaton Keyes, "The Frontispiece," Antiques 15, no. 4 (April 1929): 277. For further information about Thomas Goddard, see Mabel Munson Swan, "John Goddard's Sons," Antiques 57, no. 6 (June 1950): 448 - 49.

4. The best early accounts of John Goddard are Walter A. Dyer, "John Goddard and his Block-Fronts," Antiques 1, no. 5 (May 1922): 203 - 8; Isham, "John Goddard and his Work," pp. 14 - 24; and Keyes, "The Frontispiece," pp. 275 - 77. For a biography of Goddard, see Michael Moses, Master Craftsmen of Newport, pp. 195 - 200. For information about the history of Goddard's shops, see Ron M. Potvin, "Furniture Makers on the Point, A Selected List of Sites," (unpublished research report, Newport Historical Society, 1999), p. 5. The Goddard desk in the collection of the Chipstone Foundation is illustrated in Oswaldo Rodriguez Roque, American Furniture at Chipstone (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), pp. 56 - 59. The application of labels on furniture made for export is discussed in Margaretta M. Lovell, "'Such Furniture as Will Be Most Profitable,' The Business of Cabinetmaking in Eighteenth-Century Newport," Winterthur Portfolio 26, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 44 - 48. It is interesting to note that the Goddard desk at Chipstone has replaced backboards made of yellow pine, suggesting that the object may have been shipped to the South in the eighteenth century and later repaired there. The correspondence between Moses Brown and John Goddard is quoted in Moses, Master Craftsmen of Newport, p. 196, and Goddard's two desks from the 1750s are illustrated on pages 201 - 2 of the same volume.

5. Inventory of John Goddard, August 1, 1785, Newport, Wills and Inventories, Newport City Hall, I: 267 - 68. Wendell Garrett, "The Goddard and Townsend Joiners of Newport, Random Biographical and Bibliographical Notes," Antiques 121, no. 5 (May 1982): 1154. Lovell, "'Such Furniture as Will Be Most Profitable,'" pp. 50 - 51. Jeanne Vibert Sloane, "John Cahoone and the Newport Furniture Industry," in New England Furniture: Essays in Memory of Benno M. Forman, edited by Brock Jobe (Boston: Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, 1987), pp. 93 - 95.

6. Dyer, "John Goddard and his Block-Fronts," p. 208. George Champlin Mason, Reminiscences of Newport (Newport, R.I.: Charles E. Hammett, Jr., 1884), p. 50. Goddard's copy of Chippendale's Director is housed in the Prints, Drawings, and Photographs Department at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

7. For additional information on uses for desks and desk-and-bookcases, see Gerald W. R. Ward, American Case Furniture in the Mabel Brady Garvan and Other Collections at Yale University (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Art Gallery, 1988), pp. 343 - 44; and Brock Jobe and Myrna Kaye, New England Furniture: The Colonial Era (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1984), pp. 226 - 28. In his daybook, Job Townsend, Jr. never specifically bills any client for a desk-and-bookcase. However, it is possible that the "large" mahogany desks or especially expensive desks in his accounts were desk-and-bookcases. His typical charge for a true desk ranges from £50 to £90 during the 1760s and 1770s. The price of his large mahogany desks exceeded £200 and on one occasion amounted to £330. See Martha H. Willoughby, "The Accounts of Job Townsend, Jr." in American Furniture, edited by Luke Beckerdite (Hanover, N. H.: University Press of New England for the Chipstone Foundation, 1999), pp. 133 - 61. On December 26, 1765, Benjamin Baker billed a customer £300 for a mahogany "full [head] desk," which must have been a desk-and-bookcase; his account book lists no other items that could be interpreted as a desk-and-bookcase. See Ron Potvin, "Transcript of Furniture Recorded in the Account Book of Benjamin Baker, 1761 - 1790" (unpublished research report, Newport Historical Society, n.d.). Cahoone's two desk-and-bookcases included a mahogany example costing £200 in 1756. His ledger documents only his credit sales from 1749 to 1760 (Sloane, "John Cahoone and the Newport Furniture Industry," pp. 94, 99). I am grateful to Alexandra Kirtley for her survey of Newport inventories for the years 1779 to 1790. Of the 200 inventories she examined, 125 included a total of 142 desks and twelve desk-and-bookcases. Of the twelve, five are identified as mahogany, one as maple, one as walnut, and five lack any designation. The results of Kirtley's research are on file at the Winterthur Museum.

8. For lists of Newport craftsmen working in the 1760s, see Garrett, "The Goddard and Townsend Joiners of Newport," pp. 1153 - 55; and Sloane, "John Cahoone and the Newport Furniture Industry," p. 116. Thomas Hornsby, "Newport, Past and Present," Newport Daily Advertiser, December 8, 1849. Job Townsend, Jr. and Edmund Townsend jointly billed Nicholas Anderrese £330 for the "Large Mohogony Desk" on February 28, 1767 (Willoughby, "The Accounts of Job Townsend, Jr.," p. 144). For illustrations and a discussion of the Daniel Goddard bureau table, see Moses, Master Craftsmen of Newport, pp. 265, 271 - 72, 291 - 92.

9. For more on the desk-and-bookcase illustrated in fig. 7, see Nancy E. Richards and Nancy Goyne Evans, New England Furniture at Winterthur, Queen Anne and Chippendale Periods (Winterthur, Del.: Winterthur Museum, 1997), pp. 439 - 42. Potter family records are ambiguous regarding the histories of the two desk-and-bookcases. An 1836 account book at the Pettaquamscutt Historical Society records the settlement of the estate of Elisha Reynolds Potter. According to the accounts, Potter left a "high desk (formerly James Helme's)" to his son Thomas Mawney Potter. Presumably this is the example (fig. 9) that later passed back into the Helme family, who gave it to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (see Richard H. Randall, Jr., American Furniture in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston [Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1965], p. 84). Debra Anne Hashim to Michael Brown, March 26, 1980, object file for 40.790, Art of the Americas Department, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In a family note of about 1870, Potter's second desk-and-bookcase is briefly described as: "High book case writing desk in study Dr. P [otter] bought in Newport." William D. Miller, "An Early Rhode Island Collector," Walpole Society Note Book 1935 (Hartford, Conn.: Walpole Society, 1935), p. 45. Christopher Monkhouse and Thomas Michie proposed that this was the one later owned by Arthur Lisle (see Monkhouse and Michie, American Furniture in Pendleton House, pp. 17, 96 - 99). In addition to the two block and shell desk-and-bookcases, Potter also owned a third Newport desk-and-bookcase and a block and shell bureau table, probably the one now in the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design (Monkhouse and Michie, American Furniture in Pendleton House, pp. 84 - 85). Moses Brown's example burned in a fire, and the nine-shell desk-and-bookcase owned by Joseph Brown represents the work of a Providence cabinetmaker. The latter example's design clearly follows a Newport model, but in its details (such as the layout of the desk interior) it stands apart. The Brown family presented the piece to the Rhode Island Historical Society, and since the 1960s it has been displayed in the John Brown House. For information about the Brown family examples, see Ward, American Case Furniture in the Mabel Brady Garvan and Other Collections at Yale University, pp. 339 - 44; Moses, Master Craftsmen of Newport, pp. 328 - 29; Christie's, The Magnificent Nicholas Brown Desk and Bookcase; and John T. Kirk, American Furniture, Understanding Styles, Construction, and Quality (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2000), pp. 154 - 61. In 1989, to raise funds for the John Nicholas Brown Center for the Study of American Civilization, the family consigned this desk-and-bookcase to Christie's. The desk-and-bookcase remains in private hands.

10. For the collecting careers of Pendleton, Canfield, and Perry, see Elizabeth Stillinger, The Antiquers (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980), pp. 113 - 21; and Monkhouse and Michie, American Furniture in Pendleton House, pp. 20 - 30. For catalogue descriptions of the desk-and-bookcases owned by Pendleton, Canfield, and Perry, see Monkhouse and Michie, American Furniture in Pendleton House, pp. 97 - 99; Morrison H. Heckscher, American Furniture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, II, Late Colonial Period: The Queen Anne and Chippendale Styles (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Random House, 1985), pp. 282 - 85; and Edwin J. Hipkiss, Eighteenth-Century American Arts, The M. and M. Karolik Collection (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1941), pp. 30 - 32. Ima Hogg's desk-and-bookcase is discussed in David B. Warren, Michael K. Brown, Elizabeth Ann Coleman, and Emily Ballew Neff, American Decorative Arts and Paintings in the Bayou Bend Collection (Houston, Tx.: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in association with Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 73 - 75.

11. The Helme desk-and-bookcase (fig. 9) is the only one without quarter-columns. The two pieces with book-matched panels in the pediment are the Lisle and Helme examples (figs. 1, 9). All of the others display raised panels with applied blocks. The five desk-and-bookcases with enclosed pediments are shown in figs. 1, 7, 9, 18, 22. In addition, the five previous pieces and the Pendleton example (fig. 15) have wells in the desk interior.

12. Typically the beaded strip (fig. 17) on the base molding is present only at the front, not at the sides. Sometimes, as was the case with the Lisle desk-and-bookcase (fig. 26), it was added to the sides at a later date.

13. For a comparison of standard Boston case construction to that of Newport, see Margaretta Markle Lovell, "Boston Blockfront Furniture" in Boston Furniture of the Eighteenth Century (Boston, Mass.: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1974), pp. 81 - 89, especially figs. 58, 59. For information on the application of the waist molding to the upper case in Newport furniture, see Jobe and Kaye, New England Furniture: The Colonial Era, pp. 174 - 75. Of the block and shell desk-and-bookcases, only the one illustrated in fig. 7 has a waist molding attached to the upper case. In this instance the molding is a replacement and has been incorrectly installed.

14. During conservation of the desk-and-bookcase shown in fig. 7, the board at the center of the hood was removed revealing the original wedge-shaped blocks securing the pediment to the top of the bookcase. At the same time, conservators were able to slide out the panels along the sides of the interior of the bookcase. Behind the panels, they discovered "secret" pockets, one of which contained a packet of eighteenth-century needles.

15. The squared-off, butt-joined blocking and shells appear on the fallboards of the Lisle desk-and-bookcase (fig. 38) and examples shown in figs. 9, 41, and 42.

16. For illustrations of the bureau table, clothes press, and chest-on-chest, see Moses, Master Craftsmen of Newport, p. 332; and Roque, American Furniture at Chipstone, pp. 2 - 3, 29 - 31. Also see Cooper and Gleason, "A Different Rhode Island Block-and-Shell Story: Providence Provenances and Pitch-Pediments," pp. 173 - 74.

17. The linings of the valance drawers within the Lisle desk-and-bookcase (fig. 1) and examples illustrated in figs. 7, 9, 22 are constructed entirely of red cedar. The maker of the desk-and-bookcase shown in fig. 18 used mahogany for the sides and back of the valance drawers but continued the standard practice of using red cedar for the drawer bottoms.

18. The ties between Providence patrons and Newport craftsmen are presented in Cooper and Gleason, "A Different Rhode Island Block-and-Shell Story: Providence Provenances and Pitch-Pediments," pp. 168 - 184, 195 - 97. The Goddard-Brown correspondence is quoted and discussed in Moses, Master Craftsmen of Newport, pp. 196 - 97.

19. The x-radiograph of the finial is pictured in Monkhouse and Michie, American Furniture in Pendleton House, p. 98. Although the finial is intact and old, it remains problematic for this desk-and-bookcase. Double-reeded urns are not associated with furniture from the early 1760s, but rather with the following two decades. It is possible that these finials are one of the "repairs" made by Thomas Goddard in 1813. A bureau table signed by John Goddard's son Daniel has feet with leaf carving, but the work is clearly not by the same hand that carved the feet of the Lisle desk-and-bookcase. Moses, Master Craftsmen of Newport, pp. 141, 265, 291 - 93.

20. The bold, seven-fluted quarter-columns on the Pendleton desk-and-bookcase (fig. 15) resemble columns of similar scale on a bureau table signed by Daniel Goddard. Furthermore, the design of the shells on the two pieces is similar. This prompted Michael Moses to attribute both objects to "Daniel Goddard's family" in Master Craftsmen of Newport, pp. 271 - 72. Although this connection may well be correct, the ambiguity of the Daniel Goddard inscription prevents this author from attributing the Pendleton desk-and-bookcase (fig. 15) and the example shown in fig. 7 to Daniel Goddard at this time.

21. A desk labeled by John Goddard and dated 1745 (Roque, American Furniture at Chipstone, pp. 56 - 59) and a desk-and-bookcase signed by Christopher Townsend (Sotheby's, Important Americana: Furniture and Folk Art, January 16 - 17, 1999, lot 704) have arches above the pigeonholes. The shaped drawer fronts within the bookcase of fig. 22 are reminiscent of those in the same location on the aforementioned Christopher Townsend desk-and-bookcase. The incised arches surrounding the carved shells on the corner drawers of the desk-and-bookcase shown in fig. 22 are related to those framing shells on early Newport dressing tables. For images of Newport dressing tables, see Roque, American Furniture at Chipstone, pp. 38 - 39; and Moses, Master Craftsmen of Newport, p. 41. Although Newport craftsmen continued to employ each of these features—arches above the pigeonholes, shaped drawer fronts in the desk interior, and incised arches around the carved shells—well into the 1760s, the combination of them here suggests a date in the 1750s for this particular desk-and-bookcase.

22. Feet similar to those on the desk-and-bookcase illustrated in fig. 9 are on a blockfront chest of drawers at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Moses, Master Craftsmen of Newport, p. 311), and a privately owned desk shown in the seminal exhibition of Newport furniture organized by Ralph Carpenter in 1953 (see Ralph E. Carpenter, Jr., The Arts and Crafts of Newport, Rhode Island, 1640 - 1820 [Newport: Preservation Society of Newport County, 1954], p. 75).

23. Furniture historian Charles Montgomery examined the desk-and-bookcase shown in fig. 22 in the shop of Stair and Company in London in July 1952. He subsequently sent photos of it to his colleague Joseph Downs, who expressed his concerns. "The carving in the pediment and around the base and feet," Downs wrote, "left me quite skeptical, as it seemed quite out of period with the rest of the design, and I would guess it was somewhat later than the original work." Despite Downs' reservations, Montgomery purchased the desk for the Winterthur Museum. The museum's founder Henry Francis du Pont declined to keep the piece and traded it to antiques dealer John Walton the following September. New York cabinetmaker Ernst Peterson restored the desk-and-bookcase for Walton. He scraped away the carving on the pediment, base molding, and feet; removed the moldings on the sides, and refinished the exterior surface. By November 1952, Walton had sold the desk-and-bookcase to Miss Ima Hogg for Bayou Bend. For a complete history of the piece and its restoration, see Alexandra Kirtley, research report, object folder for B.69.22, Bayou Bend, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The author is grateful to Ms. Kirtley for sharing her findings.

24. Gerald W. R. Ward, "'America's Contribution to Craftsmanship': The Exaltation and Interpretation of Newport Furniture," in American Furniture, edited by Luke Beckerdite (Hanover, N. H.: University Press of New England for the Chipstone Foundation, 1999), pp. 225 - 27, 237 - 44.

25. A desk-and-bookcase with Job Townsend's label is in the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design (see Moses, Master Craftsmen of Newport, pp. 254, 257; Monkhouse and Michie, American Furniture in Pendleton House, pp. 94 - 96). Among Christopher Townsend's signed furniture is a flat-topped high chest and a dramatic desk-and-bookcase with silver hardware. Both were discussed in Luke Beckerdite, "The Early Furniture of Christopher and Job Townsend," in American Furniture, edited by Luke Beckerdite (Hanover, N. H.: University Press of New England for the Chipstone Foundation, 2000), pp. 15 - 22. Two of the three documented desks by John Goddard are illustrated in Moses, Master Craftsmen of Newport, pp. 201 - 2; the third appears in Roque, American Furniture at Chipstone, pp. 56 - 59. These three examples vary considerably in their individual details. Even in such related features as the shape of the feet on the two pictured by Moses, the craftsmen used different templates in sawing them out.