The Office: A Hard Working History by Gideon Haigh

JUDGES' COMMENTS

Elegant, witty and informative, this is the history of a place we have all experienced; indeed a place where many of us spend much of our waking lives. Defamiliarising the ordinary is usually the role of the poet, but here the job is in the capable hands of a long-form journalist in his prime. Haigh transforms detailed research on a seemingly hum-drum topic into a truly pleasurable and entertaining reading experience.

This book is about the contemporary office and the historical office, including the office of Egyptian scribes, labelled by Haigh as ‘the original stylus-pushers’. It is also the office found in the fiction of Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Kafka and Melville, and the office of the movies and Mad Men. Through learning about the office, we learn about ourselves; and the individual work cubicle metamorphoses into something profound.

In its scope, its ambition, its willingness to address an largely invisible yet important subject from an international perspective, The Office is a significant work written by a journailst with a careful attention to detail and a stylist's touch. Haigh introduces to a world in which most of us live, enlarging our sense of the ordinary and everyday.