'Mercury'

"I was half-way through the belt of trees above the water-meadow when automatically my hand went to my pocket, encountering the sharp edge of the flap of the unsealed envelope.  With no further intention in my mind I pulled it out and looked at it.  There was no address (or direction, as Mrs Maudsley called it, why I could not imagine) on the envelope: there never was.  But the open flap disclosed some writing which, at the moment, was the wrong side up.
 Among the complexities of our school code was a very wholesome respect for the Eleventh Commandment.   But we also had a strong sense of justice, and if we were found out we did not expect to be let off.
…
The rules about reading other people's letters were fairly well defined.  If you left your letters lying about and somebody read them, then it was your fault, and you were not justified in retaliation,  If somebody rifled your desk or locker and read them then it was their fault, and you were justified in taking vengeance…
...I had often passed round notes at school.  If they were sealed I should not have dreamed of reading them; if they were open I often read them -- indeed, it was usually the intention of the sender that one should, for they were meant to raise a laugh.  Unsealed, one could read them, sealed one couldn't: it was as simple as that.  The same rule applied to post-cards: one read a post-card that was sent to someone else, but not a letter.
Marian's letter was unsealed and therefore I could read it.  So why hesitate?
….
But I would not take the letter out of the envelope: I would only read the words that were exposed, and three of them were the same, as I could see from upside down.

   'Darling, darling, darling,
        Same place, same time, this evening,
    But take care not to---'

The rest was hidden by the envelope."

The Go-Between  L.P.Hartley

An Uncommercial Traveller

"She could not go straight to the lounge where she had arranged to meet Carne.  She must seek other diversion.  Of course, she knew, she had a note to write.

On the first-floor landing a notice with an arrow pointed to  'Writing Room'.  She followed it, and found herself in an apartment not unlike a station waiting-room.  It lacked human occupants, but there was accommodation for them.  Round the walls stood desks, back to back, with dusty blotting-paper gummed to their surfaces.  Inkwells in which the moisture had long since dried, cross nibs, and half-torn envelopes.

If she had wanted to write, this equipment might have deterred her.  But she wanted nothing.  No words could describe, to no one could she communicate, this extraordinary rapture which had transformed the universe -- because she was going to eat a third-rate dinner in a second-rate hotel, with a ruined farmer who was father to one of her least satisfactory pupils.

She could not keep still.  The wide skirts of her dress swayed round her as she moved about the room, examining the dusty but elaborate stationery, and the papers on the circular table in the middle of the room.

Who, she wondered, reads The Textile Mercury? or Iron and Steel, the Autocar,  the Iron and Coal Trades Review, the Electrical Times?  Ah, the times are electrical, she thought, 'perhaps that's what wrong with them,' and trembled, quivering with laughter at her small feeble joke, pressing her palms on the cold, smeared mahogany, because she suddenly found her eyeballs pricking with hot, irrational tears.
....
I shall remember this room until I die, she told herself."

South Riding   Winifred Holtby

Rituals of composition: the Chairman's desk

"He demanded from his underlings the strictest observance of infinitesimal minutiae.  For instance, every object on his desk had to be arranged each morning with meticulous exactitude.  The edges of the in-tray must be flush with those of the out-tray.  The silver calendar, turned for the day, two inches to the left of the clock.  Pencils, newly sharpened, and clean nibs in pen-holders.  The penwiper at right angles to the blotter, freshly filled.  Telephones and inter-communicator slightly staggered at an angle of, say, 22 degrees from the chair.  Envelope rack within easy reach without necessitating undue stretching, yet not so close that the elbow had to be unnaturally crooked.  If the softest of the three India rubbers was not found on the left-hand side of the row on the allotted tray and adjacent to the red (not blue) sealing wax, Sir Roderick's displeasure could be terrible."

Another Self   James Lees-Milne
(on the desk arrangement of Sir Roderick Jones, Chairman of Reuters)

Henry Moore's sketchbook

"...
Londoners lie under London, incubating
A different energy, a different life.

Round the corner the artist watches,
Jotting notes on an envelope.
To have drawn from life would be like

Sketching in the hold of a slave ship.
Not the Cockney wags of legend, but huge
Muffled forms, trussed and bandaged

Like Lazarus.  Wood and stone,
As well as bones and veins, wait inside
These vast vulnerabilities.

From their coding, we can construe
Houses falling, bridges falling, London falling,
Civilisations falling down.  The artist

Must show this without saying. Just
His sketchbook's sotto-voce.  Abstractish figures shelter background,
And  Try white again then scramble greyish over." 

 from Underground  (on Henry Moore's 'A Shelter Sketchbook')   U. A. Fanthorpe