With all our recent talk of writing boxes and file boxes, I thought I’d share this photograph I took on a recent trip to Philip Johnson’s Glass House… Sitting on his immaculate, leather-topped desk (designed by Mies van der Rohe, we were told) was this pretty wooden box; apparently, it was something he’d owned since his childhood in Ohio:

The Glass House served as Johnson’s weekend retreat — during the week, he lived in an apartment above New York’s Museum of Modern Art — and according to our tour guide, when he arrived, he would empty the contents of his pockets into the box so as not to lose track of anything.