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Tudor
times, circa. 16th century, a most splendid time in English history, the legs of
dining tables were often formed with large, bulbous turnings, and eventually got
phased out in favor of single or double pedestal tables. A parallel development
can be seen in the manufacture of tables designed to be situated along or
against a wall rather than in the center of a room. Console tables (made with
brackets and no back legs), pier tables (originally designed to occupy the wall
space between windows), elegant side tables, and hallway decorative tables are
all examples of this kind. Tables designed and used for specific purposes other
than dining include varieties such as artist’s and engineer's drafting tables,
billiard tables for drunken pool players in bars, card tables for all the old
codger poker players, communion church tables, dressing room tables that were
typically furnished with a mirror, library book tables, and tea time tables —
the latter being usually thought of as a round table supported on a single
pedestal with crossed or tripod feet at chair height for taking tea, which is
different from the coffee table whose use may have been for having coffee, but
whose position in front of a couch or sofa, and its lifted height, is of utmost
importance. An equally prestigious class of tables is that defined by location,
which pretty much determines the table’s size and shape, such as bedside night
tables, night pill tables, sidebar and end room tables, and sofa couch tables.
Much ingenuity has been used to construct tables that may be expanded or reduced
in size, most usually for dining, by means of extra leaves, drop leaves, folding
leaves, and draw leaves, and many of these may be classified by the construction
technique that was used such as gate-leg, Pembroke, tilt-top, harvest, and hunt
tables. For the most part these do not represent usage kinds. Similarly, many
tables have been furnished with a variety of drawers and shelves, and even, in
the case of library book tables, with cupboards, to the point that they might
often be more correctly classified as different kinds of furniture, such as
dressers, sideboards, desks, or writing tables. |