Pepys, enjoying London life in the 1660s after the Civil War, routinely noted his ‘great pleasure’ in visiting an office where there was usually nothing to do. Half a century later, Daniel Defoe emphasised the vital connection between expanding networks of commerce and the role of bookkeepers at their desks, under the management of the repeating clock.

But the office came into its own as a literary presence during the nineteenth century, when the novelty had worn off and it expressed creeping social dysphoria. It was a place of confinement and clutter, where faceless people toiled day after day at futile tasks. Balzac, Chekhov, Gogol, and Dickens were among its primary chroniclers, and its quintessential evocation was in the Circumlocution Office of Little Dorrit (1855–57), where all human causes were lost as ‘boards sat upon them, secretaries minuted upon them, commissioners gabbed about them, clerks registered, entered, checked, and ticked them off, and they melted away’. From this low point, he office  then rises, quite literally, through the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries to become an atrium of air and light designed by architectural visionaries, representing the peak of human achievement in the brave new world.

The office is Kafka’s inferno, Rockefeller’s paradiso, Gogol’s purgatorio, and Dickens’s limbo. It is the axis around which revolve all the contradictions of secular modern cosmology. Here the fantastic immaterialism of global finance intersects with the relentless literalism of daily subsistence. Here the scope of human aspiration has its most confined and its most expansive interpretations: from the flatline of human boredom and mediocrity satirised in Pleasantville (1998) to the transformative global impact of Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. Destinies may also be transformed. Clark Kent emerges from the offices of the Daily Planet to morph into Superman, as if working life in the grey flannel suit somehow incubates a counteractive energy so potent it must explode into interplanetary dynamism.

Gideon Haigh’s epic study brings out these larger thematic dimensions while assembling an encyclopedic range of facts and figures that might keep Stephen Fry and his QI team going indefinitely. This is a history of desks and filing systems, writing technologies, architectural feuds, professional dress codes, and management philosophies. We are reminded that Morse, Pitman, Dewey, Remington, and Gestetner were people before their names were branded onto objects or systems. We learn the circumstances in which the swivel chair, the stapler, the telephone, the steam elevator, and the wire waste-paper basket made their first appearance.

It is tempting to continue with an inventory of inventories, as the only concise way to portray the scope of this book, every page of which is an artfully composed blend of bizarre statistics, fascinating trivia, vivid thumbnail personality sketches, and cultural commentary. A special order of authorial stamina is required to sustain the momentum across more than 500 pages, even with the help of a dedicated book designer and some 200 illustrations. If Haigh ever became bored as he explored the innumerable novels, movies, and television shows about the office, you wouldn’t know from the way he weaves them deftly through the narrative, constantly refreshing the angle of analysis and illustration.

His account of the negotiations for building the UN Headquarters, perhaps the emblematic office project of the mid-twentieth century, begins by introducing William Zeckendorf, a New York property mogul who had been buying up slums, slaughterhouses, and factories on the East River. ‘Exuberant Zeckendorf, a moon-faced man of 136 kilograms’, who boasted that he was in the business of making grapefruit out of lemons, hired an architect to design a building that would rival the Rockefeller Center, with a 6000-seat convention hall, a 6000-room hotel, and a 5000-space parking level. When the vision failed to attract the necessary investment partners, Zeckendorf sold the land to Rockefeller himself, who was at the time heading up a committee to make representations to the United Nations for a New York base. An international panel of architects was assembled, including Le Corbusier, who was ‘unchallenged for fame among the group, and fully lived up to the stereotype of Gallic arrogance, creating his own designs in a frenzy’. In a scene that outstrips anything dreamed up by the scriptwriters of Mad Men, tensions came to a head when, in the presence of the whole team, ‘Le Corbusier […] tore down every drawing from the walls save his own’.

There is nowhere like the office as a scene for high-grade soap opera, because the great paradox of office life is its fusion of tedious daily routine with matters of the most various consequence. From the executive suite of Gordon Gecko in Wall Street (1987) to the cavernous lair of J. Edgar (2011), it provides an almost unrivalled location for psychological drama. The transformation of Andy Sachs from Walmart-clad Cinderella to Dior Diva in The Devil Wears Prada (2006) occurs in the office, appropriately reflecting the fact that the real epicentre of power in the fashion world is not the catwalk or the design house, but the offices of Vogue.

But there is a grimmer side to the story, and it seems that the devil does indeed maintain a presence here. Haigh’s chapter on ‘The Dark Office’ documents the systemic processes through which the KGB, the CIA, and the Stasi have done their worst. Under the Securitate in Ceauşescu’s Romania, the phone call log from a single factory amounted to 6432. The documentary holdings of the Stasi amounted to some 60,000 tonnes. In the devil’s work, lies and even damned lies are nothing compared to the statistics.

As may be apparent by now, my head is still reeling from immersion in this extraordinary book. I found interesting resonances with another fine study published recently, Jane Gleeson-White’s Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Shaped the Modern World – And How Their Invention Could Make or Break the Planet (2011), which traces the history of accounting since the Renaissance, presenting it as the founding discipline of modern thought. I wonder whether the synchronicity of these two publications is a sign of the times. Perhaps we are gaining some critical distance from the ideologically driven culture of workplace immersion that has prevailed since the Industrial Revolution. If so, it will take us a while to come to terms with the implications.