Any list of desk forms and types encountered in the modern office or home, and in antique stores, is incomplete and contradictory given the variations in the naming of desks, as a simple lookup in two or three of the reference books below will demonstrate. Each article discusses the name variations and the most general article of all, desk, makes comparisons between several forms and places them in historical context.
The division between "desk form" and "desk type" presented here is arbitrary, since there is no consensus as how to differentiate function, form, type and style in these matters, as the books in the reference section below show. A form here is something rather specific, while a type can be applied to any given form or all of them.