One of the best things about the humdrum bookseller task of unpacking boxes is the moment when you pick up a new book and everything about it is just fine -from the subject matter, to the design, to the writing and the approach that the author has taken. The Office: A Hardworking History by Gideon Haigh was one of those books for me.

Haigh has tackled this history under two headings. The Story of the Office traces the history of office work, the development of places dedicated to it, the influence of technology on work and the design of workplaces. Haigh ranges from the Ufizzi to the cubicle, from the scriptorium to the networked office staffed by people who have purely electronic relationships.

The second heading is The Life of the Office dealing with the human impact of office work covering commuting, communication, the bleeding of office work into homelife, gossip, office romance and most intriguingly The Dark Office. This thought-provoking chapter considers Hoover's FBI, the Stasi and the Gestapo as bureaucracies whose leaders exercised power through the collection and distribution of information. Haigh quotes historian Gerhard Wienberg who suggested that "Had the stencil and carbon paper factories been placed at the top of the strategic bombing offensive's priority list," the Nazi regime may have collapsed earlier.

Haigh's history is rich with references to the office in literature, film and television. The book comes with 21 pages of sources and has hundreds of photographs and drawings.

Office buildings and the people who work in them have shaped our cities - in fact, in someways, they are our cities. Haigh wonders about the future of these great concentrations of work - already businesses are questioning the sense of gigantic buildings that are empty for perhaps 50% of the time and which house desks for staff who are more often than not working somewhere else.

This is a substantial book that will satisfy anyone with the curiosity and staying power to go with it. Gideon Haigh has synthesized a vast array of information for us and presented a great history of the entity that most of us have encountered but, as he says, few of us have really considered.