Helen started, and said she feared she had been sitting too long idle. – Maria Edgeworth (1768–1849), Helen, 1834

Still, it is customary to keep pupils sitting too long at once. They ought to stand occasionally, or march around the room; and they should be required to exercise a few minutes in the open air, once an hour, at least. – American Annals of Education and Instruction, April 1832

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live! – Henry David Thoreau, journal, 1851 August 19th

To those who visited the old Library of Congress at the Capitol he will always be associated with it — a long, lean figure, in scrupulous frock, erect at a standing desk, and intent upon its littered burden, while the masses of material surged incoherently about him. – Herbert Putnam, of librarian Ainsworth Rand Spofford (1825–1908), 1908, wo