How to Write an Essay, 1886

"Topics Suitable for Composition" proposed by Thomas E. Hill, Hill's Manual of Social and Business Forms: 

• The Bachelor's Home.
• Discoveries of Galileo.
• People whom we Meet.
• Pleasures of Suburban Life.
• Love Conquers Selfishness.
• Things in a Country Store.
• The Books we Ought to Read.
• A Bar-Tender's Fearful Dream.
• Home Amusements Considered.
• My Garden, and What was In It.
• Going to Visit Mother Next Week.
• A Drunkard's Fate.
• Beauty at Seventy-Five.
• Adventures in a Snow-storm.
• Description of a Spelling-Bee.

Need to produce some winning prose on a deadline? Try one of these topics, or mix and match. Discoveries of Galileo in a Country Store? A Drunkard's Suburban Life? I'd read that.

How to Use a Standing Desk, 1888

"The desk at which the individual stands when writing, should slightly incline from the front upward. It would so project as to give ample room for the feet beneath, which should be so placed as to be at nearly right angles with each other, the right foot forward, the principal weight of the body resting upon the left. Incline the left side to the desk, resting the body upon the left elbow, as shown in the above engraving, thus leaving the right arm free to use the muscular or whole arm movement, as may be desired. The desk should be so high as to cause the writer to stand erect, upon which the paper should be placed with the edge parallel with the desk." 

Hill's Manual of Social and Business Forms

Between the mustache and the standing desk, the 1880s have all the style cues you need to be the hippest guy in the office.

How to Be a Novelist, 1901

"Most authors indulge in little eccentricities when working, and, if the time should ever come that your name is brought before the public notice, it would be advisable to develop some whimsical habit so as to be prepared for the interviewer, who is sure to ask whether you have one. To push your pen through your hair during creative moments would be a good plan; it would reveal a line of baldness where you had furrowed the hair off, and afford ocular proof to all and sundry that you possessed a genuine eccentricity. Or if you prefer a habit still more bizarre, you might put a hammock in a tree, and always write your most exciting scenes during a rain-storm, and under the shelter of a dripping umbrella."

How to Write a Novel: A Practical Guide to the Art of Fiction

Characters? Check. Plot? Check. Charmingly grotesque neurosis? Check.

How to Make Glow-in-the-Dark Ink, 1661

Doing some low-light writing? Grab a fig.
Samuel van Hoogstraten, Self Portrait (1647-9)

"Letters that are not to be read but in the night, must be written with the Gall of a Tortois, or Fig milk, if you put it to dry at the fire, or else [with] Water of Glow-Wormes."

Johann Jacob Wecker, Eighteen Books of the Secrets of Art & Nature (1661)

If I may offer a recommendation: opt for the fig milk. The tortoise dissection might be a little messy on your writing desk.