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Australian Arcade
You get the drift.
Coles Book Arcade graced Melbourne, with frontages to Bourke and Collins Streets, from 1883 to 1929. It claimed to have âmore than two million books to choose fromâ and billed itself as âthe Palace of Intellectâ:
Free music recitals are given every afternoon and evening. Intellectual, well-behaved people collect and friends meet and feel happy in the Palace of Intellect.
What a marvelous place it must have been!
âColeâs Funny Picture Booksâ were produced by Coleâs own printing department up until 1929, and the children of the family continued to produce versions of them right up until the present day. Coleâs Book Arcade was established by a great Melbourne identity, E. W. Cole, known for his radical and sometime subversive views, some of which crept into the cartoons, poems and vignettes in his ââFunny Picture Booksâ. He was also an extraordinarily successful marketer, who used his famous âRainbowâ logo to great effect, and was open to new ideas, and expanded possibilities, such as using entertainers in his shop to lure in the customers. The Book Arcade also had a fernery, caged mon-keys, mechanical hens that laid a tin egg containing a toy â and a tea salon. With brass bands and entertainers from minstrel shows, Coleâs Book Arcade was really an amusement arcade. The staff dressed in brilliant scarlet jackets, and hundreds of trade mark rainbows decorated the shop. The bookshop was also an early âcut priceâ establishment, selling a lot of remaindered stock, and cheap overseas editions, sometimes re-bound for the Australian market by Coleâs printing house. The Coles Book Arcade, which claimed âseveral miles of shelving and 3,000Â cedar drawersâ and â100 tastefully placed mirrorsâ was torn down in 1932 to make way for a department store.
My parents, who both left school at very young ages and had no academic qualifications, chose â for what reasons, or under what influences, I donât know â to fill the childhood home of myself, my brother and two sisters, with many many books. The end of our hallway was a wall covered in bookshelves. Most of these were purchased from door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen and by mail order from Readerâs Digest and similar companies. We had extensive encyclopedias, and my parents also purchased fiction â we had many sets of âStories For Childrenâ, including a set of the great childrenâs Classics â Little Women, Tom Sawyer, Black Velvet and so on. Who could resist Heidi , a little five year old girl toiling up and down the Swiss Alps in her hob-nailed boots?
As we grew older, beautifully bound volumes appeared with sets of the grown-up Classics, with the especially memorable great Dickens stories â A Tale of Two Cities, and Great Expectations . But perhaps most astonishing was the story of the interminable law suit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce in Bleak House . A stinging indictment of the Court of Chancery, it is, as Jarndyce says:
⦠about a Will, and the trusts under a Will â or it was, once â¦itâs about nothing but Costs, now. We are always appearing, and disappearing, and swearing, and interrogating, and filing, and cross-filing, and arguing, and sealing, and motioning, and referring, and reporting, and revolving around the Lord Chancellor and all his satellites, and equitably waltzing ourselves off to dusty death, about Costs ⦠Law finds it canât do this, Equity finds it canât do that; neither can so much as say it canât do anything, without this solicitor instructing and this counsel appearing for A, and that solicitor instructing and that counsel appearing for B; and so on through the whole alphabet, like the history of the Apple Pie. And thus, through years and years, and lives and lives, everything goes on, constantly beginning over and over, and
You get the drift.
Coles Book Arcade graced Melbourne, with frontages to Bourke and Collins Streets, from 1883 to 1929. It claimed to have âmore than two million books to choose fromâ and billed itself as âthe Palace of Intellectâ:
Free music recitals are given every afternoon and evening. Intellectual, well-behaved people collect and friends meet and feel happy in the Palace of Intellect.
What a marvelous place it must have been!
âColeâs Funny Picture Booksâ were produced by Coleâs own printing department up until 1929, and the children of the family continued to produce versions of them right up until the present day. Coleâs Book Arcade was established by a great Melbourne identity, E. W. Cole, known for his radical and sometime subversive views, some of which crept into the cartoons, poems and vignettes in his ââFunny Picture Booksâ. He was also an extraordinarily successful marketer, who used his famous âRainbowâ logo to great effect, and was open to new ideas, and expanded possibilities, such as using entertainers in his shop to lure in the customers. The Book Arcade also had a fernery, caged mon-keys, mechanical hens that laid a tin egg containing a toy â and a tea salon. With brass bands and entertainers from minstrel shows, Coleâs Book Arcade was really an amusement arcade. The staff dressed in brilliant scarlet jackets, and hundreds of trade mark rainbows decorated the shop. The bookshop was also an early âcut priceâ establishment, selling a lot of remaindered stock, and cheap overseas editions, sometimes re-bound for the Australian market by Coleâs printing house. The Coles Book Arcade, which claimed âseveral miles of shelving and 3,000Â cedar drawersâ and â100 tastefully placed mirrorsâ was torn down in 1932 to make way for a department store.
My parents, who both left school at very young ages and had no academic qualifications, chose â for what reasons, or under what influences, I donât know â to fill the childhood home of myself, my brother and two sisters, with many many books. The end of our hallway was a wall covered in bookshelves. Most of these were purchased from door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen and by mail order from Readerâs Digest and similar companies. We had extensive encyclopedias, and my parents also purchased fiction â we had many sets of âStories For Childrenâ, including a set of the great childrenâs Classics â Little Women, Tom Sawyer, Black Velvet and so on. Who could resist Heidi , a little five year old girl toiling up and down the Swiss Alps in her hob-nailed boots?
As we grew older, beautifully bound volumes appeared with sets of the grown-up Classics, with the especially memorable great Dickens stories â A Tale of Two Cities, and Great Expectations . But perhaps most astonishing was the story of the interminable law suit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce in Bleak House . A stinging indictment of the Court of Chancery, it is, as Jarndyce says:
⦠about a Will, and the trusts under a Will â or it was, once â¦itâs about nothing but Costs, now. We are always appearing, and disappearing, and swearing, and interrogating, and filing, and cross-filing, and arguing, and sealing, and motioning, and referring, and reporting, and revolving around the Lord Chancellor and all his satellites, and equitably waltzing ourselves off to dusty death, about Costs ⦠Law finds it canât do this, Equity finds it canât do that; neither can so much as say it canât do anything, without this solicitor instructing and this counsel appearing for A, and that solicitor instructing and that counsel appearing for B; and so on through the whole alphabet, like the history of the Apple Pie. And thus, through years and years, and lives and lives, everything goes on, constantly beginning over and over, and
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