Dymock's Book Arcade opens at 142 King Street, 2 April 1887

The above advertising leaflet survives pasted onto the rear board of Illustrations to Goethe's Faust in Twenty-Seven Outline engravings by Moritz Retzsch, a slim, undated, oblong volume, with no publisher’s imprint or printed text (aside from the title)—as you can see below.

I recently acquired this volume from Wal Kirsop, who purchased it in 1961, at the start of his career as an academic. (Having successfully defended his doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne in Paris, he returned in July 1960 to work for approximately two years as a lecturer in French at the University of Sydney, before transferring to Monash University in Melbourne.)

As you can see, it is not an attractive copy, and Wal almost certainly bought it—despite its condition—for the Dymocks Book Arcade advertising leaflet that it preserves.

The leaflet offers an interior view of Dymock's Book Arcade at 142 King Street, Sydney. Interior views of bookshops from this period in Australia are relatively uncommon (**), so I did some research to more-accurately date the image and—as you can be seen above and below—I am reproducing it here, in full, with some close-up images, plus—at the end of this post—some AI-generated mock-ups, to help readers visualise the shop. (** The only other I have at hand is Angus and Robertson's shop at 89 Castlereagh Street, reproduced in James Tyrrell, Old Books, Old Friends, Old Sydney (1952), opp. 88.)

Copies of this leaflet appear to be extremely rare. I can find evidence of only one other example, which is reproduced in one of my favourite books: Isadore Brodsky, Sydney's Phantom Bookshops (Sydney: University Co-operative Bookshop, 1973), 3. I do not know the source of Brodsky’s leaflet, but his copy is in worse condition that this one. I wonder whether it survived another five decades, and—if it did—where it might be today? I looked on Libraries Australia but was unable to find any record of a copy in any Australian library.

In addition to being unable to find evidence of other surviving copies, I was unable to find any definite record of when Dymock's moved into 142 King Street, Sydney. Wal's own article on William Dymock for the Australian Dictionary of Biography (here), states:

Dymock set up his own business in Sydney in the early 1880s, being at 208 Pitt Street by 1884. The shop was called Dymock's Book Arcade … as the Book Arcade expanded its activities and moved its premises, first to 142 King Street and then in December 1890 to 428 George Street.

The same elision of moving date appears on the Wikipedia entry for William Dymock, the founder of Dymock's, and other online sources (like this one), so I searched Trove for variations on "Dymock's Book Arcade" and "142 King Street" to establish when the move occurred. I did not find much advertising when I searched Trove for variations on "Dymock's Book Arcade" and "142 King Street" alone, so I used some of the phrases in this advertising copy.

The text fragments that surround the image can be read in various ways. My reading is as follows:

Dymocks Book Arcade. Books Bought [and] Exchanged, Libraries Purchased. 142 King Street, Sydney. Two Doors West of Elizabeth Street. 50,000 Volumes at Half Published Price. Twelve Miles of Books Always on View. A large Assortment of Standard Works on Engineering, Law, Fine Arts, History, Poetry, Theology, and Fiction. Latest Books. New Books and Periodicals Received by Every Mail. Finest Exhibition of Books in Sydney.

I tried variations on a the more distinctive phrases above (i.e., "Twelve Miles of Books," "12 miles of books," "12 miles" plus "Dymocks" etc.), until I was able to identify a block of advertisements which announce Dymock's move to 142 King Street. The announcement / advertisement appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald in slightly different form on Monday 28, Tuesday 29 and Thursday 31 March 1887 (here, here and here), for the closure of the Pitt Street shop (on Thursday 31st) and a grand opening—with a brass band, Chinese-lantern "illuminations" and an exhibition—at 7PM on Saturday night, 2 April 1887. The 28 March advertisement reads:

NOTICE OF REMOVAL.—WILLIAM DYMOCK takes this opportunity of thanking his numerous friends and customers for the liberal patronage bestowed upon him for the last three years, and has much pleasure in informing them that he has secured those large and commodious premises situated at 142, King-street, near tram, lately occupied by W. Crane, as auctioneer, where it is his intention to open the same as a Book Arcade on and after the 2nd of next month.
WILLIAM DYMOCK'S ARCADE REMOVED to 142, King-street, near tram.
DYMOCK'S BOOK ARCADE will re-open on SATURDAY, April 2, with upwards of 80,000 Books.
DYMOCK'S Book Arcade, 142, King-street Books bought, sold, or exchanged. Libraries purchased for cash.
DYMOCK'S Exhibition of Books on April 2 will be the largest ever held in Sydney.
LADIES and Gentlemen can wait for the tram at DYMOCK'S BOOK ARCADE.
BOOKS can be bought at DYMOCK'S BOOK ARCADE, from 3d to £300 each.
DYMOCK'S BOOK ARCADE will be the LARGEST BOOKSHOP in Sydney. OPENS April 2nd.
PICTURES.—Second only to the Arts Gallery […] DYMOCK'S EXHIBITION [will] be on opening night.
DYMOCK'S ARCADE will OPEN at 7 o'clock on April 2nd. Come and hear the band.
DYMOCK'S BOOK ARCADE REMOVED to 142, King-street, near tram.
CHEAP Music, cheap Music; 18s worth for 3s. DYMOCK'S BOOK ARCADE, King-street.

The 29 March advertisement omits the opening paragraph, and adds the following at the end:

COME and judge for yourself whether Dymock sells Books cheap on Saturday night.
ILLUMINATIONS at Dymock’s Book Arcade next Saturday, at 7 o'clock. Come one, come all.
CHEAP BOOKS. 20,000 Volumes will be offered at 75 per cent. less than English price.
DYMOCK'S Book Arcade, Removed to 142, King-st., near tram. Books bought, sold, or exchanged.

The 31 March advertisement is different again, swapping in a handful of new lines:

COME one, come all to the OPENING of Dymock's Book Arcade, Saturday, 7 o’clock.
FIFTY TON of BOOKS will be on view at Dymock's Book Arcade, King-street.
ART, LITERATURE, and MUSIC, all to be seen and heard free at Dymock's Arcade.
[…]
BOOK ARCADE in Pitt-street is now CLOSED. Re-open in King-street, on Saturday.
COME and hear the Band, come and see the illuminations. Dymock, Book Arcade, King-street.
[…]
Book Arcade has Removed to 142, King street, near tram. Re-opens on Saturday.
DOES DYMOCK sell books cheap? Come and judge for yourselves on Saturday. Book Arcade.

Dymock must have speed-run the shop-refit and Grand opening. A 19 March public notice by William Crane, Jun., auctioneer (here), states that he has "sold the lease of my Auction Room, 142, King-street, to Mr. W. Dymock, Bookseller, who takes possession on Friday next" (i.e., 25 March). Dymock was advertising for a "Signwriter and Painter" on 28 March—here—three days later, and only five days before opening—was looking for his already-advertised "band" on 29 March (here), and a Ticket-writer on 30 March (here).

A brief account of the opening appeared on Monday 4 April (here), as follows:

THE opening of Mr. Dymock's new book arcade, in King-street, attracted a great deal of attention on Saturday evening. There was a large attendance of the public—indeed, the establishment was thronged during the whole of the evening. The arcade was brightly lit up, and decorated with Chinese lanterns, in addition to which a brass band played a selection of excellent music.

* * * * *

The interior view of the "large and commodious premises situated at 142, King-street," in which William Dymock opened his Book Arcade, depicts twelve customers. If you look closely, you will notice that three of the twelve are carrying umbrellas. The wettest months in Sydney are February–March and June. For me, this is sufficient evidence to suggest that the leaflet was prepared and distributed in late March 1877, for the grand opening on 2 April, and that the leaflet, block advertising, brass band and grand "illuminations" were all part of the promotional activity that were undertaken for what was seem in retrospect, as but a brief stepping-stone on Dymock's path to 428 George Street, where the business remains to this day.

The only wrinkle in this neat interpretation is that I am unable to find advertising copy with the climed "Twelve Miles of Books" (or "12 miles of books") before 21 December 1887 or after 11 August 1888. As you can see above, when the new shop was opening, Dymock characterised "the largest [Exhibition of Books] ever held in Sydney" by number ("upwards of 80,000 Books") and by weight ("fifty ton of books")—not by length: shelf-feet or shelf miles.

As it happens, twelve miles of Books is probably wild hyperbole. Twelve miles of books is 63,360 shelf-feet. Charles C. Soule, How to Plan a Library Building for Library Work (1912), 277, states that "it has been usual to [calculate shelf capacity at] ten volumes to a running foot, a figure which has been verified in some libraries" but that "it is prudent to calculate about eight volumes to a foot for octavos and under"; noting "The English authorities still set the average number of volumes to a linear shelf foot rather higher, eight and a half to nine and a half for lending libraries or fiction shelves" (see here).

At eight to ten volumes per foot, twelve miles of books suggests five to six hundred thousand books (i.e., 506,880 to 633,600 books), massively more than the "upwards of 80,000 Books" Dymock advertised. This significantly-lower figure is also more consistent with Dymock's 31 March advertised claim of holding "fifty ton" of books (i.e., fifty British long ton). When I asked ChatGPT to estimate the weight of eighty thousand books in 1887, it concluded: "I would use approximately 59 British long tons as the central estimate for an ordinary mixed bookshop inventory of 80,000 volumes in 1887, with a provisional range of 39–79 long tons."

Returning to the hyperbole: 63,360 shelf-feet would require 2,347 nine-shelf, three-foot wide bookcases: looking at the 1887 image, my estimate is that approximately forty such bookcases are visible along the walls, and the equivalent of ten more may cover the sides of display tables. Even if this view is only one half of one floor, two or three floors of 142 King Street would need to hold much more densely-packed bookcases to make up twelve miles of shelving.

In 1964, Foyles advertised four acres of floor space, over five floors of 119 Charing Cross Road, containing thirty miles of shelves and four million volumes (Ved Mehta, "Quiet, Beneficent Things," The New Yorker (31 October 1964, 69 here—a great article BTW). But the Foyles building—which I visited in 1995—was infamously an innavigable warren. Dymock might have had twelve miles of shelving over two floors if you were to include warehousing / duplicate-inventory shelving, not open to the public, but I am doubtful he had anything approaching that number.

* * * * *

After I had photographed the leaflet, I wondered whether an AI might be up to the task of generating an image based on the woodcut. Gemini suggested that I formulate a prompt that accurately described the space and the people. This was a fascinating exercise, and one which obliged me to examine it very closely and discover specialist terminology (like "retained wall piers" and "retained wall header"). As a result, I noticed the umbrellas, and realised that two of the people in the image are actually statues! After some experimentation, I found that Gemini was wrong about the detailed prompt and that the less I included in my prompt, the better the results were—although I needed to provide the text of the signboards if I wanted to avoid gobbledygook.

Above and below are the best of the single-prompt images. Note a few details that are wrong in the first image above (the woman at left front holds an open umbrella, the man at left front wears a top-hat, two men on the right face away from the viewer), are generated correctly in second, but the second image makes mistakes, which were not in the first (the man at front left sprouts a beard, the two men on the right now face the camera, the couple browsing mid-field have become two women), while some errors persist (the two men on the right both have bowler hats in image 1, both top hats in image 2, whereas the original has one of each). The more I tried to refine the image, the more new hallucinations and errors would proliferate, forcing me to stop. I am sure that a paid-for, frontier model would have been able to either do a better job at the outset, or allowed me to combine all the best bits of all the images generated.

All considered, Google’s NanoBannana 2.1 did a solid job converting the image to a black and white photograph; albeit there were mistakes or infelicities in every image it generated. Over-all, I was struck by just how much better I can visualise Dymock’s Book Arcade (or “Dymocks Book Arcade”) via these images, so I gave into temptation and colourised one of them too. (Notice that, in this third image, both men at right are still in top-hats (!), but at least one is holding the umbrella, which missing from images 1 and 2—though the woman at left is still without her umbrella, and the man in centre-field still lacks something even more significant than his umbrella.)

I could probably go one step further than colourising, and use AI to generate a short video of the customers browsing, but if I were to try this I might also find that the statues come to life and start throwing books at the customers, or everyone abruptly starts dancing to "Stayin' Alive" (as here), so I will leave the video-generation for someone else.