The Arcades Project - Operi

viriti, or Miss Daisy: The Journal oj an English Equestrienne.
To the inhabitants of these arcades we are pointed now and then by the signs and
inscriptions which multiply along the walls within, where here and there, be­
tween the shops, a spiral staircase rises into darkness. The signs have little in
common with the nameplates that hang beside respectable entryways but are
reminiscent of plaques on the cages at zoos, put there to indicate not so 11luch the
dwelling place as the origin and species of the captive animals. Deposited in the
letters of the metal or enameled signboards is a precipitate of all the forms of
writing that have ever been in use in the We st. "Albert at No. 83" will be a
hairdresser, and "Theatrical Tights " will probably be silk tights, pink and light
blue, for young chanteuses and ballerinas; but these insistent letterings want to
say something more, sometlling different. Collectors of curiosities in the field of
cultural history have in their secret drawer broadsheets of a highly paid literature
which seem, at first sight, to be commercial prospectuses or theatrical bills, and
which squander dozens of different alphabets in disguising an open invitation.
These dark enanleled signs bring to mind the baroque lettering on the cover of
obscene books.-Recall the origin of the modern poster. In 1861, the first litho­
graphic poster suddenly appeared on walls here and there around London. It
showed the back of a woman in white who was thickly wrapped in a shawl and
who, in all haste, had just reached the top of a flight of stairs, where, her head half
turned and a finger upon her lips, she is ever so slightly opening a heavy door to
reveal ti,e starry sky. In this way Wi lkie Collins advertised his latest book, one of
the greatest detective novels ever written, The Woman in White. Still color,
the first drops of a shower of letters ran down the walls of houses (today it pours
unremittingly, day and night, on the big cities) and was greeted like the plagues of
Egypt.-Hence the arntiety we feel when, crowded out by those who actually
make purchases, wedged between overloaded coatstands, we read at the bottom
of the spiral staircase: "Institut de Beaute du Professeur Alfred Bitterlin. " And the
"Fabrique de Cravates au Deuxieme "-Are there really neckties there or not?
("111e Speckled Band" {i-om Sherlock Holmes?) Of course, the needlework will
have been quite inoffensive, and all the imagined horrors will be classified objec­
tively in the statistics on tuberculosis. As a consolation, these places are seldom
lacking institutes of hygiene. 'There gladiators wear orthopedic belts, and ban­
dages are wrapped round the white bellies of mannequins. Something induces
the owner of the shop to circulate among them on a frequent basis.-Many are
the aristocrats who know nothing of the A1manach de Gotlla : "Mme. de Con­
solis, Ballet Mistress-Lessons, Classes, Numbers.)) "MIne. de Zalma, Fortune­
teller. " And if, sometime in the mid-Nineties, asked for a prediction,
surely it would have been: the decline of a culture.