VERY RARE 1912 CATALOG OF DUFAYEL DEPARTMENT STORES. - Lot 644

VERY RARE 1912 CATALOG OF DUFAYEL DEPARTMENT STORES. PARIS rue de Clignancourt and LE NICE HAVRAIS / SAINTE ADRESSE "seaside resort". The "most important stores in the world": furniture, tapestries, carpets, silverware, jewelry, kitchen equipment, bathrooms... 36 pages of rich text describing the "innovative" models and full-page exterior and interior photos of this immense store and its breathtaking fittings. Printed by Dewambez - 26.5 x 19 cm. * DUFAYEL department store - Less well known than Mr. Boucicaut's Bon Marché, this forgotten forerunner of department stores was nonetheless the most important and certainly the most innovative. Opened in 1856 by Jacques François Crespin under the name "Palais de la Nouveautés", it was taken over on the death of its founder by his employee Georges Dufayel. An important witness to the Belle Époque, it occupied an enormous building in the heart of Paris, a kind of shopping mall in today's sense, with not only sales departments, but also a theater, a cinema, a bicycle path and a winter garden "le palmarium", where the "Dufayel symphony" could be heard every day. On-site sales, shipments all over France, millions of customers each year for whom the store allowed "payment in monthly instalments", 15,000 employees before 1914... galleries and spaces linked by railroad tunnels, containing stables for deliveries. - Closed in 1930. Of all this, nothing remains, except postcards and period catalogs, apart from a small, incomplete piece of facade at 26 rue de Clignancourt.