Clery's summer sales
Clery's
summer sales
In Brief
In Lotus Eaters Bloom reads an ad for a summer sale
held in Clery's (often spelled with no apostrophe), a large
department store on Lower Sackville (O'Connell) Street. Gerty
MacDowell thinks happily of these annual sales in Nausicaa.
They were important events on women's annual calendars.
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Reading from a poster on the corner of Westland Row and Great
Brunswick Street, Bloom thinks, "Clery's Summer Sale."
He does not think of the store again, but Gerty dreams of
owning "that silver toastrack in Clery’s summer jumble
sales like they have in rich houses," and she is wearing
a straw hat that she searched long and hard for: "at last she
found what she wanted at Clery’s summer sales, the
very it, slightly shopsoiled but you would never notice, seven
fingers two and a penny."
In an 11 September 2016 article in the Irish Times, Arminta Wallace writes that "Department store sales were once the most important fixtures in the Dublin shopping calendar – eagerly anticipated events that drew customers from all over the country." The 1965 photograph by Dermot Barry accompanying her article gives a vivid sense of this intensity: "
"It is still hard to believe that Clerys has gone," Wallace
writes. "This was one of the first purpose-built department
stores in the world, its Corinthian columns and sweeping
staircases seemingly as much a part of O’Connell Street as the
trees and statues outside." The department store survived
bankruptcy proceedings in 1879 and 1940, as well as the
pulverizing shelling of O'Connell Street in 1916, to last into
the 21st century. But a final receivership begun in 2012
spelled the end of this shoppers' mecca. It closed its doors
in 2015 and the building has been sold to developers.



Source: Wikimedia Commons.
