Wilkintie
I once said the word 'letterpress' in a room full of designers and I won't be making that mistake again, not without a poncho. Blubbering, sweating, the silent tears of nostalgia. No high-volume offset process can match the emotive fluids wrought by letterpress - that 20th Century craft-printing art of the type freaks.
All Arts Book Shop
It seems the best book shops hide behind a tough, gritty and casually cool exterior. Think Out of Print Books on battered Canterbury Road or the piles and piles of paperbacks at Goulds'.
All Arts Book Shop is no exception. An artistic oasis in an intensely industrial estate.
The store caters to the fanatic art fiend as well as the casual collector, definitely favoring the former.
Chess Discount Sales
It feels contradictory to feature this shop. Its innocuously placed signs require, at the very least, a second glance to figure out where they point; while the basement locale almost suggests the store doesn't want to be found. But once down the stairs and through the door your persistence is rewarded with chess.
Out of Print Books
Nestled amongst a bakery, newsagent and several boarded-up shop fronts is arguably Australia's best anthology of out-of-print and collectible books. Co-owner Anne prefers to call the shop a 'storage facility' rather than a retail store, explaining that 90 percent of sales are made online from local and international customers.
Apple Store Sydney
Hello I'm a Mac. I've just launched in Sydney, thereby determining your city as part of the world's greater cultural agenda. Like my brothers in Fifth Avenue and Ginza I'm sleek, shiny and crafted from a translucent glass cube.
Which MacBook are you? Find out on my first floor. Or perhaps you need an i-something from level two.
Restricted Premises
People much older and wiser than myself assure me that Kings Cross goes through varying cycles of cleanliness/dirtiness every few years or so that brings different crowds with them each time. Ian Nessick (Scyrte and co-founder of Mooks) and Gareth Moody (Chronicles Of Never and co-founder of Ksubi) are obviously unfazed by the potential for the neighbourhood to change for better or worse and have set up shop, that's right shop, in the middle of the Cross.
Wonderland On Alice
With the sanctity of poor little Alice in tatters amid allegations that Lewis Carroll loved absinthe and with the demise of Wonderland Rooty Hill (R.I.P) - it's nice to know that for us inner-westies, the acid trip can still live on.
You see, just as Alice stumbled into the nether world with that small fall down the rabbit hole, we too can lose hours of our lives after stumbling into Wonderland on Alice.
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