The arcades are, certainly, a “primordial landscape of consumption”- temples of the commodity, with their seductively displayed, endlessly varied wares: “binoculars and flower seeds, screws and musical scores, makeup and stuffed vipers, fur coats and revolvers”.

– Christopher Rollason in The Passageways of Paris: Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project and Contemporary Cultural Debate in the West
, quoting from Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project.