“Hot, gay and bookish”: After Hours’ bookshop identity spotlights a piece of Sydney’s queer history

If you live in Sydney you’ll probably know that The Bookshop Darlinghurst has been a cornerstone of the city’s queer scene since the early 1980s. Stocking shelves through the AIDS crisis all the way through to fights for trans rights and same sex adoption today, the bookshop has done something “simple but quietly radical”, over the past four decades shares Jasmine Gallager co-founder of the brand and design studio After Hours. “It put queer stories in people’s hands and made them feel at home while they browse.”

When the bookshop first reached out to After Hours, it was at a turning point. The original owner was ready to sell, and, keen to save the literary mainstay, Charles Gregory, who’d worked at the store in the past “stepped in to keep it in queer hands”, Jasmine tells us. In this new chapter for the store, Charles planned to expand on Darlinghurst’s rich local history and build its impact with a larger space, a programme of community centred events and, of course, a new visual identity that would honour its iconography whilst making it even more distinctive to newcomers.

After Hours started out its research for the project the way it they knows best: talking to people. The team interviewed “staff who’d just joined and staff who’d been there for twenty years. Customers who’ve been coming since the 80s, locals who drop in weekly, online‑only shoppers, even people in the LGBTQIA+ community who’d never heard of the shop,” Jasmine says. The more they spoke to people the clearer it became that the bookshop had been a legendary space for the queer community over the decades. “People kept using the same word – ‘iconic’ – whether they were thirty, fifty or seventy.”

From the offset the studio was clear that the visual identity wasn’t going to be about turning the bookshop into something new, but bringing out what already felt “iconic” to the business “without smoothing out the strange, specific details that give it life”, says designer Shy Trutwein. So the team dove deep into the Darlinghurst’s archive to see if they would uncover any hidden gems, but the bookshops physical collection of ephemera turned out to be tiny, and so, “most of what we had to work with was on the street”, Shy says. “Outside the shop there were two elements: a very 90s book‑and‑pink‑triangle icon on the façade, and a thin, hyper‑tracked sans serif wordmark on a hanging sign. That was the whole visual language.”

To studio made a start on a new wordmark by “literally redrawing the shop sign”, Shy says, “it didn’t exist anywhere else”. Comparing it’s classic letterforms to a few contemporary typefaces they found a perfect new suit for the bookshops name – a custom spin on Control Upright, designed by Christian Schwartz and Miguel Reyes for Commercial Type. The team was drawn to its “mix of editorial heritage, attitude and a slight camp edge that felt just right for the bookshop”, says Shy.

A last addition to The Bookshop Darlinghurst’s visual world was After Hours’ system of illustrations that centred on two gender neutral figures, drawn up to exist on posters (kind of like a secondary monogram), and as fine outlines on bookmarks or behind text. To shape these characters Shy looked to queer literary classics like Larry Kramer’s Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions for it’s loose radical drawings, as well as early art deco and salon illustrations from posters and old bookplates. Rather than pushing things solely in the direction of a pastiche of past styles, the designer refined the final line drawings just enough to feel both contemporary for younger readers that might be discovering the bookshop for the first time, but still distinct enough for older audiences to “recognise echoes of earlier queer traditions”.

Since the bookshops new identity came to life, Darlinghurst has had to face the heartbreaking decision to close, coming up against the rising costs of running an independent business, which means the After Hours the project has now, unexpectedly, come to mark the publishers final chapter. For a while the studio’s bold, pink identity made the store “finally match how people talked about it”, says Jasmine but now its legacy lives on in lots of small things. “The books people found there, the writers it put in front of readers, the calendars and photography that ended up on bedroom walls and the feeling of walking into a space that understood you before you’d said anything,” the designer ends. “If the identity now works as a kind of shorthand for all of that – a way of saying ‘this mattered’ – then we’re glad it can do that job, even if none of us expected it to be used in that way so soon.”