Physical retail in one form or another has existed for as long as human settlements have, and in a saturated, multi-channel retail world, attractive shop fronts are more important now than ever before.

Physical retail is often known as “brick and mortar”, named after the traditional material that nearly every store at one point was made out of. Even now, with many retail stores made from a diverse range of materials, many people still describe physical retail as “brick and mortar shops”.

However, despite sounding like a term that has lasted for as long as high streets have existed, the term only dates back to 1851, and unlike so many parts of the retail lexicon, there is a very specific and famous inventor.

The 1851 novel Moby Dick by Herman Melville is one of the most famous works of fiction in the world, and Ishmael’s retelling of Captain Ahab’s quest for revenge against the eponymous white whale is so popular and famous that it has changed the language and culture around it.

Even the first three words “Call me Ishmael” have become famous and when it appeared front and centre of retail bookstores, the term “white whale” quickly became a metaphor for a focus or goal pursued so intensely and single-mindedly that it becomes dangerous.

In Chapter 96, the Try-Works, an “almost solid mass of brick and mortar” is described, and whilst this initial use referred to a general structure made of literal bricks and mortar, in this case, the try-works pots used to render whale oil, the primary product of the whaling industry in the 19th century.

As with much of the book’s most famous sayings, the term expanded to become a term used for physical buildings of any kind, before being used more specifically to describe shops, eventually becoming a term used to differentiate existing shops from shops that operated by mail-order.