Foyles Bookshop

When I was working in London in the late 60s early 70s it was only a five minute walk to a number of bookshops in the area. In my lunch break my main target was Foyles on the Charing Cross Road. I spent quite a lot of time there with browsing and reading. Sometimes I would buy anything from sheet music, books on Celtic Art, Ley lines, and belief systems. I always found Foyles a little, let’s say, spooky, especially when there was few customers about.
There were areas in the upper floors where you could sit for ages among high concentrations of books and see no one and hear only a low rumble of the traffic out front. Sometimes a distant phone could be heard ringing endlessly as if staff were afraid to pick it up.

My memories of the store’s layout consisted of lots of staked books on the floor, making it difficult to maneuver through the narrow corridors with inadequate lighting.
I would say about half of the books were stacked horizontally either on the floor or on tables and not vertically on shelves as in the way of most bookshops.

I got a general impression of the place as a mixture of topsy-turvy-ness and applied chaos.
The layout was not what one would expect from a bookshop, it was also not the bookshop of choice if you were looking for a particular book.


This was because trying to find anything was nigh impossible and not limited to just customers, but also to the staff. They were usually not employed long enough to get to know the internal landscape of the place.
A landscape where the shelving arrangement had the books categorised by publisher, and not by topic or author. Also any new deliveries would be piled up where there was space on the floor!

Foyles even admits today to this chaotic situation. To quote them from the history section of their website “Foyles was bound to have what you were looking for, but neither you nor the staff had any chance of finding it”. In the 1980s, rival bookshop Dillon’s placed an advertisement in a bus shelter opposite the main entrance to Foyles.
[Ed: The advert is shown here on the right. The bus shelter can just about be seen on the left in the picture below.]
Not knowing collectively what was literary piled up around the place made Foyles unique as a bookshop. This was because its content would range from new editions through to books that were possibly out of print and had the status of an antique.
If one had time and dabbled in 'bibliology-archeology' one could very well ‘dig’ up from between the layers of book strata a rare tome that had not seen daylight in decades. I think Foyles was more for adventurous browsing than knowing what book you wanted. Which was possibly the reason I spent a lot of time hanging out there.

One of the other quirks unique to Foyles was when on rare occasions you eventually found a book you wanted, you had to queue to buy it. That would sound reasonable in the real world, but in the Foyles ‘bibliosphere’ you had to queue three times!
First you queued to give the book to usually a non-English-speaking student at one of the non-descript counters. The book would then be put on a pile that could easily be mistaken by a wandering customer for one of the other piles scattered about the place. I once observed this when a ‘bought’ book was taken from the pile and almost got sold a second time before the first customer could claim it!
After your book was placed on the pile you would be handed a hardly readable scribbled slip of paper with the book title and price. With this chit you went off to find a mini cashier booth and queue again to pay.
After paying you took the chit, now stamped with ‘paid’, back to the counter. That is if you could still remember after all the queuing where it was. Here of course on arrival you had to queue again to get your book.

All these idiosyncrasies was due to Christina Foyle, who hated anything modern such as computers, electronic tills and calculators. The crazy paying system was because she didn’t want assistants handling money. And mentioning money, her staff was low paid and usually fired within a year. She also didn’t spent anything on the upkeep of the building. This was obvious when one looked at the open metal cage lifts reminiscent of the 1920s. If one had looked close enough at them the age could have been even earlier. I never used them as I doubt that they had ever been serviced. I had no intention of being in one when it broke down and therefore I kept to the stairs.

I remember one evening browsing the stacked tables of books, it must have been sometime in 1968/9, when a somewhat elderly lady was moving with determination in my direction. I had just enough time to sidestep into an alcove as she sped past me.
I turned and my gaze followed her for a moment until she came to a counter where an assistant was occupied with a customer.
As the lady passed by the assistant the young women froze as if she had seen a ghost.
As soon as the lady had disappeared the assistant recovered and continued handing out a chit to the customer and adding the book to the pile.
I was intrigued by the reaction that the lady had on the assistant. After the customer had left to search of a cashier booth, I went over and asked the somewhat shaken assistant who the lady was. In a low voice she said “That was Miss Foyle..”.

I had never really thought much about who the owners of Foyles were. At the time I had no reason to have any background information to the Foyle family. It was only now after doing some 'book digging’ into the history of the Foyles bookshop that many of the things I had experience in the Foyles ‘bibliosphere’ makes now some sort of sense.
I also found out that Dillon’s bookshop, where I usually went when I knew what book I wanted, was founded by a Una Dillon. It looks like she looked after her staff a considerably lot better than Christina Foyle ever did.