Buying Books
Buying books in a shop is a rich experience. All those books - shelf upon shelf of knowledge and pleasure, words and pictures have the feel and smell of paper and print. Bookshops are everywhere so what is it that draws millions of people a year to the heart of London to buy books? The word 'Foyles' represents the experience in the best of everything British.
When you go into a bookshop some purposeful looking people appear to know exactly what they want while others snatch a dream from leafing through the pages before putting the book back on the shelf. It's a journey of exploration and can be confusing unless you know exactly what you want. Even the rare person who goes to a shop to buy one or two specific books (and that's that!) will be tempted to distraction by the displays and the amazing art on most of the covers.
In the mid eighteenth century a man called Charles Knight started a movement called the "Diffusion of Popular Knowledge" by making new reading materials more widely available to a public who had to work hard to get their hands on a book at all. At the turn of the 20th century mass production started the first bookshops. That is when Foyles started. Popular series of cheap reprints of classic novels, philosophy, and works of antiquity were churned out to be sold to a public to whom reading was a major source of entertainment and education and (what else is there?). In 1900 it started with Nelsons New Century Library followed by 'World Classics', Collins 'Pocket Classics' and by 1906 Dent's 'Everyman's Library' was adding to a plentiful supply of well bound and decorated books, albeit mass produced. The public were eager to own books and the choice was made easier by Foyles' policy of buying books back and selling secondhand books. In the 1930s sixpenny paperbacks were introduced. The famous Penguin and Pelican (and later Puffins) brought the ownership of books to an even wider public and introduced a greater choice of new novels and non fiction. Foyles by that time was a vast bookshop - the largest in London with a flamboyant and cheerful attitude determined to bring reading to everyone and anyone.
Of the brothers Gilbert and William Foyle who started the business, William was known as the 'Barnum of booksellers' (Barnums being a famous circus at the time). He was frowned upon by the highbrow circles by selling book bargains by the pound weight. As a result though, his trend gave millions of British homes their own little libraries. Reading was a preoccupation of the time.
City businessmen would regularly stop at Foyles on their way to and from work.
Foyles became 'unimaginably vast, and dense, and amazing'. Books piled high everywhere in a maze of rooms full of shelves and ladders. There was time in those days to take the experience as an exploration. Many small booksellers used to come to Foyles for their stock because of their policy to sell everything and keep as much as they could in the shop. They gained the reputation of 'You can find it at Foyles' Managing this vast stock was a challenge as was finding what you wanted. You had to get a little green ticket from one of the many, often overwhelmed, attendants before paying.
Check out the Foyles website