Kafka's bookseller

Christina Foyle would not have wanted us to make a fuss. After all, when her husband died in 1994, she was so worried the news would spoil that day’s Foyle’s literary luncheon that she told her guests he had a heavy cold. But a fuss there will be, for this eccentric woman and her ramshackle bookshop in London’s Charing Cross Road excited the imagination of an age fearful of its own uniformity.

Foyle, who died this week at the age of 88, was that most unlikely phenomenon, a book-selling legend. The stories that clung to her, retold lovingly in yesterday’s obituaries, are legion. Famously, on hearing of the burning of books deemed subversive in 30s Germany, she cabled Hitler: ‘Don’t burn books, we will give you a very good price.’ Apparently, the reply was negative but respectful.

She set up her famed lunches in 1930, after her father William bet her £1,000 that she could not make a success of them (he never paid). She invited leading authors to lunch at the Dorchester and enticed large numbers of paying customers to come to hear them speak and mingle with them afterwards.

On her father’s death in 1963 she took over the running of the shop, and her management techniques could be called Dickensian, though that makes them sound dangerously modern. She never accepted the need for a central database of stock, so no one knew what books the shop actually held; until very recently such innovations as credit cards were frowned upon; shoplifting was rife; and staff were often employed on very short short-term contracts. A six-week stint was reckoned to make you a veteran; stay any longer and you were likely to become head of English literature.

Foyle insisted on conducting all interviews of would-be staff members herself, usually on Thursdays in her lavishly decorated little attic at the top of the shop. One unsuccessful applicant for a job was Jason Cowley, now literary editor of the New Statesman (what this says about her judgment of candidates is not quite clear). He remembers her “posh, high-pitched voice” and “soiled elegance”, a Miss Havisham made flesh. “She smiled but there was no warmth behind the smile.”

She interviewed job applicants to make sure they were the right sort, in particular, it was said, to ensure they were not black – an allegation vigorously rejected by those who knew her well. She was also reputed to dislike beards, a prejudice shared with Margaret Thatcher. Most women were employed as cashiers, though two suggestions are offered for this: that she thought them incapable of running departments or that she considered them more trustworthy than men with money.

Her prejudices were evidently difficult to pin down. She certainly liked to employ young staff from continental Europe, and unusual foreign names abounded. A customer once came in and asked where he would find Ulysses, only to be told that he had just gone out to lunch. Another tale concerns a customer asking for Lampedusa’s great novel The Leopard. “Sorry, it doesn’t seem to be in stock,” said the assistant, before adding helpfully: “We do have Born Free if you’d like that instead.”

One young man who got through the interview and worked in the music department in 1994 recalls it being completely chaotic and says that a great deal of stealing by staff members went on. There were innumerable scams, one of which involved having friends come in to “buy” a large number of books. In reality, they paid only a few pence for the sackload of books they took out.

Another staff member, who worked there in 1982 before being summarily sacked for having a hangover, recalls one persistent shoplifter who used regularly to come in with a suitcase and take whole swathes of books – criticism A-E or the works of Henry James. Once, a staff member gave valiant chase but failed to catch the villain, and on getting back to the store was reprimanded for not running faster.

Security has never been the shop’s strong point, despite one store detective having his ear bitten off by a determined shoplifter. Part of the problem was that the management didn’t know who to watch more carefully – the customers or the staff. The absurd system, now slightly relaxed, of having to queue for the book, get a docket for it from one staff member, queue to pay, get the docket stamped, then queue again to collect the book reflects her father’s maxim that as few members of staff as possible should handle money.

Unfortunately, the shop was less security conscious in other areas. Tills were basic –Foyle could not abide electronic devices; staff had to do sums in their heads – she had a distrust of calculators; and takings used to be collected in plastic bags. One member of staff recalls an occasion when a bag containing £17,000 was snatched. Oddly, the response was not to switch to something more secure but for members of staff collecting the cash to carry large clubs.

Foyle’s, with its multiple queues, faith in antiquated systems and distrust of modernity, resembles eastern Europe before the wall came down, or perhaps an Indian railway station. Its 30 miles of shelf space may contain every title you could want; but without effective stock control finding it is another matter. Fiction is arranged not by author, but by publisher, demanding that would-be buyers have an encyclopaedic knowledge of current publishing. “Foyled again? Try Dillons,” said its rival on a poster. Mazes have more sense of logic and direction than Foyle’s, but that was the way she liked it. “People don’t just come to Foyle’s to buy books,” she told an interviewer in 1991. “They come here to browse.” They are probably still there.

At times it seems as if the store is trying to make it as difficult as possible to buy a book. If you phone you get a recorded message giving you the opening hours and informing you that books cannot be ordered by phone. Indeed, some say that answering the phone is a sackable offence. It has a website (was Foyle told of this?), but it is not possible to order through it.

Confused? It is often said that if Kafka had been a bookseller, Foyle’s would have been the result, but its owner laughed off her critics. “She was single-minded and had a naughty sense of humour,” says her nephew Christopher Foyle. “She liked unusual, eccentric, bohemian people and her own style was individualistic. She was from another world. She disliked computerisation and liked to do things the way they were done in the 1930s. She was great fun to be with and had a stock of amusing anecdotes. Through her life as a bookseller and her lunches, she had met almost every significant political and literary figure of the past 70 years.”

Foyle lived for and through the shop. Her marriage to Ronald Batty lasted for 50 years and was very happy, but much of their relationship was based on the store. Batty did the accounts – she didn’t care much for maths – and kept an eye on the staff. They had no children, but that didn’t worry her, and the cats, dogs, peacocks, budgerigars and tortoises she doted on at her converted 12th-century abbey in Essex were more than adequate compensation. “Animals are always loyal and love you, whereas with children you never know where you are,” she once said. “Look how many grow up to attack their parents. It is so sad.”

Her shop was her child and she publicly doubted whether it would survive her death. “When I’m gone this marvellous bookshop will be gone too,” she once lamented. Her nephews Christopher and Anthony spent long periods in the business but then left, and when asked whether they would inherit she was rather severe: “They’d only sell it. You can’t plan for when you are dead. But I think the running of the bookshop should go to the staff. They’re the only ones who know how to do it.” But of course you can plan for when you’re dead, by making a will, and much depends on its contents, which won’t be revealed for several months. Until then the store will be run by Christopher, who, as well as running his own cargo airline, also now sits on the board of Foyle’s. “I will run the shop until the contents of the will become clear,” he says. “It is business as usual.”

If the shop is put up for sale, there would be many potential buyers interested in both the name and the central London location. Foyle fought off numerous suitors while she was alive – notably Tim Waterstone and Terry Maher – and her death will renew speculation over the store. Waterstone’s, whose split sites on Charing Cross Road are recognised as being unsatisfactory, would be interested, and one of the new American players in the British book market would love to get its hands on Foyle’s. The name has great resonance abroad and many visitors make a beeline for the shop, including General Pinochet, who was reported to have recently spent £1,500 there.

But Christopher is adamant that the store will not be sold, and says that despite his aunt’s teasing references to the shop dying with her, she was keen for it to remain in family hands. “She expressed that wish to me on several occasions in the last five years of her life. I certainly would not sell.”

Anthony Foyle echoes his sentiments: “‘I hope that it is retained as a family-run business. The store is a little tired, but it is solvent and has some very capable staff.’ (It has always had a hard core of loyal, long-serving staff working alongside the army of short-termers.) Everything will hinge on the will and on who has the majority share, but the likelihood is that it will remain in the family and that Christopher, who is 56, will be at the helm. It is the store’s centenary in five years’ time and the family will surely want to be there to celebrate it.

Some observers see the shop’s survival in a highly competitive book-selling environment as a miracle. “It is amazing that it has survived in the face of competition from the big new book chains,” says one leading analyst. “It is an anachronism and, in bookselling terms, a shambles. It will have to change. But my assumption is that she will have made efforts to preserve it as a family business. As closely identified as she was with the bookshop, I don’t think she would have felt, ‘After me, it will die.’ “

Christopher Foyle agrees that it will have to change. “Change had already started,” he says. “We will have to computerise and spend money refitting the shop. But it is a delicate balance. We have to retain the things about the store that people like. Of course we want to make improvements but we also want to retain its character.” The money is certainly there to make improvements. Foyle’s, despite gently declining sales, has always been cash rich and is reckoned to have £5m in the bank. Annual turnover is stuck at around £12m and profits have tended to depend on the company’s property holdings rather than its book sales. The quality of its accounts has also driven its auditors to distraction, and each year they put in a clause about the difficulty of untangling them. Foyle’s customers know how they feel.

Even if the family retain control, things will never be quite the same. Computerisation will come, the feudal style of management will disappear, the tatty signs sending you up rickety staircases and round dusty corners will give way to logical signage systems, some staff may even have beards. You will be able to find what you came in for, even Ulysses, but you will not find what you didn’t know was there. Serendipity will give way to sense, languor to logic, and we will all be a little poorer. Especially shoplifters with a penchant for pre-war novels.

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