Christina Foyle

Christina Agnes Lilian Foyle (30 January 1911 – 8 June 1999) was an English bookseller and owner of Foyles bookshop.

Miss Foyle (as she liked to be called) was born in London. At age 17, after leaving a Swiss finishing school, she started working at her father's bookshop, and never left. The store, Foyles, on Charing Cross Road in the West End of London, had been started in 1904 by her father, William Foyle. She fiercely resisted unionisation of bookshop staff, sacking most employees just before they had worked there six months, when they would gain limited job protection rights. In the late 1930s, she founded the Right Book Club to counter what she regarded as the pernicious influence of Victor Gollancz's Left Book Club. It offered a variety of titles with Conservative and classical Liberal themes.

In 1945, control of the shop passed to her. It was under her that the shop stagnated, with little investment and poorly paid staff who could be fired on a whim. She refused to install any modern conveniences such as electronic tills or calculators, nor would orders be taken by phone. However, the shop excelled in other fields: expensive books ordered from as far off as Germany were sent with a bill without prepayment.

The shop operated a payment system that required customers to queue three times: to collect an invoice for a book, to pay the invoice, then to collect the book, simply because sales staff were not allowed to handle cash. Equally mystifying to customers was a shelving arrangement that categorized books by publisher, rather than by topic or author. A quote of this period is: "Imagine Kafka had gone into the book trade." In the 1980s a rival bookshop placed an advertisement in a bus shelter opposite Foyles: "Foyled again? Try Dillons".

For 70 years she presided over Foyles lunches. Her idea for bringing readers, writers and thinkers together came after she recommended The Forsyte Saga to an elderly customer who was looking for something to read on the train. The gentleman bought a copy. However he returned it to her a short time later with the words "For the young lady who liked my book — John Galsworthy."

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