Sales up as Foyle's ditches old ways

For decades, Foyle's was in a timewarp, watching its profits tumble as other booksellers embraced modern technology. But now Britain's most eccentric bookshop has reversed its fortunes and seen sales leap by a quarter.

While the rest of the trade has seen sales rises of only 2 or 3 per cent in the first four months of the year, Foyle's figures are up 25 per cent. In more specialist areas, such as martial arts and military history, takings are almost double what they were under the store's ancien régime.

Foyle's attributes the revival to its departure from the chaotic working methods and restricted opening hours that were the shop's stock-in-trade under its long-standing matriarch, the late Christina Foyle.

Now, just two years after acquiring its first computer, the historic family-run business is taking yet more radical steps to shed its image as the old curiosity shop of the publishing world. Customers visiting the store in Charing Cross Road, London, will soon be greeted by guides trained to direct them around its notoriously labyrinthine departments.

The arcane practice of stacking books according to publisher is being replaced by a fully catalogued system which arranges them in order of author surname. And in a move that will shock fans of the shop's trademark sky-high shelves, bright new units are being introduced to showcase titles at eye level.

Foyle's store manager Robert Palmer said: "Christina Foyle was known for her complete fear of technology, and this meant that even things like telephones were not in common use in the store. As a result, whereas we now accept orders by both e-mail and fax, our mail order department used to be just that: you literally had to write in to be able to order anything. The one phone on the premises was almost permanently on answerphone, with a message saying 'we're too busy to come to the phone at the moment, so please write in to us instead'.

"Some of our departments have also seemed extremely cluttered for some time, so we've decided the teetering shelves have got to go. An awful lot of them were piled up so high that they were virtually reaching up to the ceiling, and the only people benefiting from them were shoplifters."