THREE MILLION SALES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 20 April 1938, Page 2

THREE MILLION SALES

WORLD'S LARGEST BOOK STORE. YOUNG WOMAN’S VENTURE. Christina Foyle is 23 and manages Foyle's, the biggest bookstore in the world. One-fifth of the 15,000,000 books sold each year in the British Isles are sold by her. She is sweet, pretty, black-haired, and wears a red ribbon in her hair, yet sit in her office and she says, “We sold 3,000,000 books last year. And at any given moment we have 3,000,000 more in stock.” But she-looks just like a shy little gypsy with big black eyes.

This little girl—and you needn’t give her a hand —is founder and manager of the Right Book Club, an organisation of 27,000 members to which conservative books are sent each month, writes M. H. Halton in the "Daily Star,” Toronto. Her purpose is to offset the damage done by the more socially conscious Left Book Club, which has 50,000 members. She is also the arranger of Foyle’s famous literary luncheons. After we had met she told me that booksellers generally have a bad time in good times and good sales in bad times. Because, it seems, people want to escape from bad times and so read more. "In bad times people can’t afford to drink so much champagne or spend so much in gasoline. They ‘stay home at night and read a good book,’ and that is very fine for our business.” BEST SELLERS. “And what do they read when they stay home, Miss Foyle?” “The height of fashion at the moment is religion.” “What! Religion a best seller?” “Religion has often been a best seller even apart from the Bible,” she said shyly, “and among the best sellers at the moment are two religious books . . . ‘The Bible As Literature,’ and ‘Christianity and Communism.’ ” The former is simply the Bible printed without the textual idiosyncrasies that make its pages look so different from other books. “People,” said Miss Foyle, “seem to be able to read it in the new form with more satisfaction than before. One Sunday paper is even serialising it now —just the Bible.” While I asked her to tell me more, Miss Foyle answered three telephone calls, buying a carload of secondhand books and arranging a meeting almost in the same breath. Then she told me that books came in cycles like styles. “The first book fashion I remember was the sex craze in novels. There were thousands of them before 1930. In the years immediately after the war people chose gaiety rather than agony. Then, when the war had been past ten years and it could be looked back upon, thousands of war books were written, and they sold tens of millions of copies. “I think the next big fashion was Lytton Strachey and Guedalla and those people. Then came the travel books: Peter Fleming and Freya Stark. Recently the fashion has been for popular politics. Now we have the religious mode." BOOK CLUBS. Miss Foyle believes in book clubs. “I lectured in Berlin to a German book club,” she said. “Some people object to book clubs and want to pick their own reading. But book clubs provide pool' people with good reading at a price they can afford.” “What I’d like to know,” I asked her, “is how so small a girl runs the world’s biggest .bookshop.’. She would not talk about herself. "It’s not hard, it’s fun,” she said. “What do you think of American writing as compared with English? I pursued. “I think it is alive and real and far more important than the English,” she answered. “Literature everywhere is becoming more real and less false than it used to be; especially in the United States.” “Still, they produced ‘Gone With The Wind’ in the United States,” I argued. “Yes,” she laughed, “and I have to admit I liked it. Didn t you? I offered her one of my small, mild, cheap cigarettes, but she doesn t smoke. She told me she throws away one million books a year.

“You see,” she explained as I gaped,“we buy millions of second-hand books. We buy whole libraries outright to get a few books we want and millions of these books couldn't be given away. Books mostly out of date on everything from dog illnesses to Judaism, from fiction to calculus. So we sell them for a song to the pulp manufacturers—that is we throw them

away.” Three years ago Miss Foyle organised the first literary luncheon. These have now become a London institution. The average number attending them is 2000 and you have to be somebody to get a ticket. They always make headlines. Miss Foyle told me she learned more about human nature —especially the nature of authors—from arranging these luncheons than from dealing in millions of books. And she orders 10.000 books as casually as you order two heads of lettuce. „ "What's your own favourite book? I asked as I was leaving. Christina Foyle smiled sweetly. "Shakespeare and the Bible, of course,” she replied. This was the right answer and I went away, wandering through the vast shop where hundreds of people were browsing through thousands of books.