According to Foyles.

Foyles is a great big wonderful bookstore of long standing in London. For many decades before I ever set foot in it, it was famous for being an absolute pig to shop or to work in. Apparently Christina Foyle, daughter of one of the founders and the store's owner between the early sixties and her death in 1999, insisted on keeping everything as dark, muddled, and inconvenient as possible, with a checking-out system that required standing in three separate lines before you were allowed to get your damn books and leave. Even then, it had an impressive stock (though not much to help you navigate it, since there was no modern cataloging system, books were filed by publisher, and Miss Foyle tended to sack staff in the delightfully prolific yet willy-nilly fashion guaranteed to produce best results).

Today, by contrast, it is light, airy, modernized, and very well staffed. There are many, many books, often including both the very book you want and several more you hadn't realized you wanted yet. Just to ensure that you remember that it is not a bland, characterless chain, however, books are sometimes shelved according to a logic that may elude lesser mortals.

Thus, this conversation was exactly as it should have been:

Me: Do you have anything by Rebecca West? I didn't see anything in fiction but I thought I should check and see if maybe it was somewhere else.

Very pleasant information desk clerk: [checking her computer] Oh, yes, we do, actually. It's all filed together in Lesbian Fiction, on the second floor.

Me: Oh! That is interesting, because... she wasn't.

VPIDC: [smiling understandingly] Yes, it's... well... don't question.

(When I got to the Lesbian Fiction section I found that they had exactly the book I wanted, which is not in print in the U.S. Hooray!)

Comments

[miranda]

ha re wishful thinking on the part of the late christina foyle...

[ben]

Moving to typepad seems to have made you much more verbose.

[redfox]

M: I have a feeling that Christina Foyle did not really much care how things worked out. I think her position was "Fuck it. It's my great pleasure in life to be horrible about this, and I'm so rich that I can make up the shortfall."

B: Yes. How well I keep it up after the novelty has worn off remains to be seen. (Whether "well" is really the appropriate modifier there I will leave as an exercise for the reader.)