September 8, 2023 - 1:00pm
The Times has discovered that bookshops are no longer bookshops. In a horrific story today, Britain’s paper of record announced that Foyles’s Bristol branch has “got rid of its fiction section”, with “items such as diaries and posters [taking] pride of place on shelves meant for books”. Sought for comment, the Sunday Times books editor pronounced this situation “sad and incredibly strange”, a blight on the literary scene.
It’s not yet known how Foyles will react. But to anyone who has spent any significant time in a bookshop, particularly anyone who has worked in one, this is simply par for the course. As long ago as 1936, according to George Orwell’s “Bookshop Memories”, any image of some quiet and enlightening little grotto “where charming old gentlemen browse eternally among calf-bound folios” could be quickly disabused. Bookshops have always had sidelines, and their subjection to market forces has always disappointed bookish people.
My own period of estrangement and alienation was mercifully brief — a winter spent tilling and shelving in a comparably genteel Waterstones branch in north London. I, clichéd to the last, had made the same mistake as Orwell. I had primarily pictured myself making conversation with the sort of kind-hearted, frock-coated gentlemen who take in Dickensian orphans: praising Late Amis, recommending punk-ish literary upstarts, and sharing concerns about Edward St Aubyn’s post-Melrose period. Perhaps I could encourage some precocious teenagers to step up from Percy Jackson to David Copperfield; divert others away from Kaur and onto Keats. And to be fair, the occasion where I persuaded an elderly customer to give Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus a try remains a singular and fond memory.
What I had not anticipated was shift-work in a toyshop-cum-general store. Eager-eyed, I would take my position on the counter, only to watch on as mounds of bouncy balls, fridge magnets and travel puzzles were dumped on my lap, as Hogwarts Lego sets were craned into view by defeated parents (the store had a thriving Harry Potter souvenir section). All to be scanned and bagged like potatoes. In the style of a middle-class WHSmith’s, the place had diversified its income stream long before I got there, only with wooden craft kits in place of pic ‘n’ mix.
And even when you had the chance to sell a book, it was never the pioneering fiction that is laudably foregrounded in the Times books pages. Men came to buy pseudo-intellectual get-rich-quick manuals and memoirs by business gurus; couples came in asking after Harden’s restaurant guides. Oligarchs’ wives bought lavish Richard Avedon collections for the coffee table. Sometimes, a lost-looking bloke would sidle up for a chat, only to say, “Just give me anything decent mate, I’ve got to get to her birthday party in 10 minutes.” Some poor souls came in from the streets to keep warm — and one thing you can say about bookshops is that you are allowed to browse and convalesce there without spending any money.
Eventually, as Orwell again noted, the only thing working in a bookshop imparts is a loathing of books. You impose special emotions upon books when you’re young, regarding them, with some inchoate Romantic instinct, to be immune from the forces of the market, from the forklift of the warehouse economy. But once you see them arriving in their cardboard crates, shiny and stacked in endless multiples, you can see what they’re really made of; you can practically visualise their lifecycle from felled tree to shop floor.
It’s not something worth bemoaning — just a sad truth to be put to one side. And after all, Foyles, like every book chain, is only selling Moleskins and wrapping paper so it can continue to subsidise its sliver of poetry, its shelf of Penguin classics, and of course the wages of its smug young employees.
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SubscribeI would have thought the Fiction section would be the most profitable section of a bookstore, but I guess I was wrong.
I wonder if cancel culture is also influencing this bookstore’s decision to ditch fiction. My impression is fiction is more likely to attract the screaming woke hordes than, say, a book about the natural history of birds. Maybe selling fiction is just too much trouble for too little reward.
Well yeah, in publishing, ‘sensitivity readers’ are a thing nowadays.
Mind you, when JK Rowling’s agent decided to stick by her, the ensuing boycott enabled them to cleanse their lists of a bunch of writers no one had heard of, some never, others not for a very long time.
How much of this is due to people reading less and due to online purchasing or use of a reading tablet/device? I hardly ever venture into a bookstore these days, but I read a fair bit and our home is full of books. When I was younger I used to enjoy browsing the bookshelves and settling down in the in-store cafe, or a nearby one, with some new finds. I don’t have time to do that now and the move towards more and more of a gift-shop type atmosphere has made a visit less appealing.
I was also guilty of using bookshops as a showroom. Browse the titles and then purchase the ones you like online at a lower price.
Your last sentence sums it up really. Thoughtless behaviour contributing to the coffers of the Jeff Bezos class and hastening the demise of the local bookstores and contributing to the emergence of betting shops, cannabis outlets (at least here in Canada), so-called convenience stores and shuttered storefronts on the High Street.
Give Caty a break, she’s just being honest and shouldn’t be used as the outlet for your rather first-world distaste.
What’s more valuable, keeping alive the romantic ideal of spending a rainy afternoon at a bookshop cafe, browsing a copy of Keats or, you know, downloading several new books in seconds at home and actual reading them for hours day after day? I and others I know actually read dozens of books every year now because we can have them at our fingertips within seconds of finding them online.
Well, yes, I do order some from Amazon, but more often I order from booksellers themselves and have them shipped. Blackwells has a great inventory. Online doesn’t have to mean Amazon.
Still love second hand bookshops – and I’m fortunate enough to have two excellent ones near me.
Ooo! Ooo! Mr Parker – where do you live? Secondhand bookshops here on the south coast are now merely a fading memory. When we first visited Bournemouth (where we now live) in 1972, there were about ten secondhand bookshops. Now there are none. They were closing down even before the Internet and sites like ABE and eBay existed, because the change in calculating business rates (not to mention rent and insurance) meant that it was very hard for any shop down here to survive if it relied on an uncertain source of stock and low profit margins on individual items.
If you fancied a South Coast day trip there is a very excellent one in the High Street in Topsham on the Exe estuary (2 hours from Bournemouth). You could combine that with a visit to the very excellent antiques warehouse (3 floors of dealers) which has a fair number of books. And have lunch in one of the very excellent independent cafes etc.
I cannot believe more unherders haven’t weighed in with a shout for – in particular – Oxfam bookshops. The good ones (York, Liverpool, London & no doubt others) have ‘newly arrived’ sections eclectic in a way unheard of in conventional bookshops.
I am old enough to recall when WH Smith was still a bookshop. It would be ironic if the post-Christina clean-up of Foyles, undertaken in obedience to market logic and very successful in the short term, should end with its going the same way.
Many elderly people are very willing to buy physical books, but have declining visual acuity. At 80, I spend a lot of time in bookshops, both new and secondhand, which gives an opportunity to discover an essential characteristic of a book not otherwise discoverable – the size of the text. If the text is small, I buy instead an electronic copy, kindle for new books, pdf (often free of charge) for older ones.
The Bristol Foyles has been well and truly woked. There is vanishingly little literary fiction, and most of the space apart from the cavernous children section at the back is given over to what I have heard called “Skin and Genitals”, i.e. anti-White racism and sexuality/gender b0110cks.
That said, a couple of days ago there I bought a hardback copy of Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things, which I remember translating vast chunks of at school several decades ago.
Foyles Bristol has not banned fiction – but don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story!
https://www.thebookseller.com/news/foyles-bristol-addresses-shrinking-fiction-section-rumours
Foyles Bristol may not have banned fiction, but they have pretty much banned literary fiction written by White men, which is all I read nowadays as a matter of principle.
Bit bitter?