W & G Foyle, Peckham and Charing Cross Road, 1903.

Foyles started with a sale of unwanted schoolbooks. Wikipedia says the business was established as W & G Foyle Ltd in 1903 by the brothers William and Gilbert Foyle, who, after failing the entrance exams for the civil service, offered their redundant textbooks for sale and were swamped with replies. That response led them to run a second-hand book business from home and then to open a small shop in Peckham, south London, where, Wikipedia says, they painted the words “With all Faith” in gilt letters above the door. The family’s own account of the dates matches: Retail Gazette reported in September 2018 that the shop had been in Foyle family control since 1903, and quoted Christopher Foyle describing the company as one founded by his grandfather and his brother.

The brothers moved quickly into central London. Wikipedia says they opened a West End shop in Cecil Court in 1904 and were on Charing Cross Road, then London’s street of bookshops, by 1906, by which time they were described as educational booksellers; by 1910 there were also suburban branches in Harringay, Shepherd’s Bush, Kilburn and Brixton. The building that became known as the Foyles Building followed. Blueprint’s DesignCurial site, in a long feature on the shop published in August 2014, dated the Charing Cross Road store opened by William and Gilbert Foyle to 1929, and described its warren of small, eccentric spaces as something that turned it into a destination for visitors.

Some of the old shop’s branding travelled in customers’ pockets. Wikipedia says that, like many booksellers of the period, Foyles stuck a small permanent label advertising itself into every book it sold, and that the shop published its own magazine, Foylibra.

Luncheons, queues and a family that kept the keys.

The name that defined Foyles for much of the twentieth century belonged to the next generation. Christina Foyle, William’s daughter, started the shop’s literary luncheons in 1930, according to both Wikipedia and DesignCurial; Wikipedia dates the opening event to October that year and says the lunches went on to host hundreds of authors, while the Dublin Review of Books, in a June 2014 blog post, recalled guests including George Bernard Shaw and, in the summer of 1940, Charles de Gaulle. The dates for her taking charge are given differently. Wikipedia says control of the shop passed to Christina in 1945; the Dublin Review of Books said she managed it after her father’s death in 1963.

Her Foyles became known for the way it sold books as much as for the books it sold. The Dublin Review of Books described the buying system as three separate queues: one to be given a chit for a book, one to pay at the cashier, and one to collect the purchase with the receipt. Wikipedia adds that books were shelved by publisher rather than by subject or author, and that new and second-hand titles shared the same shelves.

DesignCurial says Christina Foyle owned the bookshop until her death in 1999. Wikipedia says control then passed to her nephew, Christopher Foyle, who modernised the shop and its practices, mostly between 2003 and 2005, replacing the weathered panelling with an interior of red plastic, grey metal and beech. Branches followed in the 2000s: Wikipedia lists the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank in 2005, St Pancras station in 2008, Westfield in White City the same year and Bristol in March 2011, a branch outside London. The same year Foyles took over the foreign-language bookseller Grant & Cutler, which kept its name as a section of the Foyles shop.

A shop that stayed on its street.

A bookshop’s identity usually reaches people on the street before they open a single book. The fascia sign above the window carries the name to passers-by, and it has to stay legible from across a road, often on a frontage the shop does not own and cannot change much. Inside, the same name turns up again at smaller sizes: on the paper bag at the till, on a printed bookmark slipped between pages, on a gift card and on a website. Many shops add a tote bag, which travels further than any sign, carried through other streets and on other shoulders. Because these pieces are made in different materials and by different suppliers, the mark tends to be simple enough to print in one colour on paper, cloth or plastic without losing its shape.

Much of the visible identity, though, is the shop itself. Shelf labels, section signs and table cards organise thousands of titles, and their type and colour set a tone as clearly as the logo does. Lighting, floor materials, staircases, the height of the shelves and the position of a café or a gallery all shape how a room feels, and regular customers come to recognise a shop by these details as much as by its name. Chains face a second task: one name may sit above stores of very different sizes and ages, sometimes beside older names kept from earlier businesses. For designers, the practical point is that a bookshop identity is a set of placements — a sign, a bag, a bookmark, a label, a room — and each needs a version of the mark that works at its size and in its material.

An art school becomes a bookshop, then Waterstones arrives.

The deepest change to the Foyles identity was a change of building. Wikipedia says that in late 2011 Foyles announced it was selling the lease of the Foyles Building and had acquired the former home of Central Saint Martins art school, a few doors along Charing Cross Road, and that it moved in June 2014. DesignCurial reported that it was important for the brand to stay on the same street. It said the art school building dated from 1939, designed by EP Wheeler and HFT Cooper of the London County Council Architects’ Department, and that the architects Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands had worked on the project for some six years.

The design is mostly subtraction. DesignCurial described how the architects stripped out a century of partitions to leave open floors around a central atrium about 16 metres tall, lit by a skylight and edged with frameless glass balustrades, with the retail space spread over eight alternating half levels. Director Alex Lifschutz told the site that if there was any art in the project, it lay in taking away the ad hoc additions. Slots cut into the atrium walls display books, lecterns stand on the landings, and services are left exposed in their foil wrappings rather than hidden behind a suspended ceiling; the top floors hold a café, gallery and events space, and a former assembly hall became a double-height auditorium. Christopher Foyle, quoted at the opening, said the aim was for people to come for an experience.

Ownership left the family four years later. Retail Gazette reported on 7 September 2018 that Waterstones was buying Foyles, ending family control that dated back to 1903, and quoted Christopher Foyle saying the new chapter secured the brand’s future and protected its personality. Wikipedia says the shops have continued to use the Foyles brand. Waterstones has owned Foyles since 2018.

For a design guide, Foyles shows how a bookshop can carry its name from a family shop to a new building on the same street, keeping the brand while the interior and the owner change. Compare Waterstones, the chain that bought it, and Blackwell’s, another bookseller that kept its own name under the same owner. For this guide we use interior red, beech and shelf grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Foyles’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.