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prudence2001 t1_jdzy6zc wrote

Foyles, Hatchards are two I like.

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Altruistic_Day_2332 t1_je0bffs wrote

Second for Foyles. Although it is these days a fairly standard chain bookstore it is such an important historical building: the literary luncheons that played such a key role in the Bloomsbury set, the queues round the block to buy DH Lawrence before the ban came down etc...

Although it has to be said the thing Foyles was mostly famous for was what an incredibly bad bookshop it was to the 1950s to the 1980s where, under the management of the eccentric Christina Foyle who loathed her staff so much she refused to allow them to handle money, you could only buy a book through an exasperating triple queue system (order, invoice, collect), books were only sorted by publisher and date of publication, and acquisition choices were eccentric in the extreme (making it a great place to stumble across a rare book by accident but a terrible place to find anything you were looking for). It's now much much more normal, but what's the point in that? Would you buy soup from the soup nazi if he was nice now?

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oilerian t1_je0hzat wrote

Foyles moved out of their higgledy piggledy warren a number of years ago into a light, airy modern building a few doors down. Still a great bookshop, but a very different feel.

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Napoleon64 t1_je432lg wrote

It was bought out by Waterstones a few years ago, and to be honest it feels much more like another chain store these days in terms of selection. I used to enjoy the fact that I'd often find books that were sometimes hard to get, but the variety seemed somewhat diminished the last time I visited. Still a good bookshop to visit, but I think it's lost some of its previous uniqueness.

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Dr_Vesuvius t1_je7128z wrote

I actually think it has worse variety than a comparable Waterstones - for whatever reason they stock extremely large quantities, rather than a large variety.

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