Bud Spalding sends us an obituary marking the death, in her 90's, of Christina Foyle, the active head of Foyle's Book Shop on Charing Cross Road in London. Foyle's is one of the claimants for the title, "The World's Largest Bookstore," and the undisputed winner of "The World's Oddest Bookstore." A line in the New York Times obituary describes it as "a book shop designed by Kafka." Titles were arranged on shelving on several floors according to a plan known only to Ms. Foyle if to anyone. Her store has traditionally been staffed by foreign employees with little English, less knowledge of books, and even less interest in customers. Ms. Foyle did not like cash registers (shades of Henry Ford who would not allow them in the commissaries he established for his factory employees). So check out involved a complicated system of standing in three different cashier lines. Foyle's continued success has been vital to those teachers of modern retailing who believe, "You need an exception to prove the rules."
According to The Atlantic, the word "marketplace" now being used by Wells Fargo Bank to describe its allocation of lobby space to merchandise and service vendors, dates back to the fourteenth century.
1999 marks the 100th anniversary of the commercialization of aspirin. It also marks the 20th anniversary of the Sony walkman.
1999 is the 75th anniversary of the publication of the first crossword puzzle book.
The Archive Center, National Museum of American History, the Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. 20560-0601, has issued a brochure describing its collection of records and advertisements for the Krispy Kreme Doughnut Corp. Marketing historians who want to know what is available concerning this highly successful doughnut operation should write the center for the brochure.
Devil Take the Hind Most: History of Financial Speculation by Edward Chancellor, Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 1999 New York. Chancellor sees striking analogies between current boom in Internet stocks and the 1840s boom in British railway stocks. As with other speculative booms, the latter ended in a crash.
Brand by Giles Lury, (Dublin: Blackhall, 1998, £14.99) is a short volume that provides considerable information about brand and brand position, among other things. It cites a survey that shows Britain's credit several major national and international brands with greater honesty and respectability than the police, their bank, or their church.
"Hello Boys: Become a Master Erector Engineer" by Bruce Watson, Smithsonian, May 1999 is a sympathetic history of the A.C. Gilbert Company. Gilbert manufactured Erector Toy Construction Kits, Gilbert Toy Chemistry Kits and ultimately American Flyer, electric trains and other great products for American boyhood prior to World War II. Watson's sympathetic view is interesting because he shared a problem experienced by this editor: the constructions never looked like the models in the manual. Gilbert, an energetic athlete founded the company in 1913 and aggressively promoted the Erector sets. In 1920, he equipped a railroad car as a display room (as) he traveled around the country. In 1928 he sponsored one of the first radio sports talk programs. He became a multimillionaire, but the company's fortunes declined along with his own health after mid century. Even a model atomic energy kit failed to rescue it and the company was liquidated in 1976. While the Erector kits and the chemistry sets were immensely popular, the American flyer trains always ran a poor second to Lyonel which used the slogan "for the boy in every man and the man in every boy."
The Economic and Business Historical Society will hold its 25th anniversary meeting at the Holiday Inn & Suites Old Town in San Diego, April 27-29, 2000. Marketing history papers will be welcome. Two page abstracts of proposed papers should be sent to Prof. Richard Keehn, EBHS President and Program Chair, Department of Economics, University of Wisconsin-Parkside, 900 Wood Road, Box 2000 Kenosha, WI 53141-2000 before January 15, 2000.