1 · POSITION
Born in Wisconsin, trained at Marshall Field in Chicago, he bought a six-storey Oxford Street building for £400,000 and opened in 1909. He laid the floors out so that goods could be touched, put restaurants and a library inside, kept reception rooms for foreign customers, and moved cosmetics and perfume to the front of the store — where they remain in every department store in the world.
2 · THE SILENCE ROOM
Soft lights, deep chairs, double glazing, nothing for sale. He said its purpose was to keep customers in the building longer. That is the earliest instance in this Library of commercial space given over to doing nothing, which hotels would spend the next century learning to charge for.
3 · ⚑ WHAT THE MODEL DOES NOT SOLVE
The proposition that shopping is pleasure rather than necessity was promoted into being through paid advertising, and the Library records that it was manufactured rather than observed. Selfridge himself lost control of the store and died with very little; the invention outlived the inventor’s command of it, which is a pattern this register sees often.