Foyle's, until recently the world's most eccentric bookshop, has discovered - a little late in the day - that it is bursting at the seams with unwanted paper.

Yesterday it launched its first ever book sale, a vulgarity unthinkable in the era of the bookloving autocrat Christina Foyle, who ran the company for almost 70 years until she died last June.

A tenth of the stock in the enormous shop in Charing Cross Road, central London, has been reduced in price, at least 50,000 volumes and music sheets, many of which have languished unsold for up to 30 years.

These are the fruit of decades of "bad stock management and over-zealous buying", according to Anthony Foyle, a director and nephew of Christina.

The fiction sale offers Irma Kurtz's 1993 novel Jinx for £2. In fact, many books in the sale date from 1993, the year Foyle's unwisely opted to buy from wholesalers instead of publishers. This meant publishers stopped buying back works which proved unsaleable.

In the music section, Davidoff's Romance sans Paroles is going for a song at £1.30. Astronomy tomes once costing £80 to £90 are reduced to a few pounds.

Browsing among the bargains is a reminder of the awesome comprehensiveness which has made Foyle's internationally admired. The Latin section still stocks a school crib to Julius Caesar's De Bello Civili, as it did 50 years ago.

For specialists, it remains the supreme bookshop. Even so, "We have got to bring Foyles fully into the 21st century," acting manager Robert Palmer said.

In October the store will get its first electronic stock control system so customers can check if a book is in stock without searching a labyrinth of shelves. Soon - even more unthinkably to Christina Foyle - it will start selling volumes on a website.