Barnes & Noble opened its flagship store on New York City’s Fifth Avenue in 1932, in the midst of the Great Depression. The bookseller still operates a store in that neighborhood today, right near Union Square.
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In 1971, Barnes & Noble was acquired by Leonard Riggio. Riggio had gotten his start working at the New York University bookstore while he was a student. He later dropped out and opened his own bookstore at age 24. Six years later, he borrowed $1.2 million to buy what was then just a single Barnes & Noble store.
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Source: New York Magazine
Riggio brought his family members into the business: His dad ran the office, and his brothers Jimi and Steve worked in the store. Fast-forward to the late 1990s, and Steve was serving as Barnes & Noble’s vice chairman (and eventual CEO), while Jimi ran a trucking business that shipped the company’s books.
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Source: New York Magazine
Five years after buying the business, Riggio had boosted annual sales from $1 million to $10 million, he told New York Magazine in 1999. He was making headlines for adding perks like customer telephones and bathrooms to the store, which made shoppers want to linger.
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Source: New York Magazine
A turning point for Barnes & Noble arrived in the mid-1980s when Riggio met Anton Dreesmann, the CEO of Vendex International, a Dutch retail giant. Riggio convinced him to invest, and Dreesmann paid $18 million for a 30% stake in the business. The cash infusion allowed Riggio to start thinking about expanding the business.
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Source: New York Magazine
In 1987, Barnes & Noble became the nation’s second-largest bookstore overnight when it purchased B. Dalton Bookseller, a national chain made up of 797 stores. Other acquisitions followed, including Doubleday Book Shops and BookStop. Barnes & Noble went public in 1993.
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Source: Barnes & Noble
By 1999, Barnes & Noble operated 520 superstores nationwide, plus 465 B. Dalton stores. The company owned roughly a quarter of the nation’s bookstore market, and one out of every eight trade books sold in the US were purchased at a Barnes & Noble.
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Source: New York Magazine
But Barnes & Noble’s reputation was taking something of a hit: small, independent bookstores were being edged out by the superstores, which were able to strike deals with publishing houses, sell more copies of books, and in some cases, had better economies of scale. In the late ’90s, the tension between bookstores and Barnes & Noble was so intense, it inspired Nora Ephron’s 1998 film “You’ve Got Mail.”
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Source: New York Magazine
Independent bookstores weren’t Barnes & Noble’s only competition: Borders, a bookselling chain founded in Michigan in 1971, had opened hundreds of stores in the US and abroad. Borders’ edge was in its inventory management system, which was able to predict what customers would buy.
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Source: NPR
By 2011, Borders had filed for bankruptcy, laid off 11,000 employees, and closed its remaining 400 stores. Barnes & Noble later purchased the Borders trademark for $13.9 million.
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Source: NPR, Boston Business Journal
In 2018, the bookseller laid off 1,800 employees, and by the end of the year, it had reported seven straight quarters of losses. One year later, the company was bought by hedge fund Elliott Advisors for $638 million and James Daunt, the chief exec of British bookstore chain Waterstones, was named CEO.
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Then the pandemic hit. Like other retailers, the company had to temporarily shutter hundreds of its stores, but it ended up being an unexpected boon for Barnes & Noble’s business. The bookseller used the closures as an opportunity to revamp its stores, which had gotten “a bit ugly” over the years, Daunt told The New York Times.
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Source: The New York Times
