Barnes & Noble

Clifford Noble in 1893

Barnes & Noble began in 1886 as a bookstore called Arthur Hinds & Company,[9] located at 4 Cooper Institute in the Cooper Union Building in New York City.[10][11][12] In the fall of 1886, Gilbert Clifford Noble from Westfield, Massachusetts, was hired to work there as a clerk.[13] Noble graduated from Harvard College with the class of 1886.[14]

In 1894, Noble was made a partner, and the name of the shop was changed to Hinds & Noble.[15]

In 1901, Hinds & Noble moved to 31–35 W. 15th Street.[16]

In 1917, Noble bought out Hinds and entered into a partnership with William Barnes, son of his old friend Charles Barnes; the name of the store was changed to Barnes & Noble soon after.[17][18] Charles had previously opened a book-printing business in Wheaton, Illinois, in 1873, named the C. M. Barnes-Wilcox Company; William Barnes, however, divested himself of his ownership interest in his father's business shortly before his partnership with Noble. (His father's company would go on to become the Follett Corporation.) Although the flagship store once featured the motto "Founded in 1873," the C. M. Barnes-Wilcox Company never had any connection with Barnes & Noble, save for the fact that both were partly owned (at different times) by William Barnes.

In 1930, Noble sold his share of the company to William Barnes' son, John Wilcox Barnes.[19] Noble died on June 6, 1936, at the age of 72.[20] In 1932, at the height of the Great Depression, the bookstore moved its flagship location to 18th Street and Fifth Avenue,[21] which served as the company's flagship location until its closure in 2014. The Noble family retained ownership of an associated publishing business, and Barnes & Noble opened a new publishing division in 1931.[19]

In 1940, the store was one of the first businesses to feature Muzak. It underwent a major renovation the following year.[22] That decade, the company opened stores in Brooklyn and Chicago.[23] William Barnes died in 1945, at the age of 78, and his son John Wilcox Barnes assumed full control.[23] The company underwent a significant expansion between the 1950s and the 1960s, opening an additional retail store on 23rd Street in Manhattan, as well as shops near the City University of New York, Harvard, and other Northeast college campuses.[24]

Barnes & Noble corporate headquarters, 122 (122–124) Fifth Avenue between West 17th and 18th Streets in the Flatiron District neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City

5th Avenue store sign

John Barnes died in 1964, and the company was sold to the conglomerate Amtel two years later.[25] The business was then purchased in 1971 by Leonard Riggio, who has been credited as one of the founders,[1][2] for $1.2 million.[24] By then, it had been mismanaged and consisted only of "a significantly reduced wholesale operation and a single retail location—the flagship store at 105 Fifth Avenue."[24] The publishing operation was sold separately by Amtel to Harper & Row.[26] In 1974, Barnes & Noble became the first bookstore chain to advertise on television and a year later, the company became the first bookseller in the United States to discount books, by selling The New York Times best-selling titles at 40% off the publishers' list price.[27] Between the 1970s and the 1980s, Barnes & Noble opened smaller discount stores, which were eventually phased out in favor of larger stores. They also began to publish their own books to be sold to mail-order customers. These titles were primarily affordable reissues of out-of-print titles and selling them through mail-order catalogs allowed Barnes & Noble to reach new customers nationwide.[27]

In November 1974, editors of the British-produced Guinness Book of Records, claimed on the BBC One television program Record Breakers that the Fifth Avenue store of Barnes & Noble had overtaken that of London's Foyles bookshop to become the world's biggest bookstore.[28]

Barnes & Noble continued to expand throughout the 1980s, and it purchased the primarily shopping mall-based B. Dalton chain from Dayton Hudson in 1986, for an estimated $275 million to $300 million.[29] Solveig Robinson, author of The Book in Society: An Introduction to Print Culture, wrote that the purchase "gave [Barnes & Noble] the necessary know-how and infrastructure to create what, in 1992, became the definitive bookselling superstore."[30] The acquisition of the 797 B. Dalton bookstores turned the company into a nationwide retailer, and by the end of fiscal year 1999, the second-largest online bookseller in the United States.[31] B&N's critics claim that it has contributed to the decline of local and independent booksellers.[32] The last B. Dalton stores ceased operations in January 2010.[31]

In 1989, Barnes & Noble purchased the 22-store chain Bookstop.[33]

In September 1993, Barnes & Noble became a publicly traded company by issuing $77 million worth of stock on the New York Stock Exchange under the BKS ticker symbol.[34][35] The company remained on the stock exchange until August 2019 when Elliot Management purchased all of the company's stock and took the company private.

Before Barnes & Noble created its official website, it sold books directly to customers through mail-order catalogs. It first began selling books online through an early videotex service called "Trintex", a joint venture between Sears and IBM, but the company's website was not launched until May 1997.[36] BarnesandNoble.com went public in 1999.[37]

Barnes & Noble logo used from 1999 until 2019. A modified version of this logo with a straightened ampersand was used from 2019 until 2020.

In 2004, it was reported that the reading of books was on the decline in America, with the number of non-reading adults increasing by 17 million between 1992 and 2002. Despite this, Barnes & Noble claimed that its retail store business was expanding in the book market.[38] Beginning in 1999, Barnes & Noble owned GameStop, a video game and electronics retail outlet. The company distributed its shares in GameStop in late 2004, spinning it off into its own company in an attempt to simplify its corporate structure.[39]

CEO Leonard Riggio stepped down in 2002, naming his younger brother and former acting chief executive of BarnesandNoble.com, Stephen Riggio, to succeed him. Some corporate governance experts noted that this appointment could potentially cause conflict of interest, but the company board noted that Riggio's experience at the company made him the right person for the job.[40] Stephen Riggio stepped down from the position in 2010.[41]

In 2010, website president William Lynch was named CEO. He is credited with helping launch the company's electronic book store and overseeing the introduction of its electronic book reader, the Nook. Many observers saw his appointment as underscoring the importance of digital books to Barnes & Noble's future. Steve Riggio stayed on as vice chairman.[42] When Lynch resigned in mid-2013,[43] he was replaced by Chief Financial Officer Michael Huseby early the next year.[44] Following the spinoff of Barnes & Noble Education, Huseby departed to head the new firm; his place was filled in mid-2015 by Ronald Boire,[45][46] who departed one year later.[47] Demos Parneros was named Barnes & Noble's Chief Executive Officer in April 2017 after having joined the company as Chief Operating Officer in November 2016; however, he was fired in July 2018 for "company policy violations" without severance and was immediately removed from the company's board, at the advice of a law firm hired by Barnes & Noble.[48] On August 28, 2018, Parneros filed a lawsuit against Barnes & Noble, claiming wrongful termination.[49]

After the bankruptcy and closure of its chief competitor, Borders Group, in 2011,[50] Barnes & Noble became the last remaining national bookstore chain in the United States.[7][8] This followed a series of mergers and bankruptcies in the American bookstore industry since the 1990s, which also saw the demise of Waldenbooks, Barnes & Noble's own subsidiary B. Dalton, and Crown Books, among others. Barnes & Noble's largest physical bookstore rival is now Books-A-Million, which does not operate in the Western US. Barnes & Noble also faces competition from general retailers, especially from Amazon.com, and from regional and independent booksellers. Amazon has even opened its own physical bookstores, once again creating a second national bookstore chain.[51]

Barnes & Noble began reducing its overall presence in the 2010s, closing its original flagship store in early 2014.[52] In mid-2014, the company announced it would separate its Nook Media division from its retail store division.[53]

In February 2018, Barnes & Noble permanently laid off 1,800 full time employees at an annual cost savings of $40 million per year.[54] According to TechCrunch, the company essentially fired their entire full time staff at all their stores, who would be making an average of $22,000 per year (~$11 per hour), and were replaced by part time workers earning close to minimum wage.[55]

In the 2018 fiscal year that ended in July, the company's overall losses reached $17 million.[56]

In early July 2018, Barnes & Noble fired CEO Demos Parneros for an unspecified violation of company policy, which was later revealed to be over sexual harassment claims.[57] It accused Pareneros of breaching his duties of loyalty and good faith and acting as a "faithless servant" by sexually harassing the female employee, bullying subordinates, and attempting to "sabotage" a potential acquisition of the New York-based company, and asserted that the company should therefore be entitled to claw back his salary, bonus, and other benefits during the period of his "disloyal conduct".[58]

On October 3, 2018, the board of directors announced that they would entertain offers to buy the company. Among the potential buyers was Leonard Riggio, who owned at the time approximately 19% of Barnes & Noble stock. As a result of the news, the company's stock price jumped by nearly 30%.[59]

In August 2019, Elliott Investment Management acquired the company[60] for approximately $683m with James Daunt, the managing director of London-based Waterstones Booksellers Ltd., becoming CEO.[61] James Daunt was to become CEO of both Waterstones and Barnes & Noble and was to relocate from London to New York.[62] On August 7, 2019, Barnes & Noble became a privately held, wholly owned subsidiary of Elliott.[62]

In March 2020, Barnes & Noble announced that it would temporarily stop selling magazines and, likewise temporarily, close 400 of its 620 stores due to the COVID-19 pandemic.[63] Around 12 B&N shops were closed for good since Elliott Advisors' acquisition of the company, and Daunt plans to change the acquisition process, with initial frontlist orders being made centrally and in smaller numbers than in previous years.[64] In April 2022, The New York Times reported the company used the temporary closure of stores during the pandemic to refurbish them, and credited Daunt with turning around sales both in store and online.[65] During the COVID-19 pandemic, Barnes & Noble saw up to a 500% increase in graphic novel and manga sales.[66]