Barnes & Noble

We remain committed as always to leading the evolution of the book marketplace, and to extend and advance our great franchise to the betterment of the community of authors and readers the world over. Barnes & Noble, Inc. operates the largest chain of bookstores in the United States. The company revolutionized bookselling by introducing giant, supermarket-style stores with deeply discounted books in the 1970s, and by the late 1990s it operated more than 520 such superstores across the country. Barnes & Noble is also a leading operator of mall bookstores, running the well-known B. Dalton chain, and Scribner's and Doubleday Book Shops. The company also operates, in partnership with Germany's Bertelsmann AG, barnesandnoble.com, one of the top online bookselling operations; both Barnes & Noble and Bertelsmann hold 41 percent stakes in the publicly traded barnesandnoble.com. Barnes & Noble is a leading supplier of books through mail-order catalogs as well. The company sells discounted publishers' remainders and imported books through its catalog, as well as books under its own "Barnes & Noble Books" imprint. The Barnes family's history in the book business started in 1873, when Charles Montgomery Barnes went into the second-hand book business in Wheaton, Illinois. Barnes soon moved to Chicago, selling new and used books. By 1894 Barnes's firm, reorganized as C.M. Barnes Company, dealt exclusively in school books. In 1902 C.M. Barnes's son, William R. Barnes, became president of the firm, and he continued the business in partnership with several other men. The younger Barnes sold his interest in his father's company in 1917, when he moved to New York. In New York, he acquired an interest in the educational bookstore Noble & Noble, which was soon renamed Barnes & Noble. Though Mr. Noble withdrew from the business in 1929, the name Barnes & Noble stuck. The company's early business was wholesaling, selling mainly to schools, colleges, libraries, and dealers. Barnes & Noble entered the retail textbook trade somewhat reluctantly. A report in College Store magazine recounted that single book customers were tolerated, but that the store's counters and display shelves functioned as barricades against their encroachment. Eventually the store took a building on Fifth Avenue that included a small retail space. The public then "launched a campaign of book buying that soon banished all doubt as to the need for a general retail textbook house in New York." Barnes & Noble opened a large retail store on Fifth Avenue and 18th Street, and this became the company's flagship. The quarters were enlarged and remodeled in 1941, and the store set the standard for college bookstores. Barnes & Noble served the students of hundreds of New York City schools and colleges, and the store had to operate at top efficiency to accommodate the rush for textbooks at the beginning of each semester. In 1941 the store instituted a "book-a-teria" service that was soon picked up by other college bookstores. A clerk handed the customer a sales slip as he entered the store. Purchases were recorded on the slip by one clerk, money taken by another, and wrapping and bagging done by another. Barnes & Noble installed a telephone service that was quite advanced for the time, with five lines manned by specially trained staff. The New York store was also a pioneer in the use of "Music by Muzak," with the piped-in music interrupted at 12-minute intervals by announcements and advertising. Staff during the textbook rush season sometimes numbered over 300, and the store boasted a stock of two million books. The successful retail division continued alongside Barnes & Noble's original business of wholesaling to schools and libraries. The company also ran an import and an export division, an out-of-print book service, and published several series of nonfiction books, including the College Outline Series of study guides. In 1944 Barnes & Noble began putting out children's educational bo