Barnes & Noble Booksellers

## Barnes & Noble

**Barnes & Noble Booksellers** is an American bookseller. It is a Fortune 1000 company and the bookseller with the largest number of retail outlets in the United States. As of September 2023, the company operates 585 retail stores across all 50 U.S. states.

Barnes & Noble operates mainly through its Barnes & Noble Booksellers chain of bookstores. The company's headquarters are at 33 E. 17th Street on Union Square in New York City.

After a series of mergers and bankruptcies in the American bookstore industry since the 1990s, Barnes & Noble stands alone as the United States' largest national bookstore chain. Previously, Barnes & Noble operated the chain of small B. Dalton Bookseller stores in malls until they announced the liquidation of the chain in 2010. The company was also one of the nation's largest manager of college textbook stores located on or near many college campuses when that division was spun off as a separate public company called Barnes & Noble Education in 2015.

logofounderThe company is known by its customers for large retail outlets, many of which contain a café serving Starbucks coffee and other consumables. Most stores sell books, magazines, newspapers, DVDs, graphic novels, gifts, games, toys, music, and Nook e-readers and tablets. The company offers publishing and self-publishing services.

## History

### 19th century: Foundations

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

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

### 20th century: Expansion[edit]

#### 1900–1919

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

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. 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.[*citation needed*]

#### 1920–1939

In 1930, Noble sold his share of the company to William Barnes' son, John Wilcox Barnes. Noble died on June 6, 1936, at the age of 72. In 1932, at the height of the Great Depression, the bookstore moved its flagship location to 18th Street and Fifth Avenue, 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.

#### 1940–1959

In 1940, the store was one of the first businesses to feature Muzak. It underwent a major renovation the following year. That decade, the company opened stores in Brooklyn and Chicago. William Barnes died in 1945, at the age of 78, and his son John Wilcox Barnes assumed full control. 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.