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The Original Barnes & Noble
Leonard Riggio Acquires Barnes & Noble
Innovations
Expansion
The Book Superstore
Internet Retailing

Book Publishing

The Original Barnes & Noble
Barnes & Noble's beginnings can be traced to 1873, when Charles M. Barnes started a book business from his home in Wheaton, Illinois.  In 1917, his son, William, went to New York to join G. Clifford Noble in establishing Barnes & Noble.  During the height of the Great Depression, what later became the Barnes & Noble flagship store was opened on Fifth Avenue at 18th Street in New York City, where it still resides today. This store developed a worldwide reputation for excellence by serving millions of customers with its comprehensive selection of general trade books, academic titles and textbooks, and medical books.
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Leonard Riggio Acquires Barnes & Noble
Leonard Riggio, the company's chairman, began his bookselling career while attending New York University in the early 1960s.  Working as a clerk in the university bookstore, he became convinced that he could do a better job serving students, and he opened a competing store of his own.  With a small investment, Mr. Riggio established the Student Book Exchange (SBX) in Manhattan's Greenwich Village in 1965.  The store quickly became one of New York’s finest bookstores, known for its knowledgeable staff, wide selection and great service.

By the 1970s, Mr. Riggio’s thriving business, which included six other college bookstores, acquired the flagship Barnes & Noble trade name and flagship bookstore in Manhattan, which had fallen into decline. Within a few years, Mr. Riggio transformed the Fifth Avenue store into "The World’s Largest Bookstore," with 150,000 textbook and trade titles.   Mr. Riggio’s commitment to students continues today through Barnes & Noble College Booksellers, a privately held company that operates more than 500 stores on college and university campuses across the United States and in Canada.
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Innovations
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the company made a number of groundbreaking moves.  In 1974, Barnes & Noble was the first bookseller in America to advertise on television.  Aired in the New York market, the Barnes & Noble “Of Course!  Of Course!”  commercials won awards and were so memorable that customers still recall them.

In 1975, the company took a bold and audacious step by becoming the first bookseller in America to discount books by offering New York Times bestsellers at 40% off publishers’ list prices.  Barnes & Noble expanded on that idea by opening a 40,000-square-foot Sale Annex directly across from its flagship store.

The company began to expand in the New York/Boston markets by opening smaller discount bookstores.  In addition, it acquired two local chains, BookMasters and Marboro Books, which were converted to Barnes & Noble discount stores.  Initially, these stores were very successful and expanded to 50 locations. They were  eventually phased out in favor of the company’s larger-format book superstores.

The acquisition of Marboro Books gave Barnes & Noble a foothold in the growing mail-order business, which served as a platform to reach customers nationwide.  This business served as a laboratory that revealed undercurrents of demand, prompting Barnes & Noble to begin publishing its own books for sale to its growing mail-order customer base.  These titles were primarily out-of-print books that were reissued in high quality, affordable editions.   
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Expansion
Through the 1980s, Barnes & Noble experimented with different store formats and sizes, seeking to develop a suburban superstore version of the original Barnes & Noble store.  In 1987, the company made its largest acquisition when it purchased B. Dalton Bookseller from Dayton Hudson.  This acquisition of 797 retail bookstores thrust the company onto the national scene, making Barnes & Noble a nationwide retailer overnight and the second-largest bookseller in America.  The company also acquired Doubleday Book Shops from the Bertelsmann Company and the rights to the Scribner’s bookstore trade name from Macmillan. 

To further evolve its superstore strategy, Barnes & Noble purchased BookStop, a company operating discount book superstores in Texas, in 1989.  This acquisition gave the company key insights into the ingredients behind a successful superstore strategy, from real estate to operations to marketing and merchandising.  
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The Book Superstore

In the early 1990s, the company refined its superstore concept and established the modern generation of Barnes & Noble superstores, which today represent over 96 percent of our retail sales.

Barnes & Noble superstores have become the information piazzas of America.  They combine a vast and deep selection of book titles with an experienced bookselling staff and a warm, comfortable and spacious atmosphere.  They also offer a comprehensive inventory of music and DVDs. The music department stocks a deep selection of classical, jazz, opera and show tunes that has established Barnes & Noble as a leader in the adult music market.  Further enhancing the stores’ appeal as destinations are our cafés, which through an exclusive arrangement with Starbucks, distinguish Barnes & Noble as the only bookseller serving America’s premier coffee brand.

Barnes & Noble became a publicly traded company in 1993.  
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Internet Retailing
The company has been selling direct to consumers for over 25 years, beginning with its mail-order catalogue in the 1970s.  In the late 1980s, Barnes & Noble tested selling books online in an early generation venue called Trintex, a joint venture between Sears and IBM.  In the mid-1990s, it sold books on CompuServe and later opened a full-fledged book superstore on America Online in March 1997.  The company’s Web site, Barnes & Noble.com (www.barnesandnoble.com), was launched in May of that year.

Today, the Barnes & Noble.com Web site serves as the company’s largest store, enabling customers to order any book any time from anywhere.  With more than one million unique titles, the site’s standing inventory is the largest of any bookseller online.  Customers also have access through Barnes & Noble.com to millions of used and out-of-print titles from a network of authorized book dealers, as well as a vast selection of music CDs and DVDs.
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Book Publishing
The company began publishing books in the early 1980s by reissuing affordable editions of out-of-print titles.  Its editions of The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense by Suzette Haden Elgin and The Columbia History of the World by John Garrity have sold over 250,000 and 1 million copies, respectively.  Over the next decade, Barnes & Noble’s nationwide store base enabled it to expand its publishing operation and become a leader in illustrated book publishing.

The company has made two acquisitions that expanded its publishing capability. 

  • In 2001, Barnes & Noble purchased SparkNotes.com, a leading study aids Web site, offering free online access to literature notes and more than 1,000 study guides on everything from literature to chemistry to computer science. SparkNotes converted its top study guides into print publications, and they have rapidly become bestsellers.
  • In 2003, Barnes & Noble purchased Sterling Publishing, one of the top 25 publishers in America and the industry's leading publisher of books for enthusiasts, with over 5,000 titles in the areas of how-to, crafts, home design, cooking and health.

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