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Alarm about declining interest in books is perpetual. But, as bookselling reaches unexpected heights, James Daunt, the chief executive of Barnes & Noble, thinks a different future is at hand.
It was the Friday before Labor Day, a lowering sun, when James Daunt, the most important man in bookselling, spilled off a train and turned to work. He had reached the end of the track in New Jersey. His destination, the Barnes & Noble in Eatontown, was three miles in from the shore. In the normal course of things, Daunt, who is tall and English and who often has the look of someone trying and failing to be invisible, would weave across the final stretch by bicycle—he has a folding Brompton—but the afternoon was muggy, and the traffic unkind, so he crammed into a rideshare car. On the map, Eatontown looked minuscule, but on the approach it unfurled: shopping mall after shopping mall, lawn after lawn, all cloverleafs and big-box stores and the straightaways that Bruce Springsteen, who grew up in the area, called “no place left to hide.” It was also, a lot of people would have said, no place to put a bookstore. To Daunt, it was the landscape for a new, improbable kind of success.
Though less known than many authors, Daunt leads a bookselling empire of unprecedented scale. For seven years, he has been the chief executive of both the largest bookstore chain in the United States, Barnes & Noble, and the largest in the United Kingdom, Waterstones. He is the founder of what may be London’s most beloved independent bookshop, Daunt Books, whose reputation extends so far beyond the literary world that, when the Victoria & Albert Museum…Click here to read the full article
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