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History
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. In the 1930s, they opened the Barnes & Noble flagship store on Fifth Avenue at 18th Street in Manhattan. Leonard Riggio acquired this store in 1971.
Mr. Riggio began his bookselling career while attending New York University. Working as a clerk in the university bookstore, he became convinced that he could do a better job serving students and opened a competing store of his own. With a small investment, Mr. Riggio established the Student Book Exchange in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village in 1965. The store quickly became one of New York’s finest college bookstores.
In 1971, when Mr. Riggio acquired the Barnes & Noble bookstore in Manhattan, his thriving business included six other college bookstores. Within a few years, he transformed the Fifth Avenue store into “The World’s Largest Bookstore.” Mr. Riggio’s commitment to students continues today as chairman and principal shareholder of Barnes & Noble College Booksellers, a privately held company that operates more than 500 bookstores on campuses across the United States and in Canada.
Throughout the 1980s, Barnes & Noble made a number of groundbreaking moves. It launched its own publishing division, started a mail-order business, and acquired B. Dalton, Scribner’s Bookstores, and Bookstop/Bookstar.
During the 1990s, Barnes & Noble introduced a new kind of bookstore. These superstores combine a vast and deep selection of titles with an experienced bookselling staff and a warm, comfortable, and spacious atmosphere. Barnes & Noble became a publicly traded company in 1993, and its shares trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “BKS.” In 1997, the company opened its online store, Barnes & Noble.com (www.bn.com).
In 2001, Barnes & Noble purchased SparkNotes, the world’s largest and most popular stand-alone educational Web site, with more than 6 million registered users. In 2002, Barnes & Noble purchased Sterling Publishing, one of the top 25 publishers in America and the industry’s leading publisher of how-to books. |
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