Edwards said, pointing to Elizabeth Enright’s “Thimble Summer” (1938) on the shelf, near some other books that had recently returned. They will have about the same number of total books on the shelves, but fewer of each title, offering a greater variety. Adding them back is part of an effort to beef up the backlist in Barnes & Noble stores.
These books, both Newbery Medal winners, hadn’t been kept in stock in recent years, she said, but teachers and grandparents would come in looking for them. Debra Edwards, who runs the children’s books department at the Yonkers store, noticed while restocking during the lockdown that older titles - like “Strawberry Girl” (1945), by Lois Lenski, and “Rifles for Watie” (1957), by Harold Keith - were being sent in from the warehouses again. Taken all together, it’s like seeing a friend for the first time in a while and wondering: What’s different? Did you get a haircut?īeyond tweaking the look of the place, what’s on the shelves is also a bit different. “At the same time,” he added, “we didn’t want to spend any money, because we didn’t know how long this pandemic was going to go on for.” “And then suddenly: ‘Oh my goodness, they’re all shut. “I knew I wanted to rip these stores apart and put them back together in a different way,” Mr. Revamping the stores was part of a broader plan to revive the company, a difficult task to begin with that has become a lot more formidable under the weight of the pandemic. This spring, Barnes & Noble used lockdowns around the country as a chance to refresh more than 350 of its 614 stores throughout the United States, using small teams to move furniture around, paint walls and bring in new books.
Then the coronavirus closed almost all of them down at once. His plan, over the next two years or so, was to close locations on a rotating basis for a few weeks at a time to refurnish and refurbish. The chief executive of Barnes & Noble, James Daunt, who took over last summer, thought the company’s stores were badly in need of some sprucing up.