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Barnes & Noble Booksellers is an American bookseller with the largest number of retail outlets in the United States. The company operates approximately 600 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. The 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, who had graduated from Harvard College earlier that year, was hired to work there as a clerk. In 1894, Noble was made a partner, and the name of the shop was changed to Hinds & Noble. 20th century: Expansion 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. 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. 1960–1979 John Barnes died in 1964, and the company was sold to the conglomerate Amtel two years later. The business was then purchased in 1971 by Leonard Riggio, who has been credited as one of the founders, for $1.2 million. By then, it had been mismanaged and consisted only of "a significantly reduced wholesale operation and a single retail location—the flagship store at 105 Fifth Avenue." The publishing operation was sold separately by Amtel to Harper & Row. In 1974, Barnes & Noble became the first bookstore chain to advertise on television and a year later, the company became the first bookseller in the United States to discount books, by selling The New York Times best-selling titles at 40% off the publishers' list price. Between the 1970s and the 1980s, Barnes & Noble opened smaller discount stores, which were eventually phased out in favor of larger stores. They also began to publish their own books to be sold to mail-order customers. These titles were primarily affordable reissues of out-of-print titles and selling them through mail-order catalogs allowed Barnes & Noble to reach new customers nationwide. In November 1974, editors of the British-produced Guinness Book of Records, claimed on the BBC One television program Record Breakers that the Fifth Avenue store of Barnes & Noble had overtaken that of London's Foyles bookshop to become the world's biggest bookstore. 1980–1999 Barnes & Noble continued to expand throughout the 1980s, and it purchased the primarily shopping mall-based B. Dalton chain from Dayton Hudson in 1986, for an estimated $275 million to $300 million. Solveig Robinson, author of The Book in Society: An Introduction to Print Culture, wrote that the purchase "gave [Barnes & Noble] the necessary know-how and infrastructure to create what, in 1992, became the definitive bookselling superstore." The acquisition of the 797 B. Dalton bookstores turned the company into a nationwide retailer, and by the end of fiscal year 1999, the second-largest online bookseller in the United States. B&N's critics claim that it has contributed to the decline of local and independent booksellers. The last B. Dalton stores ceased operations in January 2010. In 1989, Barnes & Noble purchased the 22-store chain Bookstop. In September 1993, Barnes & Noble became a publicly traded company by issuing $77 million worth of stock on the New York Stock Exchange under the BKS ticker symbol. The company remained on the stock exchange until August 2019 when Elliot Management purchased all of the company's stock and took the company private. Before Barnes & Noble created its official website, it sold books directly to customers through mail-order catalogs. It first began selling books online through an early videotex service called "Trintex", a joint venture between Sears and IBM, but the company's website was not launched until May 1997. BarnesandNoble.com went public in 1999. 21st century: Operating in an electronic environment 2000s In 2004, it was reported that the reading of books was on the decline in America, with the number of non-reading adults increasing by 17 million between 1992 and 2002. Despite this, Barnes & Noble claimed that its retail store business was expanding in the book market. Beginning in 1999, Barnes & Noble owned GameStop, a video game a.... Discover the Noble Publishing popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Noble Publishing books.