The heyday of the chain bookstore could be traced to the Harry Potter phenomena between 1997 to 2007, writes Alexandra Lange for Bloomberg CityLab.
Amazon.com, dying malls, and fewer bookstores dwindled those chain bookstore crowds over the years.
But they could be seeing a resurgence, driven by Millennial nostalgia for Waldenbooks, Borders, and other national bookseller brands.
Brian Goldstein, an art history professor at Swarthmore College, is one of those with fond memories.
“I got many sports biographies from Little Professor and other chains, most vividly Gretzky, An Autobiography, which I read in the fifth grade,” he wrote in an email.
He remembers hanging out at the Little Professor next to a barbershop at a suburban Cincinnati strip mall.
Later, he worked at a local Barnes & Noble, shelving books while learning about Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the centuries-old philosophy of fly fishing and Frank Lloyd Wright.
Gen Z is also going to TikTok to talk about books, driving billions of views and sales of authors’ back-lists.
In a country starving again for social interaction, a place like Barnes and Noble could be where the public browses together once again.
Read more at Bloomberg CityLab about the revival of chain bookstores.
