Last fall, during a visit to Barnes & Noble’s flagship store in New York City’s Union Square, the British bibliophile James Daunt strode about the ground floor in oxblood loafers deploring the bookshop’s hideous appearance. The carpets were dusty, and the escalators had broken down. A cheap pine table was littered with trinkets and scented candles. A vase was wedged between new titles, its bouquet of sunflowers sagging in brown water. “I like the idea of the flowers, but you have to change the water,” Daunt said. “And you have to put in decent flowers—you can’t just go down to the petrol station and grab a bunch. I mean, look at it.”
Daunt has opened about 60 bookshops in his three-decade career, every one of them profitable, making him one of the Amazon era’s most successful booksellers. After founding Daunt Books, a popular, independent brand of stores in the U.K., he was credited with saving the country’s largest chain, Waterstones, from ruin by giving managers more agency over their inventory. Those credentials impressed Elliott Management Corp., a notorious $40 billion hedge fund better known for seizing an Argentine warship as collateral and berating corporate governance at Twitter Inc. and AT&T Inc. It acquired Barnes & Noble Inc. last year for $683 million including debt and appointed 56-year-old Daunt chief executive officer, the man in charge of its rescue.
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