Barnes & Noble says Center City store fills indie bookstore void downtown

It’s midday Wednesday at the Center City Barnes & Noble, and Rachel Kushner, one of America’s coolest novelists, is giving a reading from her latest work.

Kushner is discoursing about leftist communes in France — her just released Creation Lake is set in one — and the crime fiction of Jean-Patrick Manchette, the kind of obscure and hopelessly hip novelist more likely to be found at a well-loved used bookstore than America’s largest book chain.

But Kushner is speaking at the Barnes & Noble at 1708 Chestnut St. because it is designed and curated to appeal to those who are most likely to be her fans and who most feel the lack of an independent bookstore in Center City. (There are four Manchette novels in stock.)

“I know that my publisher [Scribner] in particular is very excited about this Barnes & Noble, because they see it as having a non-astroturf, actual relationship with the people who live in Philadelphia,” Kushner told The Inquirer after her reading.

The Chestnut Street store opened almost a year and half ago. It is a smaller and sleeker space than the company’s former location on Rittenhouse Square. It is also orchestrated in accord with the vision of James Daunt, the CEO who took the company private in 2019 and has given more power to individual managers to set the tone of their stores to reflect their customer bases.

In Center City that means more of an emphasis on literary fiction, and even independent publishers, in an attempt to fill the void left when longtime Center City bookseller Joseph Fox closed in the wake of the pandemic.

The Chestnut Street Barnes & Noble’s manager, Lynn Rosen, has sought to provide other services to the city’s literary scene too. There are talks by sophisticated authors like Kushner and Colm Tóibín, who may not sell the most books in the U.S. but have seriously dedicated readerships. On Thursday, Jesmyn Ward will be speaking at 6:00 p.m.

These are also types of authors who might speak at the Philadelphia Free Library’s speaker series, which has been in turmoil this year after the program’s entire staff resigned in June. The B&N events have proven a success, although the relatively small size of the new store has limited their scope.

Soon that could change.

“We’re looking into a partnership that would allow us to use a bigger space,” said Rosen, who would not disclose the possible location for larger gatherings. “It’s not a new thing for Barnes & Noble. In New York, Union Square [location] partners with Town Hall [a performance venue]. So there is precedent for us working with auditoriums or theaters.”

It isn’t just Kushner’s publishers who think highly of Rosen’s stewardship of the Chestnut Street location. While Barnes & Noble doesn’t share precise sale figures for individual stores, the company said that sales are outstripping those at the former, larger, Rittenhouse Square location.

“Sales are up year over year and it had a hell of a first year,” said Shannon DeVito, senior director of book strategy with Barnes & Noble. “The fact that it’s outperforming the previous location with less square footage is huge.”

The enthusiasm for Barnes & Noble — once the bête noire of the literati — was evident at Kushner’s event. Customers approached Rosen to thank her for the event series, and for reading groups the store organizes.

“Of course, I love independent bookstores, but faced with the devil of Amazon, having brick-and-mortar stores is what publishers very much want,” said Kushner. “And Lynn is wonderful, who can deny that?”

This article has been updated to correct information on the speaker series at the Philadelphia Free Library. The speaker series was only off for the summer and has resumed.