Emma Snyder’s friends broke the news to her early this month that Johns Hopkins University’s Barnes & Noble in Charles Village was closing.
“Meg Ryan won,” one text message to the local bookstore owner read, a reference to the 1998 romantic comedy, “You’ve Got Mail.”
“Barnes & Noble is gone and they had signage for days,” another said.
Snyder, whose Bird In Hand Café and Bookstore is less than 300 feet from Barnes & Noble, said she often complains that her small business doesn’t have enough signage indicating that the café also has books.
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Snyder laughed at the messages, but at the same time, also felt “affirmed by her community.” She also owns The Ivy Bookshop on Falls Road.
Johns Hopkins University announced June 2 that it is replacing Barnes & Noble Education as the operator of its bookstore with Follett, a higher education solutions company that operates over 1,000 campus stores in North America.
That marks the third closure of a regional Barnes & Noble in less than 10 years. First in Towson, then at the Inner Harbor, and now this.
It leaves Baltimore — known as “the City that Reads” — without a stand-alone giant book retailer.
What remains, however, is a thriving ecosystem of about two dozen local, independent bookstores.
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“Baltimore has this incredible, ever-growing collection of just wonderful local bookstores, and it’s so exciting to see,” Snyder said. “It speaks to the health and vibrancy of Baltimore as a city.”
Three university campuses in the city are still operated by Barnes & Noble Education, with locations within those colleges’ student centers.
But if you want to visit a stand-alone Barnes & Noble, you’ll have to make the trek out of the city to Pikesville, Ellicott City or White Marsh.
Closing and openings
In “You’ve Got Mail,” the big box retailer comes into the neighborhood and expedites the closure of a long-time independent children’s bookstore.
While Bird In Hand and Barnes & Noble’s proximity to each other felt reminiscent of the film, that’s as far as the similarities go.
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The Johns Hopkins campus bookstore opened in 2006, and Bird in Hand opened a decade later.
And it wasn’t a traditional Barnes & Noble store. It was a Barnes & Noble Education store, which served the university and its students first, followed by the rest of the community.
The University of Baltimore had a similar setup in 2010, with a campus bookstore in The Fitzgerald apartment tower in Mount Vernon that felt like part of the community. It moved into the university’s student center in 2018.
But the closure in Charles Village isn’t an indication of poor performance for the bookseller.
The company plans to open 60 new locations this year, the most it has opened in the last five years, and more than it opened from 2009 to 2019, Fast Company reported in February.
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Barnes & Noble did not respond to requests for comment.
The company has had an overall tumultuous retail experience, simultaneously opening and closing stores year after year.
In the early 2000s, the bookseller opened 30 stores or more a year, but it also closed about half as many at the same time, The Wall Street Journal reported.
In 2013, the company planned to close about a third of its retail stores over the next decade, shrinking its nearly 700-store footprint closer to “400 or 500 stores,” Mitchell Klipper, then-CEO of Barnes & Noble, told the Journal.
The bookseller’s Baltimore stores were seemingly part of those cuts.
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The Towson location opened in 1998 and closed in 2017. Its closure left the Baltimore County suburb without any bookstores to serve the broader public.
Then, in August 2020, the store at the Power Plant Live at Baltimore’s Inner Harbor shuttered after 22 years in business.
The location was “exceptionally large and architecturally beautiful,” a spokesperson for the company said at the time. But those details made it “extraordinarily expensive both to run and maintain.”
Some markers of the former tenant remain in the upper-level windows, but the 28,000-square-foot space still stands empty.
Brandon Rashad Butts, a manager at Charm City Books in Seton Hill, said he thinks having fewer giant retailers is good for small businesses and customers.
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“It allows for an opportunity to just truly think about your dollar and think about where you’re putting it, and think about how you’re spending it,” Butts said. “A more intentional opportunity to be a part of the Baltimore community.”
Uniquely Baltimore
The COVID-19 pandemic had an outsized impact on small businesses, but it also seemingly turned things around for independent booksellers, Ray Daniels, chief communications officer of the American Booksellers Association, said in a statement.
More than 300 bookstore businesses opened last year, with over 245 planning to open this year, the trade group’s annual report found.
The association estimates there will be more than 2,800 bookstores by the end of this year, up from 1,600 in 2020. Barnes & Noble has about 600 stores nationwide, according to the company website.
“As people reevaluated what matters most, we’ve seen a real demand for businesses that align with people’s values, provide a meaningful in-person experience, champion debut and diverse authors, and support community,” Daniels said.
The association’s membership also is rising each year. There are 16 members in Baltimore, “which is more than many other major cities,” Daniels added.
The rise of the #booktok community on TikTok, Instagram and other social media sites plays a part in fueling this shift. So much so that Barnes & Noble started curating displays based on book-loving content creators’ recommendations.
After the isolation of the pandemic, there has been a growing desire for “third spaces,” a term for places where a people can gather outside of home or work.
While Barnes & Noble’s brick-and-mortar stores can serve as a third space, Baltimore’s independent booksellers believe they’re better suited for it.
“If you create a beautiful space, and you populate it with nice people who want to chat with you and put a radically smaller array of really interesting books that somebody has carefully curated, people are just going to want to spend time there,” Snyder said of Bird In Hand.
Her Ivy Bookshop, leaning into the idea of a beautiful space, is located in a renovated and expanded house. It sits on 3 acres of land with a gazebo, picnic benches and a garden open to the public.
Navigating Amazon
Independent bookstores thrive off their community’s desire to read and connect. Yet there are problems they haven’t solved.
The American Booksellers Association identified several key issues, including credit card swipe fees, gift card fraud, tariffs and a lack of tax breaks for small businesses.
But there’s an existential struggle for Barnes & Noble and independent booksellers alike: Amazon.
Amazon accounts for at least 40% of the physical books sold in the U.S., more than 80% of e-books, and it dominates audiobooks and book distribution, according to an analysis by WordsRated.
Borders, the former big-box store with more than 400 locations, was crushed by Amazon and the rise of new technologies. It filed for bankruptcy and liquidated in 2011.
Barnes & Noble barely made it out alive. The company’s investment in its online store and e-reader, the Nook, turned out to be its saving grace, NPR reported in 2011.
Book bans are another concern for the booksellers association.
Julia Fleischaker, owner of Greedy Reads in Baltimore, said independent booksellers are “uniquely placed amid the anger, fascism and rising threats to free speech and free expression that are rampant across the country.”
“The threat of book bans and the potential criminalization of selling — and lending — books that somebody somewhere doesn’t like is always looming," she said in a statement.
And there’s the issue of access in Baltimore.
A majority of the city’s bookstores are located within the “White L,” leaving Black and brown communities reliant on libraries, or in book deserts.
Nicole Johnson, owner of Baltimore Read Aloud, has addressed this with her mobile pop-up bookselling business and diverse and representative children’s books.
With so many in-store and online options, it can be easy to find places to buy a book, Johnson said. But “there is something unique about what independent bookstores can bring.”
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