When I travel I love visiting the bookstores in town. Since Covid, because they are ubiquitous, I have had the pleasure of checking out many Barnes & Noble stores. In the past, when big chain bookstores ruled before Amazon, I was always more of a fan of Borders than B&N. However, the visits to various B&Ns around the country over the last several years have led me to change my views about the chain.

One of their strategies, I have learned, is to allow the managers at each location to have leeway to stock the stores based on their knowledge of the local community of book buyers. That way, each store ends of being somewhat unique with a different mix of titles. This is noticeable in Portland when visiting the various B&N locations.

Today I visited the one in North Haven, Connecticut and it was awesome. Something I noticed there, which seems to be a common practice now at their stores, is that they have a wide selection of books. They do this by filing many, many of their books sideways instead of face out. In these parts of their shelves they only have one copy of each book, but the selection of new books is impressive. Rather than the top 10 biggest sellers set up 8 deep, it was hundreds of new books per section filed sideways. I was able to spend about 80 minutes just browsing the non-fiction today.

We are visiting NYC soon and instead of Barnes and Noble I am looking forward to visiting The Strand. Will report on that visit soon.