The New Age of Reading

In Eatontown, Daunt got out of the car in a strip mall, to contemplate a mild calamity. The Barnes & Noble—a wide, flat building in gray brick—was obscured by an enormous construction crane. Fencing, orange cones, and loose gravel lay in a messy tumble beside its entrance; a tarp was draped, like a dishrag, across the roof.

“Holy, holy moly,” Daunt said.

The strip mall was owned by Kushner Companies, Jared Kushner’s family firm, which was remodelling it into a housing-and-retail complex. The demolition had surprised Daunt, because he’d seen no suggestion of it in the store’s sales figures. “I don’t think many retailers could expect people to come visit, basically, a construction site,” he said, and, as if registering a crime scene, he snapped a picture with a small Lumix.

“Now that I’ve got your attention.”

Cartoon by Sam Gross

Outwardly, Daunt carries faint traces of the social caste that the Victorian critic Matthew Arnold facetiously dubbed “the Barbarians.” Lean and white-haired, he dresses in the subdued style of the office gentleman—dark jackets, gold cufflinks, shirts of forgettable color. He speaks crisply in what he describes as “this ridiculous sort of upper-class accent” and has the urbane English habit of conveying seriousness by tilting his head forward, locking his jaw, and smiling grimly: resting Brit face. When something entertains him, though, he squints and twinkles like an impish kid, a shift so marked that some of his friends experience it as a phase change. “Seeing him laugh is one of my favorite things, because his face disappears into his eyes, like the sun coming out from behind a cloud,” the actor Hugh Bonneville, who went to boarding school with Daunt and later roomed with him at university, told me. “Not that he looks like a cloud—but he’s otherwise quite hard to read.”

Inside, Daunt began to drift through the new-fiction displays, a candescently pale man among the Maillardized, sandal-clad shoppers of the Jersey shore. When he took the helm of the struggling Barnes & Noble, in 2019, his most urgent reform was to loosen centralized control, encouraging every store to select and present its stock as if it were an independent shop. The goal was partly to give booksellers a renewed sense of expertise and accountability. But it was also about recognizing that what stoked the imaginations of Manhattanites might not suit the residents of, say, Henderson, Nevada. In Eatontown, Daunt was pleased that one of the booksellers had arranged the romance section according to her own taste. “They’re starting to realize they can do it,” he said.

Facing New Fiction, he ran his eyes over the shelves, where a great number of covers were turned outward—a signature of his shops. “What I’m looking at is Have the books got enough space allocated to them?” he murmured. “Is the choice sensible? Can I quickly and easily see the books that should be here?” He looked again. “So, for instance, you’d expect to see Rachel Cusk’s new novel. . . .” (“Life of M,” Cusk’s book, created controversy for its treatment of a protagonist rumored to be closely modelled on the actor Natalie Portman.) “Is it sold out?” he said. “Or is it that we’re at the Jersey shore and nobody cares about Rachel Cusk?”

A stream of eager booksellers, who had recognized Daunt, began offering their services; he asked one whether they had a copy of the Cusk.

“I can check,” she said.

A few minutes later, someone reported that it wasn’t stocked—“We don’t have it”—and Daunt, with a tight smile, continued wandering the floor.

A reader of anything but books could be forgiven for thinking that we are living through a low point in literacy. It has been less than a year since the Reader’s Digest, noting statistics about pleasure reading, declared a “reading slump.” In May, the Wall Street Journal bemoaned a crash in the market for “dad books”: histories, theories, bewigged biographies. A summer Atlantic cover, with the headline “The Age of Reading Is Over,” channelled fears that we have entered what it called a “postliterate era,” as a consequence of phones, screens, and the rest of it. This month brought James Marriott, a British columnist, warning, “As reading declines, the result, evident all around us, is the intellectual hollowing out of our society.” That’s from “The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society,” a Substack polemic that Marriott expanded into, of all things, a book. How dead can the nonfiction market be?

Actually, in America, the reading of books is up. Sales of print books have increased nearly twenty-five per cent from a decade ago. The number of independent bookstores in the United States has climbed steeply since 2009, with a seventy-per-cent increase since 2020. A survey by the Pew Research Center found that thirty-eight per cent of American adults read one to five books in 2025, and fourteen per cent read at least twenty. The global book market is expected to grow five per cent annually for the next several years; for the generation now entering college, book sales are at a lifetime high.

In its lament for fading literacy, the Atlantic mentioned current data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, whose reading survey of thousands of students began in 1971. “Just 35 percent of high-school seniors were ‘proficient’ at skills such as analyzing complex fictional themes and evaluating the effectiveness of an author’s argument,” the magazine’s staff writer Rose Horowitch observed. That sounds bad, but the same figure a decade ago was thirty-seven per cent—just two points higher—and in the gloriously unwired age of 1992 it was forty. And the survey’s broad news was good. American nine-year-olds performed much better on reading assessments in 2025 than in 1971, and thirteen-year-olds’ performance held steady. The reading skills of English learners have risen in the past two decades, and, unlike in 1971, the top quarter of Black and Hispanic students today out-read the average white child.

“I thought that piece in the Atlantic made some good points, but the idea that reading has finished and we have moved into a kind of post-literate dark age strikes me as absurd,” Robert Darnton, a historian of the book and a former director of the Harvard University Library, told me. “ I have a little collection of jeremiads, and one is from 1928, when Walter Benjamin said, ‘Everything indicates that the book is nearing its end.’ ” He added, “There’s this unprecedented change in the technology of reading, and people are naturally reacting to that, because it’s disorienting. How do we make sense of changes that have hit us so fast?” “Every decade, there is a new scapegoat for why the reading public is diminishing,” Nancy Bass Wyden, who owns the Strand Book Store, told me. “The fact of the matter is that books are one of our most enduring forms of human expression.”

The illusion of decline might come in part because people consume books differently. Pew reported that, in 2025, the number of adults who read a print book during the year was eight percentage points less than it was in 2011—but that the number who read an e-book and the number who listened to an audiobook each increased by almost double the same proportion. (Other studies turn up a similar result; the National Education Association, whose 2022 survey the Atlantic cited as its first data point for decline, noted in its own material that factoring in audiobooks eliminated any significant downturn.) Joel J. Miller, a former book editor and the author of a book about books (“The Idea Machine”), pored over data about the ostensible nonfiction crisis on his blog, Miller’s Book Review, this year, and found what he described to me as a dubious “confirmatory pattern that everything’s going to hell in a handbasket.” The media started measuring a decline, he noticed, at the peak of the pandemic, when adult-nonfiction sales had risen to unprecedented heights. When he zoomed out on the time span, total print sales came out slightly higher than they were before the pandemic. He factored in e-books and audiobooks, and they went higher still. The picture wasn’t of a crash but of a steady, gently climbing line with an anomalous hump in the middle.

When I brought up the subject of reading decline one day with Daunt, he laughed. “Such nonsense,” he said. “It’s ‘Policemen always get younger’—we just go through an arc of life. Every single year of my bookselling life, somebody has popped up and said, ‘Literary fiction is dead!’ Now it’s ‘Nobody is reading nonfiction!’ ” His stores suggested the opposite. One of Barnes & Noble’s pandemic best-sellers had been “Middlemarch,” bought largely by people younger than forty-five. At all six stores in New York this summer, one of the top-selling books—helped along by Hollywood—was Emily Wilson’s twelve-thousand-one-hundred-and-ten-line verse translation of the Odyssey.

We were sitting in the company’s headquarters, which Daunt had consolidated into two floors above its flagship store, in Union Square. His office, behind a warren of cubicles, was smaller than most bedrooms in a Manhattan walkup, with just enough room for a book-covered desk, some shelves, and a round café-size table, where we sat. The sills of two high windows had been covered with short, neat piles of books (“Sour Cherry,” “Radical Duke,” “Paul Celan: A Life”). The space seemed curiously provisional. Since taking over at Barnes & Noble, Daunt has spent three weeks a month in the U.S. and one in London, where he is temporarily renting a flat with his wife; their house in Hampstead, where they reared two daughters, is being renovated. “All the things we’d put off for twenty-five years—plumbing, that sort of thing—turned out to be in a dire state,” he said. His conversations about bookstores tend to also have a diagnostic air. When he began at Waterstones, in 2011, the chain was going bankrupt. He turned it around to the point where it was opening dozens of new stores. The idea had been to do the same with Barnes & Noble when he arrived. Then the pandemic hit.

“I had just barely got my feet under the desk, and suddenly we were closing stores left, right, and center,” Daunt said. “It was just, like, Oh, my God.”

He managed to use the unexpected closures to accelerate his own reforms. Daunt’s idea of good bookshops—welcoming, browsable retail spaces that are also singular and carry human fingerprints—became the template for remaking more than six hundred Barnes & Noble stores. “My argument to the money people was that it will cost that much more, but we’re going to be so much better when we reopen,” he said. In 2021, after eight years of negative revenue slopes, the company saw positive growth, and it has continued to gain speed, adding sixty new stores last year. Elliott Management, the hedge fund that owns Waterstones and Barnes & Noble, is widely expected to take both of them public next year at a total valuation of at least three billion dollars—a startling resurgence for the sort of brick-and-mortar chain bookstore that, fifteen years ago, was supposedly being devoured by Amazon and the apps.

Daunt holds that a literary culture is something booksellers are well placed to build. “Books aren’t a fixed market,” he told me in his office. “The more bookshops there are, the more people will read. The better bookshops are, the more people discover things. Online is an efficient place, but it’s not a place that can excite in itself.” He paused, and added, “I believe that we make our own luck.”

Chain bookselling is an artifact of nineteenth-century rail travel, replacing the work of booksellers who had previously moved city to city with their stock. “The economic advantages,” the scholar Andrew Pettegree explains in “The Bookshop,” his new history of the trade, included “economies of scale, central stocking, the ability to promote high-performing staff from within the organization, and most potently, the capacity to extract from suppliers higher discounts for larger orders.” The bookselling Brentano family began its chain in 1883; within half a century, it had some thirty rivals across the United States. Chain bookselling, which enabled the unification of the reading market, was one of the first heralds of a globalizing age.

Achilles James Daunt was born in Sussex, in 1963, to parents whose adulthoods coincided with the international reading culture that resulted from this expansion. Timothy and Patricia Daunt had met in Turkey, where they were stationed for diplomatic work. “They were chalk and cheese,” the younger of Daunt’s two sisters, Alice, recalled. “Our mother was a force of nature—loved a good story, no problem exaggerating—and our father was very precise and reserved, very steely.” What they shared was a penchant for reading (“Our birthday and Christmas presents were almost always books,” Daunt’s other sister, Eleanor, said) and travel, the more adventurous the better. In the eighties, the Daunts returned to Turkey, where Timothy served as the British Ambassador; he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth.

Daunt, the eldest, was sent away to boarding school at the age of seven. At thirteen, he entered the Sherborne School, in Dorset, where his father had gone. He was a good, if obstinate, student. Attending chapel was obligatory, but Daunt found it pointless, so he accepted weekly detention instead. He distinguished himself on the rugby pitch. “The first time I saw him playing, he received a crunching tackle,” Hugh Bonneville recalled. “But then he picked up the ball and started running, streaming down the wing, and scored a try. That’s the image I have of James—a sudden turn of speed.”

At Pembroke College, Cambridge, Daunt lived off campus and almost immediately fell in love with a young woman, Katy Steward, whom he met at a party; she later became his wife. It was a lively time in the arts around the university. Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, and Emma Thompson were in the sketch-comedy troupe the Footlights. A newly relaunched Granta magazine was making its name. Daunt was not involved in those endeavors. He studied history with the Mediterranean medievalist David Abulafia, focussing in part on the Crusades, which he regarded as an entry point to medieval Islam. “As a reader of history, James had that thing of being able to cut through and grasp the salient point,” Brett Wolstencroft, one of his roommates, said. “And, whilst most of us had quite small worlds, maybe because of his upbringing he was already interested in a wider one.”

Every summer, Daunt bought a junker of a car and, with a rotating cast of friends, organized a road trip from Brussels, where his parents were then stationed, to the Middle East, passing through the Iron Curtain into Hungary, traversing Transylvania, dipping down to Turkey, and entering Syria—a Crusades route—reading prolifically along the way. In the fall, the group would return home, tired, sunstruck, and bursting with tales of arrests, accounts of car trouble, and what his younger sister called “the most dreadful lavatorial stories,” the result of eating roadside watermelon in Syria.

For Cambridge graduates of that era, employment was hardly a question, because companies recruited on campus. “A great number would offer you a job,” Daunt said. “You just had to say whether you wanted to be a lawyer or a banker or something else.” He noticed that American banks paid very well, and he liked the idea of being in New York, so he accepted a post as a junior banker at the Morgan Guaranty Trust Company (now J. P. Morgan). He worked on corporate mergers and restructurings, whose stakes and puzzle solving he enjoyed, and he spent his nights at restaurants and jazz clubs. “It was a young city, and you were being paid stupidly,” he recalled. “The party was on.”

“Watching paint dry was boring, until they legalized betting on it.”

Cartoon by Drew Dernavich

Daunt might never have left the bank had it not been for Steward. She had fallen in love with a diplomat’s son, an adventurous student of history. The prospect of spending the rest of her life with a man who nattered on about yield curves filled her with despair. Daunt weighed his options. “I thought, If I’m going to take myself out of an office job, I have to do something for myself and tie it to my interests,” he said.

He liked to read, he reasoned, and he liked to travel. When he planned a trip, the first thing he did was to go to the bookstore and immerse himself in the area’s history and literature. Usually, that meant a search through both the history and fiction sections, each a jumble of books from everywhere and every age. “If you read ‘Suite Française,’ the Irène Némirovsky novel, well, then you want to read about the Occupation, you want to read about collaboration, and so on—but nobody put those books together,” he said. What if there were regional sections in which all these elements—novels, poetry, histories, guidebooks—were grouped? Daunt likes to describe this as the moment when he set his mind on the idea of a bookstore, though Bonneville recalls it differently. “My abiding memory at university is of him saying, ‘I’m going to get a job in the city for a couple of years, learn about business, and then open a bookshop,’ ” he told me. “I said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ ”

In 1989, Daunt, back in London, toured the run-down site of a former antiquarian shop on Marylebone High Street—a long, double-height chamber with stained glass and skylights, a balcony-like mezzanine, and light pouring onto two stories of bookshelves. “There it was, dusty, full of crap,” he told me. “Bookstores are usually just shops that you convert, but this one was purpose-built for bookselling.” He opened his shop that winter. He was twenty-six and, as he put it to me, “quite interested in trying to make a different kind of bookstore work.”

One Sunday morning in August, I stopped by the original Daunt Books twenty minutes after opening. The store was already crowded. In the double-height room, the dark-wood shelves were labelled, in gold capitals, with the regions of the world (“CZECH & SLOVAK REPS,” “POLAND”). A middle-aged woman sat in a high-backed armchair and read a few dozen pages of Rachel Blackmore’s novel “Costanza.” On the mezzanine, young people alternately browsed and posed for Beatles-style photographs taken from below. At the “ITALY” shelves, a young American girl intoned to her father from an introductory Italian-language book: “Io sono alta, ho i capelli castani e un po’ lunghi.”

When Daunt Books opened, on the Ides of March, in 1990, it was an inauspicious moment to start an internationally themed bookstore. Less than a year earlier, two London shops had been bombed for selling Salman Rushdie’s “Satanic Verses.” But Daunt thought that reading was headed in a global direction, and, broadly, time proved him correct. Successful authors once boasted of the number of languages into which they were translated, but that is no longer seen to be a marker of ubiquity—not because English-language work isn’t read but because the Anglosphere has grown. By 2045, in some projections, a plurality of English readers will live in China.

None of that helped the store’s début. “It was a disaster,” Daunt recalled. That year, the United Kingdom tipped into recession, and Marylebone High Street became a retail wasteland. “It was a staff of three or four of us in this quite big shop,” Wolstencroft, who is now the manager of the Marylebone store, told me. He had been training to be a lawyer when Daunt enlisted him to help set up the place, and he never left. No one had experience in the trade, and most of the shop’s signature features emerged from trial and error and the uncertainty of the market.

At the start, they placed their titles cover out because they didn’t have enough stock to fill their shelves. They began arranging books on tables, in a set of stacks known as “the pyramid.” Circular tables were ideal, they found, because customers passed them in a rounding motion, keeping their attention on the surfaces for longer. Daunt deplored the dingy norm of London’s independent bookstores and spent months keying up his lighting. Then he niggled with the shelves. An incline of exactly three degrees, he discovered, put books in the optimal path of light. (At Waterstones, the angle was revised to 4.5 degrees.) To fill gaps and corners, he made display risers covered with a very British William Morris fabric involving leaves, flowers, and uneasy-looking birds. (“Those patterns are, like, lodged in the back of my brain,” the literary agent Juliet Mushens, who has spent a lot of time in Daunt’s shops, told me.) Wolstencroft and Daunt noticed that pedestrians tuned out cluttered shop windows, so they loaded theirs with a single title at a time, and decorated them thematically, like department stores’. In the early days, London was still a city of smokers, and Daunt would count cigarette butts on the sidewalk to gauge how many passersby had stopped to look.

What emerged was a model of bookselling both knowledgeable and precisely retail-focussed. Laura Macaulay, a bookseller in the two-thousands, recalled Daunt telling her, “Everything we do has to make a profit.” Staffers were encouraged to read prolifically as a quality check: every lemon on the shelves was a reason for a customer not to return. Weak covers were missed opportunities; to this day, Daunt remains one of the few people in the industry who can get the jacket of a major book redesigned.

Daunt Books grew for years as a quiet shop with a devoted following. “You felt the people who worked there were believers,” the actor Bill Nighy, a regular since the nineties, said. (He continues to give people its book-subscription service at Christmas. “If anyone knew how much time and money I spend in bookshops, they would say, ‘What the fuck?’ ” he said. “It is made more delicious by the fact that books were dead, officially, about ten years ago.”) In 1995, Daunt opened a second branch, in Belsize Park, and proceeded to expand to four more locations. He was dubious about publicity, so his booksellers, such as Diana Liu, learned to rustle up attention in other ways. In 2006, Liu, after being approached by Re-Wrap, a women’s textile coöperative in India, helped design the famous tote, which has an outline of the Marylebone shop façade. Alice Daunt, now a travel agent, told me that she had no idea her brother’s shop was a success until she spotted a Daunt Books bag hanging from a housekeeping cart “at some dreadful hotel in Antigua,” filled with soaps.

Buying a book demands an unusual commitment from the customer—hours, days, or even weeks of attention, and a measure of heart besides. Because the investment is great, the sales numbers can seem small. To reach the Billboard Top Ten, a music album often must sell about thirty thousand units a week; a book can make it to the Times best-seller list with a mere five thousand. An individual Barnes & Noble store might sell two dozen copies of a best-seller a week, and a “steady seller” might mean fewer than ten weekly sales.

Daunt Books’ figures, in this light, could be extraordinary. When the shop gave a paperback the treatment—a window, a display, and bookseller effort—it could expect to move a hundred and thirty copies a week. Once in a blue moon, a hardback attained those sales, too. The shop put on the map books such as Alexander McCall Smith’s “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency,” a previously obscure crime novel set in Botswana which became a best-selling series and a TV show. After Daunt came in one day buzzing about “Two Jews on a Train,” a collection of the French Hungarian writer Adam Biro’s folksy tales, his sellers got behind the book so enthusiastically that he asked the publisher, University of Chicago Press, for thousands more copies. The press refused, suspecting that the request was a hoax. Daunt suggested that Liu, who had moved to London from San Francisco, call them. “He said, ‘Will you talk to them in American?’ ” she told me. “I said, ‘I’m standing here, selling these books.’ And they asked, ‘Why?’ ”

“James was quite outspoken about the idea that many publishers didn’t really know what they were doing,” Macaulay, who is now the publishing director at Pushkin Press, told me. In 2010, he asked her to launch an imprint, Daunt Books Publishing, that would focus on out-of-print material and new manuscripts; she spent her first year in the publisher’s job filling in as a bookseller and found it instructive. “Standing behind the counter, you have thirty seconds or less to say the right formulation of words that will make the customer pick up that book and take it home,” she said. Even now, the shop floor must sign off on the imprint’s acquisitions and covers. “I have to think, What will a bookseller be excited to sell?,” Marigold Atkey, the current publisher, explained.

As a book buyer, Daunt had exceptional confidence. “James discovered that you could go to the publisher and say, ‘Will you give us better terms on this book?,’ ” Wolstencroft told me. During one standoff, as he recalled it, Daunt threatened to send the books back. (Daunt disputed the memory, denying that he would have done this.) “It seemed remarkable at the time, not just to me but to other people in the trade,” Wolstencroft said. “Other people prefer a collegial sort of management.”

Before the nineteen-nineties, bookselling wasn’t a business predicated on growth. There were chains (Brentano’s, Foyles), big chains (Borders), and really enormous stores (Powell’s, the Strand), but all of them expanded linearly. That changed in 1995, when Jeff Bezos launched his online bookstore, Amazon, on the theory, as the reporter Brad Stone put it in “The Everything Store,” that books “were pure commodities.” Though Bezos was technically a bookseller, his interest was in infrastructure. If you could sell people books efficiently, he thought, you could sell them laundry detergent, tube socks, and printers. Bezos spent a lot of effort, and magnitudes of capital, building a proud, sleek, global machine for frictionless selling. Its product was anything and everything—basically, stuff.

The idea that consumer companies are in the stuff business is still Amazon’s longest shadow. Enterprises plowing the creative fields now call their products “content.” People who might once have referred to books or photographs or rom-coms find themselves obliged, at least once a quarter, to speak of content as a kind of goo subjected to important active verbs. We generate content, publish it, surface it, and deliver it. Since “content” encompasses mystery novels, cheesecake recipes, “Soul on Ice,” breaking news, red-carpet commentary, videos of twerking cats, and the late writings of Heidegger, those verbs are the important thing. If goods are interchangeable—if it’s all just stuff—then market success must be the result of efficiencies in the delivery systems, and we are wise to focus on those, not the qualities of individual works.

By 2011, Daunt had developed a different philosophy. He had spent two decades on the shop floor, studying what customers bought and didn’t buy and why. Books, he knew, were not like laundry detergent. Decisions rarely happened categorically or in bulk; everything came down to whether the specific thing in front of you—that book, this shop—was good enough to draw you in. If powerful growth was to be had in the book business, that specificity would have to remain central. It was around this time that Daunt’s colleagues noticed a distance in him. “He’s ambitious,” Liu told me. “And I could suddenly feel that he wasn’t going to be held by Daunt Books.”

Only Wolstencroft knew that Daunt had by then spent two years trying to line up a purchaser for Waterstones, which operated some three hundred stores. The chain had been taken up into a conglomerate called the HMV Group, which, rattled by Amazon, had centralized warehouse operations and optimized pipelines. But those efforts failed to attract customers, and Daunt watched as Waterstones’ sales went into free fall, threatening to pull down much of the publishing industry with it. He took it upon himself to intervene. In early 2010, he got a call from Dennis Stevenson, a member of the House of Lords.

“I am literally having a cup of tea with a Russian businessman,” Stevenson said. “I’ve explained that there’s a bookseller who thinks that Waterstones can be saved. Why don’t you pedal over here and see whether you can interest him?”

The Russian, Alexander Mamut, was not an obvious savior. In the nineties, he had been known as “the Yeltsin family banker,” and emerged with fingers in the usual pies: fuel, telecoms, media. He was alleged to have been implicated in the Bank of New York money-laundering scandal—which transferred Russian capital through U.S. bank accounts—though nothing was proved. (Mamut denied any knowledge of the illegal money transfers.) He was also a prolific reader who, in 2004, had invested in the Moscow chain Bookberry. For two years, he had been quietly buying up shares of HMV, trying to precipitate a Waterstones deal. Daunt made a simple pitch about Waterstones’ shops: “If we save them, then we’ve got a perfectly nice little business, and we can turn a dime on it as well.”

Mamut asked how much it would cost. When Daunt said forty million pounds, the businessman looked pleased. “That’s less than Fernando Torres,” he later said. (His fellow-oligarch Roman Abramovich had signed Torres, a soccer player, for Chelsea F.C.) “It’s not even half a boat,” he added. Daunt recognized the signs of a man talking himself into a large purchase.

In the end, Mamut’s fund bought Waterstones for fifty-three million pounds. Daunt took Liu and Wolstencroft to a pub lunch and told them that he would be leaving Daunt Books to become Waterstones’ managing director. (He continues to own the Daunt shops.) “I was, like, ‘Oh, God, the banker within you is coming out,’ ” his sister Alice told me.

At Waterstones, Daunt spent three months interviewing employees—“Just, ‘What do you do?’ ” he said. He asked all four hundred employees in the home office to reapply for their jobs, and fired two hundred. “There’s nothing good—ever—about sacking,” he told me, sounding only slightly defensive. “The narrative is that everybody is a fantastic bookseller, loving books, but it isn’t the case. You have a disenchanted, unempowered, fairly miserable group of people, some of whom really are not good at their roles and are actively counterproductive. These people have to be moved on if you want to run a good shop. It’s a brutal process, and the store managers will never do it.”

Cartoon by Carolita Johnson

In Daunt’s view, Waterstones’ trouble was that its previous owners had run it as a stuff company, where books were mixed with things like scented candles and decision-making was centralized. But he did notice exceptions. One day, he visited a Waterstones in Horsham, south of London, and caught the manager, Kurde Atfield, unawares. Her store was, as she puts it, eccentric. Her displays didn’t feature approved books, and they were decorated with handwritten signs and dusty plastic flowers. “A customer once said to me, ‘It’s like coming to my aunt’s house,’ ” she said. “I thought, James Daunt is going to go a bit mad.”

Daunt did go a bit mad in Atfield’s store (“Every time you walk in there, you just hold your head in your hands,” he has said), but he also thought she was a genius. The shop had become a community hub, with a strong sense of Horsham’s local interests and taste. He looked for other sellers at the company with similar instincts.

“James scythed through the head office—they didn’t understand what we were doing,” Luke Taylor, a quick-talking manager in his forties, told me in Waterstones’ six-floor Piccadilly store, above which Daunt had moved the company’s headquarters after closing remote offices. Waterstones had previously churned through young employees, so Daunt set up six major promotion points, with salary increases at each, allowing the most talented booksellers to grow across a full career. Taylor, an early beneficiary of these reforms, had been promoted to the position of retail director. “In 2012, there was an ice-cream freezer in the front and a wall of clearance DVDs right here,” he said, gazing out across the main floor, now filled with Dauntian round tables stacked with books.

By the numbers, the Waterstones turnaround was remarkable. Returns, the unsold books that shops send back to publishers, fell from twenty-five per cent of the stock to four per cent. The company’s forty-three-million-pound loss in 2011 became an eighteen-million-pound profit by 2017. Daunt eliminated “co-op”—the long-standing practice by which publishers would pay for placement in a bookstore. Instead, booksellers ran with their own ideas. To sell Gabrielle Zevin’s “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow,” a novel of gaming, in 2022, Waterstones’ flagship set up an arcade machine loaded with Donkey Kong. For the release of “Land,” Maggie O’Farrell’s new potato-famine-and-cartography novel, it hired a fiddler to play in the window. This year, after hundreds of Waterstones booksellers voted to bestow the chain’s Debut Fiction Prize on “May We Feed the King,” a novel by the poet Rebecca Perry, the book landed on the British best-seller lists and was short-listed for the Booker Prize. To Daunt’s admirers, this is democratization. “In the pre-James world, when the books were chosen by a center, you couldn’t really have those surprise hits in the same way,” the chain’s head of books, Bea Carvalho, who also runs the prizes, said.

Yet publishers complained to me about a new consolidation of power. To keep returns low, Daunt shops often placed tiny initial orders, a wan show of confidence that risked seeping down to the fragile economy of the writing life. Jordan Pavlin, the Knopf publisher, described it as “challenging”: “We have to remain undeterred by those initials—we have to maintain our conviction and our vision for a book’s ultimate potential.”

As time went on, Waterstones seemed to put Daunt’s roles as a bookseller and a businessman into collision. In 2019, a platform called Organise approached employees to help them arrange a campaign to increase wages among entry-level booksellers to nine pounds an hour (slightly more in London), which fewer than half of Waterstones’ employees were earning. They circulated a petition, which received ninety-three hundred signatures. A second petition carried the signatures of twenty-four hundred writers, including novelists such as Sally Rooney. Daunt offered the employees a four-per-cent bonus but denied the base-wage increase. “The booksellers we were working with decided that they’d said what they wanted to,” Usman Mohammed, a founding member of Organise, said. “But they still weren’t happy with their pay.”

When I asked Daunt about his handling of the dispute, he told me that he saw nothing exceptional in it. “Pay is a zero-sum game,” he said. “If I’m going to pay one person more, I have to pay another person less. Are we putting that money into base pay, or into the career ladder?” (Mohammed called this “textbook corporate speech, where they draw a false binary.”) Daunt described himself as sympathetic, but told me, “The brutal economics of it is Sorry, our priority is the career.”

In 2014, Russia invaded Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, and Western banks pulled back on lending to Russians. Waterstones, under Mamut, was unable to get the loans that British booksellers typically use to stock their shelves. “We needed a strong partner that would open the doors to the banks to us,” Marina Grönberg, who oversaw the day-to-day of Mamut’s businesses outside Russia, told me. In April, 2018, Mamut sold Waterstones to the private-equity arm of Elliott Management for a hundred and ninety million pounds, nearly a hundred and fifty million more than he had paid. In financial terms, the deal was an apparent victory, but Mamut took it as a bittersweet loss. “Alexander didn’t want to sell control—he hoped to remain with fifty-one per cent,” Grönberg told me. “Also, the reputation of Elliott is not necessarily of a friendly investor.” The firm had made its name as an activist hedge fund investing in distressed sovereign debt.

Mamut and Grönberg were persuaded by Paul Best, a new arrival at Elliott, who believed that the eclipse of brick-and-mortar retail by online commerce had been overstated, and that certain chains could flourish if well capitalized. Waterstones was his first acquisition. A source close to the deal said that Daunt was seen as key to the chain’s prospects. “In a lot of businesses, like fashion, you have the designer and then you have the C.E.O., a left brain and a right brain,” the person said. “He has both. If you put him in a room full of booksellers, they think he’s one of them, because he is. If you put him in a board meeting, he can talk about productivity, inventory turns, return rates.”

What followed was an astonishing period in which almost all British chain bookselling consolidated itself under one man. That September, Waterstones bought the troubled Foyles. In 2022, it bought Blackwell’s, too. Both of their owners, Christopher Foyle and Toby Blackwell, had contacted Daunt personally to offer him their failing enterprises; Daunt had come up with a rescue method. “Do nothing for a year,” he explained. “Let the shops get over the horror of being owned by a chain or whatever it is. Then say, How are you going to run this place properly? You didn’t go bankrupt because you were such a good bookstore.” Only then did Daunt put money in, to sparkle up the facilities.

Barnes & Noble, a publicly traded company that had begun its own stock-market slide, had been in Mamut’s sights before his exit. In 2019, Elliott contemplated an acquisition. “I think it’s doing the same things wrong that Waterstones was,” Daunt told Best. Elliott took Barnes & Noble private, for six hundred and eighty-three million dollars, inclusive of debt.

The American publishing industry watched the transaction with both relief and trepidation: it had heard the buzz of private-equity chainsaws on its grounds before. In 2006, in a notorious case, Pershing Square Capital Management, the hedge fund founded and managed by the billionaire Bill Ackman, had begun taking on a plurality stake in Borders, which operated about a thousand book-and-music stores. Pershing Square saw it as an undervalued asset. Yet, when Borders put itself up for sale during the credit squeeze of 2008, it got no offers. Pershing Square extended more debt. In 2010, Ackman made a failed bid to merge Borders with Barnes & Noble. That holiday season, Borders stopped paying some landlords and suppliers on time, and, in February, it filed for Chapter 11. Soon a thousand American bookstores had disappeared.

The prospect of Daunt’s leadership struck publishers as a flash of hope. “I’m generally not a booster,” one said. “But, you have to understand, we’ve had so much worse, just a legacy of morons and horrible people.”

Daunt told me, “Barnes & Noble shouldn’t be owned by private equity.” He saw it as a safe haven for a company that had needed to find its footing before proving itself. A few years ago, the podcaster Nigel Beale asked him whether Paul Singer, Elliott’s founder and president, was a lover of books. “No, he’s a lover of making money,” Daunt shot back, with what sounded like pride. At a moment when anything to do with reading or literature tended to be presented as a sympathy cause, like saving the whales, he’d got bookselling enshrined as that truly unassailable thing: a lucrative American business.

Yet public trust has not entirely followed him. Last spring, a mild fracas erupted when Daunt was quoted as saying that Barnes & Noble would stock and sell books written by A.I. “What I actually said was ‘We don’t sell A.I. books. We go to extreme lengths not to,’ ” he told me. “Then the next question is ‘Would you ever?’ ” He told me he said yes with a thought to word-game compilations and other non-narrative materials that publishers might churn out using A.I.

The tenor of alarm about new technologies was familiar. When Daunt arrived at Waterstones, bookselling was in a panic about the Kindle, said to be poised to replace paper books. Daunt was doubtful: he’d used the product. And he’d seen the advent of the personal computer during his time as a banker, when the arrival of the I.B.M. XT had carried him and his peers up the ranks. But books were more like rubber bands or bottle openers than like computers: their form was largely unimprovable for their function. Daunt had the Kindles displayed in every Waterstones. They sold quickly at first, then slowly, and then, booksellers told me, Kindle buyers began returning for books. Today, the e-reader market has plateaued at some ten per cent of traditional publishers’ revenue, while about seventy-five per cent comes from paper books, a technology essentially unchanged since the nineteenth century.

Now we are having a Kindle moment with A.I., which has seemingly started to affect the sales of self-help and pop-business titles—the kinds of books, Joel Miller pointed out to me, that present themselves as answers to such prompts as “How do I” or “I want to.” But the claim that A.I. writing threatens to replace novels, archival histories, reported narrative, and so on, seems a naïve insult to readers, and major publishers have avoided A.I. work. As far as the shelves of the bookstore are concerned, A.I. writing is a technology without a market.

The future of an industry is harder to judge. An enterprise consolidated under a single deft leader is secure until that leader leaves; then it’s just consolidated, and vulnerable. When I asked Daunt about succession, he insisted that he had stocked the upper ranks of both Waterstones and Barnes & Noble with like-minded booksellers who would carry on without him—unless, that is, a new owner did as he had done, and cleared the decks before charting a new course. Daunt told me he was sanguine. “If the whole thing is working well enough, they’ll let you get on with it,” he said.

Daunt spends most weekends when he’s in the U.K. at a house in Suffolk, a bike ride’s distance from the English shore. One morning, he met me at the end of the Darsham station’s platform with his car, an electric Polestar that was dark navy and caked in dust. “The filthiest car in Britain!” he announced and put the vehicle in gear.

East Suffolk, a windblown span of marshy coastland, has a reputation for stark, mournful beauty, and for drawing creative people with a taste for isolation and escape. This is the place that W. G. Sebald described, in “The Rings of Saturn,” as “dry, empty stretches of land which, by the end of a long summer, are almost like a desert.” Benjamin Britten’s opera “Peter Grimes” was set nearby. Daunt and Steward’s house is on what he describes as the emptier, inland side of the highway. Until the Waterstones job, which he accepted when his daughters were out of primary school, he would take off all their school vacations, and the family would travel together, often far afield. “We would go to Georgia, Nicaragua, Cuba, Ethiopia, and have a good, nice, proper, adventurous holiday,” he said. (“He’s what I call a SFOG, a smug father of girls,” said his sister Alice, who summarized his preferred style of travel less romantically: “At best, a really shitty tent.”)

Now Daunt gazed ahead as he followed the curves of road toward Southwold Books, a Waterstones shop that operates under its own name. Southwold is one of Britain’s affluent seaside getaway towns, filled with Range Rovers and sunburned Londoners. Daunt made a series of small groaning noises on the approach. “Obviously, I’ve gone into the grubby world of commerce,” he told me. “But whether you’re a civil servant, as my father was and my elder daughter is, or a schoolteacher, as my grandfather was, or someone who works with hospitals, like my wife”—a policy expert who sits on the boards of an N.H.S. mental-health trust and the U.N. Refugee Agency—“public service seems to be what we gravitate toward.”

Daunt likes to think of his own service as the preservation of a kind of literary and civil space. He has been a noisy critic of closing libraries in Britain. His acquisitions have invariably been of cherished bookshops about to shutter, and he has pulled Barnes & Noble out of real-estate deals—recently in Washington State—on discovering that they would threaten an independent shop nearby. In Southwold, he backed delicately into a parking space along the town’s central embankment. The waves below were an uncouth olive-brine brown.

“Let’s take up the full width of the sidewalk so everybody knows how in love we are!”

Cartoon by Ellie Black

“Did you bring your swimming trunks?” Daunt asked merrily, and led me in a zigzag through the parking lot of the Adnams brewery, then out to the bookshop, a chip-shop-size storefront with a blue exterior. Inside, I saw what looked like a very fine small store. Daunt saw an array of signs and symbols that he could read. He noted where abutting shelves were set at different heights, signalling divisions in the stock. He clocked, from several feet away, a paperback from McNally Editions and a few hardcovers from Slightly Foxed, a more obscure house.

“You can see it’s got lots of tiny publishers,” he said excitedly, half to himself. “Quite an eccentric stock as you start looking.” He approached the checkout counter, where a young bookseller in a gingham dress was ringing up customers. “I wanted to introduce myself,” he said, placing all five fingertips on his chest. “I’m James Daunt.”

“Oh, my goodness!” the bookseller, Nina Wilkins, said, perhaps not entirely joyfully. “Oh, my goodness!”

“Nice and busy in the morning, isn’t it?” Daunt said. “And the shop’s looking lovely.”

Wilkins said, recovering, “Shall I call my manager, Steph?”

As Daunt waited, he checked the pyramids. Early on at Daunt Books, he and Wolstencroft found that, if they placed unknown début-fiction titles on their own, people shied away, but, if they interposed known books of a similar flavor, customers bought both. Presenting the new in the context of the old allowed readers to orient themselves.

The manager, Steph Burridge, appeared, her blond hair half gathered into a top bun. “Congratulations,” Daunt, who congratulates everyone, said.

“We pick a book, and it just flies,” Burridge said.

“I always say that, in small shops, you can be talking to somebody and selling the book to three other people,” Daunt said. He paused. “Anything for me while I’m here?”

“I think the shop should have an awning,” Burridge said. “I mentioned it, and I just got completely—”

“Would you e-mail me?” Daunt said. “You don’t need to say, ‘Hi, James, the weather’s lovely, blah blah blah.’ Just write an e-mail that says—”

“Awning,” Burridge guessed.

“Awning,” Daunt said, with a smile.

For most of us, ideas about the state of literature are the result of a cohort experience. Reading is private—or has been since at least the sixth century, before which the Western habit was to read everything aloud. But conversing about reading is a social activity. If you were of a certain cohort in a certain time, you might remember everybody talking about “Primary Colors,” or “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” or “White Teeth.” To be ensconced within a reading cohort is bliss, and falling off the cart can be demoralizing. “Within the industry, we’re very used to there being a golden age and it being just over,” one publisher told me dryly. “The moment of decline usually depends on the age of the person telling the story.”

It is also true that cohorts used to be mostly local, made up of people you could meet for lunch. Now they are, like everything, atomized and diffuse. “Readers are connecting with each other in small communities scattered all over the internet,” Kris Austin, the C.E.O. of the self-publishing platform Draft2Digital, which serves more than three hundred thousand authors, told me recently. “The big gatekeepers are less major players than they used to be, and authors are finding readers directly—or readers find them, and tell each other on social media.” It is easy to be snide about the way that taste hierarchies flatten on social media, but any writer who genuinely connects with readers isn’t working in vain. “A romance author might be able to release a book a month, and, if they have a thousand people who will buy all of their books, they’re making a good living,” Austin said. Rarely, somebody breaks out and gets picked up by a publisher, as with the best-selling romance writer Colleen Hoover. But a lot of reading today happens in diverse pods below the publishing industry’s waves.

Cartoon by Roz Chast

These reading habits often reach booksellers through BookTok—an ecosystem of literary influencers across social media. Barnes & Noble shops sometimes include BookTok recommendations on dedicated tables, which have helped move books; TikTok has translated into fifty million book sales across Europe, according to Nielsen. Still, these displays are not universally adored. (“I think it’s lazy bookselling,” Victoria Harty, the chain’s New York retail manager, told me.) Most BookTokers are young, and appeal to readers in the eighteen-to-forty age range. “I think people much older than me maybe wouldn’t see that their tastes align with mine,” Jack Edwards, a twenty-seven-year-old BookToker with four million followers, said.

Edwards, who recently reviewed both Alexandra Romanoff’s romance “Big Fan” and John Berger’s “Ways of Seeing,” began posting as a student at Durham University, in the U.K. He told me that a great number of his followers were interested in writing in translation. (Half of all translated fiction is now bought by people between the ages of thirteen and thirty-four.) “I think the reason is that we’ve grown up in the digital landscape and are used to scrolling on our phones and seeing people from many different countries,” he said. “We don’t question reading a book from Nicaragua or Ethiopia or Sri Lanka.” They are also tired of their feeds. Recent years have brought a huge market for books with decorated edges and embossed covers, and major fantasy books now sell out in large luxury editions—an enthusiasm that the agent Juliet Mushens, who represents a lot of best-selling fantasy books, attributed in part to Daunt’s emphasis on visual display.

“People are ravenous for content that isn’t on their laptop or their phone,” Eden Yonas, another preëminent BookToker (twenty-five years old, half a million followers), told me. “I love that now, when I’m sitting on the train in New York, I can look up and, instead of seeing people on their phones, see them reading a book. Three, four years ago, I didn’t see that.” Every bookseller I spoke to reported increased book-buying among young customers.

It is puzzling, then, that the world is filled with professors reporting that students can barely muddle through the reading on their syllabi. That complaint was the focus of Tyler Jagt’s recent Chronicle of Higher Education essay “My Students Can’t Read,” which provoked a flurry of responses. Dorian Thornley, the proprietor of Westsider Rare and Used Books, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, gives a basic literary-knowledge quiz to the young college graduates applying to work there, and has been appalled at the results. “They don’t know who wrote ‘Moby-Dick,’ ” he said. “They don’t know who wrote ‘The Magic Mountain.’ ” It’s not that they aren’t reading. (Thornley’s own teen-age son, he told me with a sigh, reads almost exclusively “politicized Y.A., over and over again.”) It’s that their canon is illegible to older readers.

The new reading wars, in that sense, are largely about the primacy of taste. “The confusing thing for people in the business is that the books folks love and want to recommend are not the books that people wanted to catch fire,” Michael Cader, the founder of Publishers Lunch, a publishing-industry newsletter, said. Felicity Blunt, a prominent literary agent at Curtis Brown, told me, “We are discovering that people are reading things that we weren’t expecting—and we are behind certain curves.” One of the most-read genres in the United States right now is romantasy, or romance in fantasy worlds; at bookstores, readers across the country queue down the sidewalks for midnight releases of new titles. Earlier this month, “Threshing Day,” a short-story collection by the romantasy writer Rebecca Yarros, débuted at No. 1 on both the print and the combined print-and-e-book Times best-seller lists, having sold, according to Publishers Weekly, nearly nine hundred thousand copies of its special-edition release in its first week, superseding a new John Grisham novel for the first time in four decades—a moment of generational change in best-seller publishing.

Romantasy is not many people’s idea of great literature. But, then, neither is a lot of “literary fiction.” “How many of these books will actually command a place on our shelves in ten years?” Daunt said of this year’s best-sellers. “Very few. But, boy, do you know them when you find them.” He recalled his thrill on reading “Tinkers,” Paul Harding’s slender début novel centered on the memories of a clock repairman, which was published by a small press and, in 2010, won the Pulitzer Prize.

The truth is that the distance from romantasy to “Tinkers” can be small. Most readers don’t cut their teeth on Robert Caro or Proust; they begin with the Sweet Valley Twins or Agatha Christie, and the habit of reading propels them toward more remarkable work. “If you’re strictly a romance reader, I’ll be, like, ‘Have you ever read Jane Austen?’ ” Yonas said. In London, the writer Tom Willis has become known for organizing the Soho Reading Series, a slate of literary readings and parties that have drawn more than ten thousand attendees over the past few years, feeding what he describes as an enormous appetite for a real, welcoming literary culture among the young. “I’ll put on a reading with a writer like Rob Doyle”—the Irish novelist—“and, after it, people are queuing up with their eyes lit up like in the frigging olden days,” he said. He launched a literary talk show this fall—one more person trying to make even the screens a bookish place.

“Reading, right now, feels like resilience,” Edwards told me. “It feels revolutionary to choose friction in a world increasingly being designed to reduce it through ChatGPT.”

In garrulous moods, Daunt likes to impart advice for young travellers. Make an effort with the lexicon: a hundred words of any language will get you far. In remote terrain, speak whatever language you speak worst: you’ll use more gestures and expressions, which will make your message clearer. (Daunt speaks Turkish in rural Japan.) Travelling, like reading, is a reminder of the impossibility of communicating across territories—but also evidence that, somehow, we always do.

The politics of bookselling, as Daunt sees them, are pragmatic and pluralist. “I think booksellers, as a tribe, almost universally believe in principles of liberalism, which means that we’re politically of the left—not in a punching-with-Bernie way, though plenty will be, but in a commitment to diverse societies,” he said. Under his aegis, Barnes & Noble has joined with publishers to wage legal battles against content restrictions in Texas and Virginia, like those used to limit the distribution of L.G.B.T.Q.-themed books. But it has also supported its shop in Cheyenne, Wyoming, which mounted a display of MAGA books: the local taste. “We can’t believe in free speech and the importance of resisting censorship and then censor ourselves,” Daunt said.

Back on the road, in Suffolk, he told me that Barnes & Noble was the most engaging work of his career. “Waterstones was a bigger train set: more tunnels, more things to set up. And then, when you get to Barnes & Noble, it’s a whacking big thing,” he said. We were stuck behind a slow truck on a two-lane highway; I could sense him waiting to lay into the pedal for a burst of speed.

We reached the town of Lowestoft. Once a thriving fishing center, it was now a place without an industry. The Waterstones shop sat on a wide main street of drugstores and budget-clothing chains in whose windows everything appeared to be on sale. “This is the less affluent white U.K. you’re seeing,” he said. “The places that have been left behind, that become breeding grounds for Reform”—the British far-right party.

The store was neatly ordered, with a table of romances near the entrance and a bright-emerald carpet: a relic of an older style of décor. Daunt had said before we entered that, of all the shops he was responsible for, those like Lowestoft were the ones of which he was proudest. “There will always be some version of a Southwold Books,” he said. “But no one today is opening a bookshop in Lowestoft. If this one leaves the high street, it’s gone.” As we watched, the manager, Alison Mason, went from table to table, adjusting books, as if preparing a home for a visiting friend.

Before Daunt left, he made a slow round of the store, studying its displays and stopping at the children’s section, into which, Mason said, kids and teen-agers flocked daily after school. In the early days, at his own shop, he had been known for his laconic style of selling. “Booksellers can sometimes say too much about a book, but James would never say too much,” Wolstencroft told me. When showing visitors around, Daunt would seem to notice a book on a table and ask whether they had read it. When the answer was no, he’d pick it up and appear to examine it, as if it were the only thing in sight, a precious object borne across the world. Then he would hand it over. “Just read it,” he’d say. ♦