James Daunt grew up in England the child of a diplomat—moving countries, tasting cultures, living a life with books and history at its core. He lived in Turkey and Cyprus before coming back to England for boarding school. After studying history at Cambridge, he didn’t know what he wanted to do, so the Career Services department pointed him towards investment banking across the sea in New York City.
He actually liked the job but his girlfriend thought it was incredibly boring and encouraged him to quit. He thought, "How do I combine my love of reading and my love of travel into doing something wholly different?"
The first Daunt Books independent bookstore opened on Marylebone High Street in London soon after. Unlike nearly every book store in the world he organized his books … by country. Not genre! But by place. Bookselling isn't an easy business! Lots of stores were going belly-up and profits were meager but over time he found a special knack for it.
He went to bookselling school, paid fairly, and took mentorship and development seriously. When big bookstore chains started falling in the wake of Amazon, and Waterstones was essentially the only national chain left in the UK, a wealthy entrepreneur bought it and asked James to lead it.
He turned the concept of a chain bookstore on its head, suggesting that stores would do better if the head office minimized itself and helped the booksellers operate like their own independent bookstores. Gone were planograms! Head office mandates! He tore up lucrative publisher deals spelling out which books to force onto the front tables to guarantee bestseller lists! He ripped up the rulebook completely. And what happened? Sales shot up. The chain survived ... then thrived.
When the new owners of Waterstones bought Barnes & Noble—the largest bookstore chain in the world—they asked James to lead it, too. Today, James Daunt is the biggest bookseller on the planet overseeing nearly 1000 bookshops including his now-9 store Daunt Books indie chain, over 300 Waterstones, and over 600 Barnes & Nobles (including 65 new ones this year!!).
I was very excited when James said "yes" to coming on 3 Books. We go deep on learning from history, the role of bookstores in society, his most formative books, the best place to find a date, the key to customer service, leading from behind, and much, much more....
Let’s flip the page to Chapter 141 now…
Chapter 141: James Daunt on bespoke bookselling building Barnes and bonds
View full transcript here
CONNECT with JAMES DAUNT
JAMES’ 3 Books
First book (20:26)
Second book (48:37)
Third book (1:23:36)
WORDCLOUD OF THE CHAPTER
Quotes
“Books are in a very good place.” — James Daunt | 3 Books Podcast
“What we can do within bookstores offer the serendipity of illogical choice, be that personal recommendations of booksellers or other customers or the chance of how displays and the interactions and juxtapositions of books alight upon yourselves.” — James Daunt | 3 Books Podcast
“If you are interested in a country or a place then I think you need to read very broadly within it. You definitely need to read the history, but you also want to understand the anthropology, want to understand the novels, you want to understand the movies, you want to understand everything.” — James Daunt | 3 Books Podcast
“I think booksellers need to and can read body language. Is this somebody who’s looking to engage or not? Also customers, as they come into the stores, they know that the bookseller is lurking there, sort of the spider in his web.” — James Daunt | 3 Books Podcast
“Technology can be extremely helpful and dynamic, but if you want to get a reluctant reader, some young boy to read books, you're going to probably be most successful with a highly skilled bookseller whose passion is to encourage kids to read.” — James Daunt | 3 Books Podcast
“One of the joys, I think, of reading history is that you read it to learn and to educate yourself, to consider and be able to reflect on current affairs with hopefully more intelligence and more insight, but also to be able to navigate through the prism of the writer.” — James Daunt | 3 Books Podcast
“With empowerment comes responsibility.” — James Daunt | 3 Books Podcast
“[Bookselling] remains a very ill-advised route to riches.” — James Daunt | 3 Books Podcast
“If you want people to become really tenured and expert, then they need to work full time.” — James Daunt | 3 Books Podcast
[On attention spans and reading.] “These are not new problems. I've been a bookseller for 35 years or something. I've predated really the internet. I've certainly predated e-books. I've certainly predated audio and podcasts and all of these things... And the reality throughout all of this is that how people are, the time people have available to read and the enthusiasm with which they read changes by not much.” — James Daunt | 3 Books Podcast
“[Bookstores] do provide a community space that's inherently democratic in the sense that everybody can come inside it.” — James Daunt | 3 Books Podcast
“We are the greatest dating place that there is. Forget the bar, forget the nightclub, forget everything else, come to a bookstore. That's where you can really meet people, see people.” — James Daunt | 3 Books Podcast
“I think there are people who lead from the front, and de Gaulle happened to have been one of those, and there are those who can lead from the back, and Lincoln was one of those. I think the latter, the Lincoln way of leading is, I think, generally, well, certainly the one that fits with my personality.” — James Daunt | 3 Books Podcast
