Writers Tricks of the Trade Issue 2 Volume 9 | Page 27

NEWS
E LLIOTT M ANAGEMENT A GREES TO B UY B ARNES & N OBLE , D AUNT TO
R UN B OTH B&N AND UK’ S W ATERSTONES
We have seen so many changes in the brick and mortar bookstores and bookstore chains.
Now Hedgefund Manager Elliott will pay some US$476 million for Barnes & Noble, having last
year bought the UK’s main chain Waterstones. James Daunt is to run both companies.
F
ollowing a flurry of articles
about a Wall Street Journal report that
stated “Barnes & Noble was nearing a deal
to be bought by New York hedge fund El-
liott Management Corp, it was reported on
June 7 by Barnes’ founding chairman Len
Riggio and Paul Singer’s Elliott offices that
the deal is in place.
James Daunt, who has had strong success
with Waterstones since Elliott’s buy of the
UK’s major bookselling chain on April 26,
2018, is scheduled to move to New York
City later this year and will run both com-
panies.
D AUNT : ‘W E C OUNTER A MAZON ’ S S IREN C ALL ’
For a year the UK market watched Daunt
lead Waterstones to profitability and the
opening of new stores under Elliott’s own-
W RITERS ’ T RICKS OF THE T RADE
ership. Philip Jones quoted James Daunt,
defining his new dual role in the context of
Amazon’s dominance in the bookselling
market.
D AUNT SAYS , IN PART :
“Physical bookstores the world over face
fearsome challenges from online and digi-
tal, a complex array of difficulties that for
ease and some evident reason we lay at the
door of Amazon.
“Our purpose is to create, by investment
and old fashioned bookselling skill,
bookshops good enough to be a pleasure in
their own right and to have no equal as a
place in which to choose a book.
“We counter thereby Amazon’s siren call
and defend the continued existence of real
bookshops.
P AGE 22
S UMMER 2019