Barnes & Noble opens its doors on St. Paul Street

BALTIMORE (Map, News) - The free coffee all weekend was terrific.

So were the sparkling hardcovers.

About the only complaint at the opening of Johns Hopkins’ Barnes & Noble in Charles Village by local residents was that there were not enough books. And unlike other stores in the chain, there was no music, either.

Barnes & Noble College Booksellers, a private sister company of publicly traded Barnes & Noble Inc., has operated the Hopkins’ bookstore in Gilman Hall’s basement since 1981. The store moved into its new — and more visible — digs on the ground floor of the residential Charles Commons building.

As part of a college town trend, Hopkins and Barnes & Noble partnered with developers to create an “academic superstore” on St. Paul Street, a block from campus. The result is somewhere between its traditional college bookstore and mega-retail model. The plan is simple: Retain students, faculty, alumni and parents as clients while enticing the community to become regular customers.

“But the store is just too small,” said Jerry Cooper, a Hopkins faculty member and Charles Village resident since 1968. “There is not enough square feet to do everything they want to do.”

The second floor is filled with textbooks — still the store’s first mission, manager Paul Lynch said. The first floor has the traditional coffee shop, but the space is dominated by a large section of Hopkins clothing, gift items and gear. The opening coincided with parents weekend.

“If it said ‘Hopkins’ on it, parents were buying it,” said Amy Peyrot, a sophomore working at the store. “There were some people asking about music,” she added. “I sent them down to Record and Tape Traders.”

There are roughly 850 Barnes & Noble retail stores in the United States, like the ones in Towson and the Inner Harbor, and 525 college stores. The hybrid “superstore” makes up a tiny percentage, but it’s growing. Lynch noted similar models at Yale and Harvard, and said Wilkes and Kings College in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., are getting into the act by sharing a new academic superstore.

The downside at the Hopkins store, however, is a Barnes & Noble’s with only 25 percent to 30 percent of the titles found at a full-size store.

“And we’re still trying to work out the mix of what we carry,” Lynch said.

“That will evolve. Eventually, I think we’ll lean back more towards the academic side,” rather than the clothing etc., he said. “I think Charles Village probably is looking for more titles, like our faculty.”

rcassie@baltimoreexaminer.com

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