Just two years after opening inside the Saint Louis Galleria, Barnes & Noble is coming back for more in the St. Louis market. The bookseller will open a 25,000-square-foot store in Creve Coeur on November 18, taking over the former Office Depot space on Olive Boulevard, just west of I-270 in the Heritage Place strip mall.
If you wrote off Barnes & Noble as another Amazon casualty — fair, plenty of people did — the company’s comeback is one of the more surprising retail stories of the decade. Under CEO James Daunt, a veteran British bookseller, the chain ditched the playbook that ran it into the ground. As Daunt once put it, he brought “the principles of independent bookselling to a chain” — giving local managers real power and clearing out the random merchandise that had little to do with books.
In St. Louis, that local manager is Jolene Crismon Carter, who also launched the Galleria store in 2024. She says the Creve Coeur opening will bring the region’s total to nine Barnes & Noble stores, and she hints there could be more coming. The company plans to open roughly 60 new stores this year and about the same number next year. “Stay tuned… there may be more exciting news to come in the St. Louis market,” she said.
The Creve Coeur location is built on the company’s newest store prototype, designed around discovery and curiosity — a place to browse, linger, and spend time, not just transact. It’ll include a cafe serving Starbucks beverages, plus vinyl records, toys and games, and a full newsstand alongside the books.
And Barnes & Noble isn’t alone in the St. Louis book renaissance. Reading for pleasure may be down nationally over the past two decades, but bookstores are opening at a clip: the American Booksellers Association reports 605 new brick-and-mortar, pop-up, mobile, and online shops opened across the country last year, with most members reporting year-over-year sales increases.
Locally, the momentum is easy to spot. Leviathan opened on South Grand. The Public Intellectual, a Spanish-English pop-up, has been hosting events. Cookbook shop Anchovy Book Co. outgrew its tiny space and moved into a bigger Cherokee Street storefront. And the Unbound Independent Bookstore bookmobile keeps popping up in Eureka, Wildwood, Cottleville, and beyond.
The Creve Coeur grand opening is November 18. Book lovers west of the river won’t have to wait much longer.
