Walking into the big Barnes & Noble store in New York’s Union Square a few years ago, a book lover might have been surprised by what they found: an absence of books. Barnes & Noble shops were once full of other things: Lego sets, calendars, Funko Pop figurines, puzzles, chocolates – all with their own display shelves. The books were mainly upstairs.

Not any more. Now, “you’re not seeing much beyond books”, says James Daunt, Barnes & Noble’s British chief executive, standing on the first floor of the giant bookstore, the second-largest in the US. “I mean, there are other things, but it’s unequivocally book-driven.”

On a spring afternoon, the books seem to be successfully drawing a stream of browsers to the four-storey shop. People popping in from a run flip through mysteries and romance paperbacks near the front, while backpack-wearing teens giggle excitedly in the young adult section on the second floor. They pay little attention to the soft-spoken man walking through the store in a grey suit. “I’m not wearing my bookseller threads,” Daunt says with a laugh. “This is not what a bookseller looks like.”

Barnes & Noble is the US’s largest remaining book chain but, under Daunt, each of the chain’s approximately 600 stores is meant to operate like an independent bookstore – unique and highly curated to fit a local community. The aim is to offer something completely different from Amazon, where about half of all print books sold in the US are bought.

“Amazon doesn’t care about books … a book is just another thing in a warehouse,” Daunt says. “Whereas bookstores are places of discovery. They’re just really nice spaces.”

At Union Square, one section is dedicated to fiction and nonfiction about New York City. Another table, labelled “BookTok”, displays books that have become viral hits thanks to TikTok’s powerful influencers.

“It doesn’t matter what table you’re looking at, you’re probably looking at a reasonably intelligent selection of books that feels appropriate for here,” Daunt says. “This will be different from Fifth Avenue, which will be different from the Upper West Side, and we’re just talking about [New York]. Whereas when I turned up, it was identical everywhere.”

Daunt, 59, quit his job as an investment banker to launch Daunt Books in London in 1990. His first store, in Marylebone, grew into a chain, and in 2011, he was appointed managing director of Waterstones in the hope that an independent bookseller’s playbook could resurrect the troubled chain. The plan worked, and in 2017 Waterstones announced its first profit in years.

Meanwhile, in the US, the fortunes of Barnes & Noble were following the downward trajectory of other bricks-and-mortar businesses that could not keep up with online competitors. Union Square is testament to that: a Toys R Us once flanked the bookshop to the east, a Virgin Megastore to the south. Both are gone.

Fighting to stay in the game, the company closed stores across the US. By 2018, 400 branches nationwide had closed and thousands of employees had been laid off. Elliott Investment Management, the New York hedge fund that owns Waterstones, acquired Barnes & Noble in 2019 for $683m, along with the debt the company had accumulated over the years. It quickly set Daunt up as chief executive.

Daunt’s tactic at Barnes & Noble has been the same as the one he used at Waterstones – taking the “corporate” out of a corporate bookstore chain.

Barnes & Noble, he says, had been running itself like a conventional corporate retailer. Each store was the “same, same, same” – something that works at stores such as Staples, the office supplies chain and the bookshop’s neighbour in Union Square, but not at other places, he says. “At Staples, when you walk in, you definitely want consistency. You want to be able to buy your printer ink, your notepads, your pens. Staples basically runs the same store everywhere, and you as a consumer are happy because it’s the same everywhere.”

Barnes & Noble’s corporate leadership, he says, “wanted to behave like conventional retailers”. “It wasn’t because they were stupid or because they were idle. It was simply that they didn’t understand bookselling.”

Specifically, they did not understand the importance of curation. For example, the stores had “co-op” agreements with publishers that allowed the latter to dictate what titles were in prime display spots, such as a store window or a table near the entrance, for a yearly fee.

“You have the same books on the table, the same books on the shelf, the same arrangement,” Daunt says. “You end up having stores full of books your customers don’t want to buy.”

Though Barnes & Noble was making revenue from these deals, Daunt argues it was ultimately losing more. With the co-op agreements, which he has now ended, the chain was returning 30% of its inventory unsold – about $1bn worth of books. Now, that’s down to 7%. “When you’re running your bookstore properly, it’s about 3%,” he says.

The company was also tracking how many people coming into the store