London Evening Standard
Not content with running his six eponymous bookshops in London’s smartest neighbourhoods, James Daunt has now turned around the nation’s biggest bricks and mortar bookseller, Waterstones. Hermione Eyre meets him to talk vlogger power, Kindle culture and how to save our bookshops in the online age
He's got the power: James Daunt (Picture: Matthew Stylianou)
Shock news just in: bookshops are rallying. Waterstones is looking likely to break even this year after ‘sensational’ sales on Black Friday last month. Its managing director James Daunt receives my congratulations warily as we sit in an engine room at Waterstones on Kensington High Street, a world away from the teeming shop floor. ‘Not many businesses leap with joy when they break even,’ he says, ‘but given where we’ve been, it is quite an achievement. We came within a millisecond of losing everything. We were loss-making, dead in a ditch.’
He’s not given to overstatement, this man with an urbane, gentlemanly manner. But the Amazon effect, coupled with encroaching e-readers and tough market conditions in the UK, meant that by 2011 the HMV group was willing to sell Waterstones for £53.5m. Enter the Russian oligarch Alexander Mamut, who really liked his local bookshop, Daunt Books in Holland Park. He bought Waterstones and appointed James Daunt as MD to turn it around. (Daunt still owns the Daunt shops, but is not involved in the day-to-day running of them.)
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