About

About this project

I grew up in a Barnes & Noble that had green carpet, oak shelves up to the ceiling, and a painted band of author portraits running above the stacks. Most of them don't look like that anymore. This site keeps track of the ones that still do.

Why

Starting around 2016 and accelerating under new ownership, Barnes & Noble began refreshing its stores: lighter palette, lower fixtures, polished floors, a redesigned cafe, and a cleaner sans-serif logo. It's a defensible retail decision and the new stores are perfectly nice. It also quietly erased a specific interior that a whole generation spent its adolescence in, store by store, with no announcement and no record.

Nobody is keeping a list. So: a list. Not a protest, not a petition — a field guide, so that if you want to stand in one of the old ones again, you can find out where.

How the originality index works

"Un-remodeled" isn't binary. A store can keep its oak fixtures and lose the cafe, or get new paint over an intact frieze. So every store is scored against a checklist of 12 signifiers from the original build-out, weighted by how hard each one is to remove — a surviving music department tells you much more than a brass lamp. Add up what survives, divide by the 25 available points, and that's the index.

Markers nobody has checked count as absent rather than present. That means an unvisited store scores zero, and a partly-surveyed one scores low until someone fills in the gaps. The alternative — assuming the best about unseen stores — would make the numbers flattering and useless.

Where the data comes from

The 647 locations come from OpenStreetMap, whose Open Database License explicitly allows reuse with attribution. The snapshot in use was taken October 20, 2026 and is refreshed by a script in the repo. 185 of those records carry an official Barnes & Noble store number, which OSM mappers recorded as part of the store's website link.

I don't scrape barnesandnoble.com. Their store directory sits behind bot protection, and getting around that would mean defeating an access control somebody put there on purpose. OSM has the same facts under a license that invites this exact use, so there's no reason to go anywhere else.

Condition and status — the part that matters — is entirely human, and mostly not mine. It comes from readers who send in what they saw, plus the stores I've managed to get to myself. I read every report and write it into the store page, so there's a lag, but it also means somebody is reconciling reports that disagree instead of leaving a page to contradict itself.

Corrections

Store data gets stale fast and I will certainly have some of it wrong. If a store is mislocated, misjudged, or has been remodeled since its last report, the report form is the fastest way to fix it. Fixing the underlying location data is even better done upstream at OpenStreetMap, where it helps more than just this site.

Not affiliated

This is a personal project with no connection to Barnes & Noble Booksellers, Inc. I'm a customer who liked the old carpet. All trademarks belong to their owner, and nothing here should be read as their position on anything.