B. Dalton Bookseller history

August 1966: Dayton's opens its first B. Dalton Bookseller at Southdale Center.

By mid-1968 there were 12 B. Dalton bookstores in Arizona, California, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, and Wisconsin.

Among the film colony in attendance were Charlie Chaplin (who complained about the prices) and Marlene Dietrich (whom one customer reportedly mistook for a clerk). The Pickwick chain grew to 16 by 1972.

In 1976 another Dayton Hudson subsidiary, Pickwick Book Shops, Inc., was merged into B. Dalton.

In a 1979 issue of Saturday Review, a college journalism director complained that among the 40,000 titles in Edina--the original B. Dalton store--"serious readers would look in vain for anything of real interest.

In 1983 B. Dalton opened Pickwick Books as a discount chain, establishing three outlets on a trial basis in Columbus, Ohio.

November 1986: Dayton Hudson sells B. Dalton stores to Barnes & Noble Inc., catapulting Barnes & Noble onto the national scene and making it the second-largest bookseller in the country.

The mall’s book store switched names to B. Dalton Bookseller in February, making it the only location for the brand that Barnes & Noble acquired in 1987, according to an unsigned statement sent in response to questions from the Orlando Sentinel.

By the summer of 1988 Riggio, the chief of both Barnes & Noble and B. Dalton, was spending $5 million a year on spot television commercials in which "Books Dalton," a bookish-looking, bespectacled, suspenders-wearing character, promoted the chain's best-selling titles.

In September 1990 B. Dalton opened the first of what it said would be a series of large stores stocking more than 100,000 titles.