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The case is written based on publicly available data from primary sources like the company’s annual reports and presentations and from secondary sources, as indicated in the references.

Barnes & Noble Inc. (B&N), one of the oldest and largest American retail booksellers founded in 1917, was facing a grim business situation underpinned by a fall in demand, a change in consumer preference and stiff competition. After almost a century of being in the business, B&N was experiencing a fall in market share and weak stock market performance. In 2019, the company was sold to Elliot Advisors – a hedge fund – for US$638m. With the appointment of new chief executive officer (CEO) James Daunt in August 2019, a man known for the turnaround of similar businesses, B&N expected its business’s revival and reorganization strategy to turn profitable. Its long-term strategy of beating competitors with its offerings’ sheer volume and low prices was no longer viable. The turmoil was compounded by top management crises with the repeated changes and ousting of several CEOs in a short span, alongside the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns in 2020 and 2021. Daunt was considering how to overcome the crisis and act fast to reposition the company and regain the loyalty of its customers. Was there more that the company could do to improve the company’s position and restore profitability?

The case can be used in strategic management and entrepreneurship classes at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. The case can be used in an investment analysis and management course to teach students the industry analysis technique using Porter’s five forces model.

In early April this year there was much media coverage of a government preliminary report that was stated to have commented about the eating habits of a sample of 3000 children aged 10–15 years old. The report was said to have contained results which indicated that many children were eating foods high in animal fat and sugar, while low in fibre. Diets were said to be deficient in vegetables and fruit, and in lean meat. Concern was expressed about the levels of vitamins and minerals in children's diets. We will have to await publication of the full report before commenting further, but it is appropriate to mention it now because it provides a useful context in which to view the results of a study of school meals in the ILEA carried out at the University of Surrey. Michael Kipps MSc, Carol Noble BSc and James Thomson PhD describe their study and summarise the results.

ALL who have visited Liverpool for any length of time have affection for her. She lies alongside a noble river, watched over by the lofty Liver building and the perhaps more architecturally perfect offices of the Mersey Dock authorities. Even in these days, when the very largest ships have been diverted to Southampton, splendid vessels come from and go to the ends of the earth almost daily. The river is the essential fact about Liverpool; she was born of the river and her waterfront is one of the world's rendezvous. As a city she compares favourably with any English town, and perhaps excels most in her few splendid buildings, amongst which the new and rapidly growing Cathedral takes first rank.

Cleaning and descaling of metals. An improved process is described for cleaning, descaling and deoxidation of metals, especially stainless steel. A treating bath acts directly on the scale or oxide itself. Advantages cited are the decrease in time required as compared with the acid‐pickling process, decrease in metal loss to 10 lb./ton, elimination of pickling‐waste disposal problem, reactivity of the bath with C, decreased etching of the metal surfaces, and low cost and simplicity of operation. Thus, in cleaning a Ni‐Cr alloy steel, the complete cycle for satisfactory oxide removal is as follows: 6 to 7 min. in fused NaOH + 5% NaNO3 at 900°F., or 4 to 5 min. at 950°F., water quench, and treatment in 10% HCl at 180° for 1 min. followed by 15 sec. in 15% HNO3 at 180°.—U.S. Pat. 2,678,289, James H. Noble, Rolfe Pottberg and Urlyn C. Tainton.

This chapter is an exercise in speaking, letting individuals speak for themselves insofar as possible. As Marx famously put it, “they cannot represent themselves, they must be represented.” The “they” were peasants, potato farmers in 1840s France, and by extension peasants, workers, and other lower class groups, not to mention women and minorities who rarely made it into the historical record, and even more rarely in their own words. To give “voice to the voiceless,” as the now old new social historians of the 1960s and 1970s put it, I consciously include here numerous speakers, arranged in two sets of different voices: quotes in the text and endnotes to further document and amplify points. With this plethora of voices, the aim is not to complicate but to speak clearly, listen carefully, and engage respectfully. To multiply the speakers speaking is the single best way to make two primary points concerning what is most important about the Chief Illiniwek mascot controversy: that the sheer number of individuals speaking out is in itself significant, and that this community colloquy all comes down to identity – who we are, individual identity, communal identity.

BY mid‐September when these words appear there may be the first touch of frost in the mornings : summer is irrecoverably over. There is yet, a week ahead, the Library Association Conference and not a few older librarians, who have a life‐long memory of Autumn conferences, are happy that we no longer hold them in May, that adolescent, variable month, but are able to catch again in the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness the pleasures we have had in our summer holidays this perfect year. The irony of it lies in the fact that there is precious little holiday in today's conference week ; we do not even have an excursion on the Friday. Such frivolities are beyond the great gatherings of multilateral interests that assemble. Time, too, has become almost sordidly precious.

In an article in Nutrition and Food Science in August 1982 a case was put forward for a closer co‐operation between those involved in nutrition education in schools and those concerned with the provision of school meals in the hope that this would help children to choose wisely from the increasing numbers of cash cafeterias now appearing in schools. But before such a meal choice scheme can be developed for use in guiding children's selection of food, a sound knowledge of their present food habits, particularly foods commonly chosen at lunchtime, is needed. A study being carried out at the University of Surrey on schools meals has provided the opportunity to collect baseline data concerning children's choice and their consumption of food at lunchtime in a variety of situations. Information relating food consumption at lunchtime to food intake for the whole day is also being collected.

WE begin a new year, in which we wish good things for all who work in libraries and care for them, in circumstances which are not unpropitious. At times raven voices prophesy the doom of a profession glued to things so transitory as books are now imagined to be, by some. Indeed, so much is this a dominant fear that some librarians, to judge by their utterances, rest their hopes upon other recorded forms of knowledge‐transmission; forms which are not necessarily inimical to books but which they think in the increasing hurry of contemporary life may supersede them. These fears have not been harmful in any radical way so far, because they may have increased the librarian's interest in the ways of bringing books to people and people to books by any means which successful business firms use (for example) to advertise what they have to sell. The modern librarian becomes more and more the man of business; some feel he becomes less and less the scholar; but we suggest that this is theory with small basis in fact. Scholars are not necessarily, indeed they can rarely be, bookish recluses; nor need business men be uncultured. For men of plain commonsense there need be few ways of life that are so confined that they exclude their followers from other ways and other men's ideas and activities. And, as for the transitoriness of books and the decline of reading, we ourselves decline to acknowledge or believe in either process. Books do disappear, as individuals. It is well that they do for the primary purpose of any book is to serve this generation in which it is published; and, if there survive books that we, the posterity of our fathers, would not willingly let die, it is because the life they had when they were contemporary books is still in them. Nothing else can preserve a book as a readable influence. If this were not so every library would grow beyond the capacity of the individual or even towns to support; there would, in the world of readers, be no room for new writers and their books, and the tragedy that suggests is fantastically unimaginable. A careful study, recently made of scores of library reports for 1951–52, which it is part of our editorial duty to make, has produced the following deductions. Nearly every public library, and indeed other library, reports quite substantial increases in the use made of it; relatively few have yet installed the collections of records as alternatives to books of which so much is written; further still, where “readers” and other aids to the reading of records, films, etc., have been installed, the use of them is most modest; few librarians have a book‐fund that is adequate to present demands; fewer have staffs adequate to the demands made upon them for guidance by the advanced type of readers or for doing thoroughly the most ordinary form of book‐explanation. It is, in one sense a little depressing, but there is the challenging fact that these islands contain a greater reading population than they ever had. One has to reflect that of our fifty millions every one, including infants who have not cut their teeth, the inhabitants of asylums, the illiterate—and, alas, there are still thousands of these—and the drifters and those whose vain boast is that “they never have time to read a book”—every one of them reads six volumes a year. A further reflection is that public libraries may be the largest distributors, but there are many others and in the average town there may be a half‐dozen commercial, institutional and shop‐libraries, all distributing, for every public library. This fact is stressed by our public library spending on books last year at some two million pounds, a large sum, but only one‐tenth of the money the country spent on books. There are literally millions of book‐readers who may or may not use the public library, some of them who do not use any library but buy what they read. The real figure of the total reading of our people would probably be astronomical or, at anyrate, astonishing.

The food habits of generations of people in the UK were subtly influenced by the traditional school dinners. Today those adults who love or loathe gravy, custard, mashed potatoes, boiled greens, prunes and semolina pudding may be able to trace their attitudes to school meals eaten ten, twenty or thirty years ago. Nowadays, when school caterers make every effort to serve only those foods which children will eat and enjoy — and which in many cases are identical with the foods children eat everywhere else — is it possible that school meals can influence and improve the food habits of future generations?

Performance measurement is increasingly important in every aspect of life today. Unfortunately, the main emphasis appears to be on historical measures, justifying or reporting actions after the event, rather than process measures, monitoring activities as they occur. Thus, existing performance measurement frameworks have shortcomings that may prevent them from being an effective control and predict mechanism for business operations. To address these shortcomings, this paper proposes the use of Burbidge's connectance concept and the Incremental Calculus approach for building an “indicative” scorecard for performance measurement. An example of this approach is given, and plans for further research are discussed.