Barnes & Noble will open a new store in Fort Worth ahead of the 2026 holiday season. Here’s everything you need to know.
Fort Worth influencers, planning your BookTok content is about to get a whole lot easier. On Monday, Barnes & Noble filed with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation to open a brand new 20,000-square foot store near West 7th Street. An Office Depot previously occupied the building that Barnes & Noble is eyeing in that Montgomery Plaza shopping center. Roughly $500,000 in renovations will need to be completed before the bookstore is up and running, and construction is tentatively scheduled to begin sometime in July. With the work (hopefully) wrapping up in October, the new location may be ready to welcome customers before the holiday season officially kicks off.
Fort Worth was previously home to several Barnes & Noble stores, including Sundance Square’s two-story retailer that shuttered its doors all the way back in 2013. A secondary location near University Park Village closed around the same time. The one on Hulen Street is still alive and well, as are the Hurst, Arlington, Burleson, and Southlake stores, but it’ll be nice to welcome another B&N to the community in about seven months or so. This announcement also serves as a reassuring confirmation of the resurgence of traditional brick and mortar bookstores. As The Atlantic and other outlets have pointed out recently, several factors are contributing to Barnes & Noble’s ability to write a new chapter for itself after it looked like the retailer was going to close the book on its success (bad puns very much intended).
Barnes & Noble has grown in popularity in recent years
Like many other bookstores—both independent and chain—Barnes & Noble has struggled to compete with Amazon for a good stretch of years. After the company was taken over by Elliott Investment Management in 2019 though, it started to see a positive trend in popularity. Along with the Fort Worth location, 59 other stores will open throughout the US in 2026. A spokesperson for the retailer said, “Barnes & Noble is enjoying a period of tremendous growth as the strategy to hand control of each bookstore to its local booksellers has proven so successful. In 2025, Barnes & Noble opened more new bookstores in a single year than it had in the whole decade from 2009 to 2019.”
Barnes & Noble’s CEO, James Daunt, told The Atlantic, “We’re actually repopulating a devastated landscape that needs bookstores.” While many consumers gravitate toward shopping at local, independent bookstores, these options aren’t always available. By opening more Barnes & Noble stores, the company is hoping to reach readers who don’t have access to smaller bookstores while tailoring each location to local culture to provide a similar mom-and-pop experience. Every store is allowed to create displays of books that are most appealing to its customers, such as titles written by local authors or covering topics that are meaningful to the community.
Another reason why bookstores have been coming back into the mainstream consciousness? TikTok, of course. Many influencers and content creators have flocked to Barnes & Noble as a place to film their videos and engage with the BookTok community. For Daunt, this is an added bonus. “One of the great joys of chain bookstores is they have a certain anonymous and wholly democratic, with a small d, welcome to them,” he said. By welcoming influencers, as well as families who are seeking a free space to spend time, Barnes & Noble is operating as a safe haven of sorts for those on all different stops of their reading journeys.
Oh, and did we mention that the new Fort Worth location will have a cafe too? Because there’s really nothing better than browsing the shelves with an iced coffee as you find your next great read.
