Waldenbooks

Ghost Corp Apparel — resurrecting iconic corporate ghosts.

Walden Book Company began in 1933 as a rental-library business, then rode the paperback boom toward retail. Its first Waldenbooks store opened at Northway Mall in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1962. Before long, the little book counter had become a nationwide mall ritual: fluorescent lights, new-release tables, paperbacks, magazines, calendars, and one more thing you absolutely did not need.

The company moved its home office to Stamford, Connecticut, in 1948 and built a major corporate headquarters at 201 High Ridge Road in 1979. Carter Hawley Hale acquired Walden in 1969; Kmart acquired it in 1984. The chain expanded through the 1980s, including WaldenKids and Waldensoftware experiments, because apparently books alone were not sufficiently dangerous.

After Kmart acquired Borders in 1992, Waldenbooks, Borders, and Planet Music were combined into Borders Group in 1994. Waldenbooks announced it would leave Stamford and consolidate headquarters with Borders in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1995. Beginning in 2004, many locations were rebranded as Borders Express. Borders Group entered Chapter 11 on February 16, 2011; remaining stores closed during the liquidation that September.

Our Waldenbooks collection celebrates the mall-bookstore era: a time when a quick trip for one paperback somehow ended with a stack of magazines, a bookmark, and a calendar you would never hang.