Description
Blackwell UK, also known as Blackwell's and Blackwell Group, is a British academic book retailer and library supply service owned by Waterstones. It was founded in 1879 by Benjamin Henry Blackwell, after whom the chain is named, on Broad Street, Oxford. The brand now has a chain of 18 shops, and an accounts and library supply service. It employs around 1000 staff in its divisions.
The Broad Street branches, which include speciality music and art/poster shops, remained the only ones until expansion in the early 1990s, when at peak after taking over Heffers in Cambridge in 1999 and James Thin in Scotland in 2002, the company had more than 70 outlets. Its library supply chain serves an international market, but parts were sold off in 2009, with the North American arm of Blackwell Book Services and the Australian business James Bennett sold to Baker & Taylor for their academic arm YBP Library Services. The group were also publishers, under the Blackwell publishing imprint, which published more than 800 journals when it was sold to John Wiley & Sons in 2007 for £572 million to form Wiley-Blackwell.
The Blackwell family ran the company until 2022, with an ownership divided between voting shares owned by the family and wealth shares owned by family and others. There was a public dispute in 2002 between Julian "Toby" Blackwell, the current owner of the group, and Nigel Blackwell, the former chairman of the publishing arm, about the possible sale of the publishing business. This led to an offer of £300 million from Taylor & Francis and to an eventual deal with John Wiley & Son in 2006, as a result of which Nigel Blackwell and Toby's son Philip Blackwell left the business, leaving Toby Blackwell the sole family member still involved in running the company. Other family voting shares were held by a trust, which Toby's shares would transfer on his death, eventually bringing an end to the Blackwell family involvement with the company. Toby Blackwell announced in 2009 that the wealth shares would be distributed between staff, transforming the company into an employee-partnership, similar to that of retailer John Lewis, when the company returned to profitability having spent several years experiencing losses. The company reported it was expecting to return to profit in 2012.
In February 2022, the UK book chain Waterstones, itself under the umbrella of Elliott Management Corporation, bought Blackwell's.
