A discount bookseller inside the Haft family’s Dart Group.

Crown Books was founded in the Washington, D.C., area in 1977 by Robert M. Haft, under the umbrella of the Haft family’s Dart Group, according to the International Directory of Company Histories (1998), in a profile reproduced by FundingUniverse. The profile says the company was incorporated in Delaware in 1981, and that Dart Group held a controlling interest in it, held the leases on its corporate offices and provided some administrative services. English Wikipedia says Robert Haft started the chain with money borrowed from his father, the Washington businessman Herbert Haft, and that the Dart Group umbrella also covered Trak Auto, Shoppers Food Warehouse, Total Beverage and Dart Drug.

The company was run from Maryland. The company profile says pricing, inventory and advertising decisions were all made at the corporate offices in Landover, Maryland, and The New York Times also described Crown as based in Landover in March 2001; English Wikipedia gives the headquarters a Largo, Maryland, postal address in Prince George’s County.

Crown’s shops were built for convenience rather than for browsing in a mall. The company profile says Crown stores were usually in strip shopping centres and on urban streets rather than in enclosed malls, and were placed in clusters to make advertising go further and to keep distribution costs down; it adds that every store location was leased. It names Washington, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, San Diego, Houston and Seattle as the clusters at the time it was written, and English Wikipedia adds Baltimore, Philadelphia, Sacramento and Portland to the cities where the chain traded.

Classic Crown and Super Crown.

The chain ran two store formats under one name. The company profile says the small Classic Crown Books stores had been the backbone of the company since 1977, and that from 1990 Crown moved to a larger superstore format, Super Crown Books, which stocked many more titles and added greeting cards, games, computer software and gift items. It says Super Crown interiors were standardised so that new stores could open to shoppers quickly, and that through the mid-1990s the company closed Classic Crown stores while it opened superstores.

Advertising carried the founder’s face. English Wikipedia says Crown became known in the 1980s and early 1990s for advertising campaigns showing Robert Haft sitting on large stacks of books, with a caption saying that books cost too much, that this was why he had opened Crown Books, and that customers would never pay full price again. The company profile says the chain advertised chiefly through newspapers, supported its stores with author appearances, book signings, children’s story hours and reading groups, and described its employees as dedicated to what it called “Stand Out Service.”

The range widened beyond print. The company profile says Crown added audio tapes in 1985, together with videos connected to authors whose books it carried, and English Wikipedia says Robert Haft planned a Crown Software venture in 1986. English Wikipedia names Jose Gonzales and Jeanne Herrick as the executives who ran day-to-day operations and merchandising in the early years, with the same pairing of roles repeated as the chain entered California and later Chicago.

In 1993, amid a dispute within the Haft family over control of the Dart Group companies, Robert Haft was removed from his positions at Crown, according to the company profile and English Wikipedia. The profile says the company then went through a run of management changes, and English Wikipedia names Glenn E. Hemmerle as president and chief executive from October 1992 to June 1994, followed by Steve Stevens, who came from Circuit City.

Bookshops as brands.

A store chain that has closed leaves its identity behind in a scattered set of objects: the lettering that once ran along a shopfront, the cover of a mail-order catalogue, a printed shopping bag, a receipt, a gift card or a television advertisement recorded off the air. None of these was made to last. Signs were taken down when leases ended, catalogues went out with the recycling, and bags were reused until they wore through, so what survives tends to be whatever someone chose to keep.

That makes the visual record of a defunct retailer patchy and uneven. Photographs of storefronts, archived web pages and library or museum holdings can show how a name was set and coloured at particular moments, but they rarely show the whole sequence of changes, and they almost never explain who designed a mark or why it was redrawn. A name may also outlive its stores, passing to new owners who use it online or on a different kind of business.

Each guide in this group therefore keeps to what dated sources record about the chain, its owners and what became of its name, and treats the palette and typeface here as an interpretation rather than a reconstruction.

Two bankruptcies and a name passed on.

The chain’s end came in two stages. English Wikipedia says Crown entered bankruptcy in 1998 under chief executive Anna Currence and emerged in the spring of 2000 with Charlie Cumello, a former Waldenbooks chief executive, in charge. The New York Times reported on 7 March 2001 that Crown had filed for Chapter 11 protection in February and that Books-a-Million had agreed, subject to court approval, to buy the inventory and take over the leases of stores in the Washington and Chicago areas; English Wikipedia says the remaining Crown stores had closed by July 2001. It adds that Books-a-Million remodelled the stores it took over in 2001 and 2002 and hired many former Crown staff.

The name outlived the company. English Wikipedia says that after the 2001 liquidation Andy Weiss, owner of a bookseller called A&S Booksellers, bought the Crown Books name and trademark and applied it to his stores, and that in 2007 Ward Albright bought the right to share the name and opened further bookstores under it, selling remaindered books and publishers’ overstock at a discount. It cites a June 2005 report in the San Diego County paper the North County Times and a November 2007 report in the Cupertino Courier.

The Crown story also sits inside the wider rise of the book superstore. The company profile places Crown’s move to Super Crown stores alongside the growth of Borders, Barnes & Noble and Books-a-Million in the early 1990s, and the Publishers Weekly history of Borders Group published in February 2011 describes the same period as the superstore wars between Borders and Barnes & Noble.

For a design guide, Crown Books shows a bookseller whose identity was built on price and on its founder’s own image in newspaper advertising. Compare Borders, a rival from the same superstore era, and Barnes & Noble. For this guide we use red, gold and newsprint with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Crown Books’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.