Furet du Nord was originally a fur shop located on
Rue de la Vieille-Comédie in Lille. High school principal Georges Poulard transformed the fur shop into a bookstore in 1936. Despite the nature of the business changing, the new owner decided to keep the original name,
Furet du Nord. Dissatisfied with his position as a salesman and the shop's size, Callens wanted to purchase the shop despite not having enough money. Later in 1950, he told his dreams of buying the bookshop to his dairymaid friend, Florence, who took a tin box from the cellar wrapped in a newspaper containing her savings. Callens bought the bookstore with the savings the next day. While at a café, Callens heard that Galleries Barbès was closing their furniture store on the Place du Général-de-Gaulle in Lille, and he had the idea of moving
Furet there. There were other contenders for the location such as the Renault company, so Callens made his first trip to Paris to plead his case with the management of
Galleries Barbès. It initially had a space of 20 m2 which later expanded to 600 m2. a youth department was built in the basement in 1970. On 15 October 2009, Furet launched furet.com and began distributing more than a million books on the Web. In mid-September 2010, the eleventh bookstore opened in the
Englos-les-Géants shopping centre. In June 2011, a new boutique opened in
Cité Europe in
Coquelles, near Calais. At the end of October 2011, the first
Furet du Nord bookstore outside the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region opened; it was in the
La Vache-Noire shopping centre, in Arcueil, south of Paris. The brand continued its expansion in the shopping centres of
Île-de-France by settling in that of
Le Kremlin-Bicêtre, named Okabé, 16 October 2012. In 2013, the brand returned to
Dunkerque, after having left in 2000. It replaced the Virgin Megastore after it went into liquidation.
Furet du Nord made an offer to purchase the Sauramps bookstore in Montpellier, but on 19 July 2017, the Montpellier tribunal de commerce chose a different offer by François Fontès, head of Amétis, a real estate group specializing in social housing. In 2018,
Furet du Nord expanded outside of France with the purchase of Chapitre.be (formerly Agora) which has two stores in Belgium. In November and December 2018,
Furet du Nord announced the acquisition of Decitre, which opened up access to the Rhône-Alpes region, in addition to an increased presence on the Internet. This acquisition was formalized on 18 January 2019, making
Furet du Nord the fourth-largest bookseller in France. The group achieved a turnover of €82 million in 2018, of which €52 million is in the book market. == Location of stores ==