The story
In 1951, Pam Joseph, in partnership with Philip Joseph's mother, Pauline, purchased a small second-hand bookshop in the centre of Johannesburg and renamed it Exclusive Books.
Philip Joseph expanded the business by setting up a further branch in 1954 in Hillbrow, then one of the most densely populated areas in the world. The bookstore offered late night and Sunday trading, contributing to its growth. The Hillbrow store closed in 1993, and within the same year, the Hyde Park store became the group's flagship. It was the largest bookshop of its kind in Southern Africa at the time.
In 1998, it launched the Fanatics loyalty program, which grew to a membership of 170,000 members by 2001. In 1999, Exclusive Books introduced Seattle Coffee Company cafés adjoining eighteen of the book stores.
Until 2012, they sponsored an annual book prize called the Exclusive Books Boeke Prize.
On 22 September 2013, it was announced that Exclusive Books, and its sister company Van Schaik Bookstore, were being sold by TMG to a private consortium led by Medu Capital, for a total of R435 million.
At the conclusion of the sale, the company briefly traded under the name Jadeite Trading (Pty) Ltd Trading As Exclusive Books, before being re-registered as Exclusive Books Group (Pty) Ltd. On 21 August 2014, the company announced its new brand and a shift in its corporate focus, including the introduction of its own café brand, EB Café.
In July 2017, Market Theatre Foundation partnered with Exclusive Books.
In June 2020, Exclusive Books announced that it would host all then-upcoming book launches online via Zoom, to comply with COVID-19 regulations.
From Wikipedia’s article on Exclusive Books, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4