NEW YORK (AP) — Leonard Riggio, a self-proclaimed, brash outsider who transformed the publishing industry who built Barnes & Noble into the nation’s most powerful bookseller before his company was overtaken by the rise of Amazon.com, has died at the age of 83.
Riggio died Tuesday “after a valiant battle with Alzheimer’s disease,” according to a statement released by his family. He had stepped down as chairman in 2019 after the chain was sold to hedge fund Elliott Advisors.
“His leadership spanned decades, during which he not only grew the company, but also nurtured a culture of innovation and a love of reading,” Barnes & Noble said in a statement.
Riggio’s nearly half-century reign began in 1971, when he used a $1.2 million loan to buy the Barnes & Noble name and flagship store on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue. He acquired hundreds of new stores over the next 20 years and, in the 1990s, launched what became a national empire of “supermarkets” that combined the discount prices and massive capacity of a chain with the cozy appeal of couches, reading chairs and coffee shops.
“Our bookstores were designed to be welcoming, not intimidating,” Riggio told The New York Times in 2016. “They weren’t elitist places. You could come in, get a cup of coffee, sit and read a book for as long as you wanted, use the restroom. These were innovations that we had that no one thought were possible.”
He grew up in working-class New York, liked to say that he preferred socializing with his childhood friends to his fellow business leaders, and was informal enough with his associates that he earned the nickname “Lenny.” But in his day, no one in the book business was more feared. With the power to make a given book a bestseller, or a flop, to alter the market on a whim, Riggio could terrify publishers simply by suggesting that prices were too high or that he could sign contracts with bestsellers like Stephen King And John Grisham and publish them himself. He even tried to buy the country’s largest book wholesaler, Ingram, in 1999, but backed out after encountering resistance from the government.
By the late 1990s, an estimated one in eight books sold in the United States was purchased through the chain, where tabletop displays were so valuable that publishers paid thousands of dollars to have their books included. Thousands of independent sellers went bankrupt, even though Riggio insisted he was expanding the market by opening stores in neighborhoods where there were no existing stores. Instead, independent owners reported being overwhelmed by competition from Barnes & Noble and Borders Book Group, with the rival chains sometimes setting up stores near each other and the local business.
Barnes & Noble became so well-known as a giant that one of the most popular romantic comedies of the 1990s, “You’ve Got Mail,” starred Tom Hanks as a Fox Books executive and Meg Ryan as the owner of a dying independent store in Manhattan.
“We’re going to win them over with our size, our discounts, our deep seats and our cappuccino,” Hanks’ character says confidently. “They’re going to hate us at first, but we’ll get them.”
The acrimony of independent booksellers
For a while, it seemed like the industry debate was a permanent response to Barnes & Noble. Publishers were known to change a book’s cover or title simply because a Barnes & Noble executive objected. “Angela’s Ashes” author Frank McCourt was condemned by the American Booksellers Association, the independent trade association, after agreeing to appear in a Barnes & Noble ad. On the floor of the industry’s annual national trade show, long organized by the ABA, employees of independent stores whistled at attendees wearing Barnes & Noble badges.
When the novelist Russell BanksSpeaking at the 1995 Barnes & Noble annual shareholder meeting, stating that he was both a shareholder and a satisfied B&N customer, some independent sellers stopped carrying his books.
“Please know that I will never read, buy or sell another word of your writing,” wrote Richard Howorth, owner of Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi. “These are the kindest things I can think to say to you.”
Tensions led to legal action when the ABA announced on the eve of the 1994 convention that it was suing Barnes & Noble and five major publishers for unfair business practices. Some publishers were so angry that they boycotted the gathering the following year and did not return until after the ABA sold the show to Reed Exhibitions. In 1998, the ABA sued Barnes & Noble and Borders for unfair business practices (both cases were settled out of court).
Internet is changing the way books are sold
Riggio entered the 2000s at the height of his power, with more than 700 supermarkets and hundreds of other retail outlets. But online commerce was growing rapidly, and Barnes & Noble, with its roots in brick-and-mortar retail, lacked the imagination and flexibility of the Seattle startup that called itself “the world’s largest bookstore,” Amazon.com. The online giant launched in 1995 by Jeff Bezos grew in popularity throughout the 2000s and by the early 2010s had replaced Barnes & Noble with innovations such as the Kindle e-book reader and the Amazon Prime subscription service.
Bezos compares himself to David defeating Goliath, although the contrast between the two leaders also recalls an Aesop fable: the muscular and mustachioed Riggio, son of a boxer, overthrown by the quick and intelligent Bezos.
“We are big booksellers, we know how to do it,” Riggio said. recognized in The Times in 2016. “We were not built to be a technology company.”
Barnes & Noble launched its own website in the late 1990s, but initiatives like the Nook e-reader and a self-publishing platform couldn’t stop Amazon. Even the collapse of Borders after the 2008-09 economic crisis didn’t have an impact on Barnes & Noble, which, after decades of expansion, closed more than 100 stores between 2009 and 2019.
An unlikely ally of independent booksellers
At the time of Riggio’s retirement, independent retailers saw the chain not as a threat, but as an ally in the fight against Amazon to keep brick-and-mortar stores alive. At the 2018 Booksellers Convention, Riggio and ABA CEO Oren Teicherformer enemies in business and in court, congratulated each other at a joint appearance.
“A few years ago, it would have been impossible to imagine that I would be here and doing what I’m about to do (introducing Riggio),” Teicher said at the time. “The fact is that our business is stronger and American readers benefit when there is a vibrant, healthy network of physical bookstores across the country.”
In the 2010s, Barnes & Noble seemed uncontested and undesirable. The board announced in 2010 that the company was for sale, but no one offered to buy it. Four CEOs left in five years, and Barnes & Noble’s stock fell 60% between 2015 and 2018. More rumors of a sale persisted for months before Elliott Advisors, which had previously bought the British chain Waterstones, bought Barnes & Noble for $638 million and hired Waterstones CEO James Daunt to run B&N.
“I don’t miss being a businessman, I miss that. But I do miss being a bookseller, helping find books to recommend to customers,” Riggio told Publishers Weekly in 2021.
Riggio’s roots and his beginnings in bookselling
For Riggio, bookselling and family often overlapped. His brother Steve Riggio was for years a vice president of Barnes & Noble, and another brother, Vincent “Jimi” Riggio, helped run a shipping company that shipped the store’s books. After being interviewed in 1974 by the trade publication College Store Executive, Leonard Riggio met for coffee with the editor, Louise Gebbia, who became his second wife seven years later. (Riggio had three children, two with his first wife, one with his second.)
Leonard S. Riggio was the eldest son of a professional boxer (who twice beat Rocky Graziano) who became a taxi driver and tailor. From childhood, he progressed quickly, skipping two grades and attending one of the city’s top high schools, Brooklyn Tech. He studied metallurgical engineering at New York University’s night school before focusing on business, and by day he immersed himself in the world of bookselling and the growing cultural rebellion of the 1960s.
As a department manager at the campus bookstore, he learned enough to drop out of school and open a competing bookstore, SBX (Student Book Exchange), in 1965, where he allowed student activists to use the copier to print copies of antiwar tracts. SBX was so successful that it bought several other campus bookstores and was in a position to buy Barnes & Noble and its only Manhattan store in 1971. A few years later, it became the rare bookstore to run television commercials, with the slogan “Barnes & Noble! Of course! Of course!”
Riggio and the independent community might have seemed to have opposing values, but they shared a love of reading and the arts as well as a liberal political outlook. Riggio was a generous philanthropist and a staunch supporter of Democratic politicians. He was even friends with consumer activist and presidential candidate Ralph Naderwhich starred Riggio, Ted Turner And Yoko Ono among others in his 2009 novel “Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!”, in which Nader imagines a progressive revolution from above.
“Ever since he was a kid growing up in Brooklyn, he had a visceral reaction to the way working-class people and the poor were treated on a daily basis,” Nader wrote of Riggio, who sometimes stood out from his peers. When some 200 business leaders were surveyed by Fortune magazine in the 1990s about their political views, only Riggio supported raising workers’ wages.
“Money can become a burden, like something you carry on your shoulders,” he told New York magazine in 1999. “My nature is to be a pain in the ass, but my role is to help people.”
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This story has been updated to correct the names of Riggio’s second wife and one of his brothers. They are Louise Gebbia, not Louise Altavilla, and Vincent “Jimi,” not Thomas.
