Leonard Riggio, the brash, charismatic, literary-minded businessman who, with the founding of the large Barnes & Noble chain, remodeled the bookselling enterprise as totally because the rise of the paperback had ever completed—and who was each a hero and a villain for it — died Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 83.
His demise from Alzheimer’s illness was introduced by his household.
Mr. Riggio, the son of a taxi driver, was simply 30 in 1971 when he purchased a run-of-the-mill, half-century-old bookstore in Decrease Manhattan referred to as Barnes & Noble and commenced turning it right into a literary big. Inside many years, it was the most important bookseller in the US, with a whole lot of supermarkets, many in locations that had beforehand been ebook deserts, similar to malls.
The retailers had been extra like shops than a typical bookstore: every supplied 1000’s of titles, together with cappuccinos and snacks, stationery and desk tchotchkes, an considerable number of magazines and newspapers, and a pleasant coverage that allowed browsers to linger for hours . (It helped that there have been public loos.) And every retailer was a welcoming, if monolithic, agora that additionally served as an oasis for folks and caregivers to unfold out within the youngsters’s ebook division’s huge aisles and skim to little ones you are a taxi.
Earlier than the flip of the millennium, it was estimated that one out of each eight non-academic books bought in the US was bought from Barnes & Noble or the smaller B. Dalton shops, which the corporate acquired in 1987. Publishers paid excessive premiums to to have their books displayed on Barnes & Noble’s expansive entrance tables, prime actual property that may make or break a title, although the shop shares many discounted titles from those self same publishers.
The corporate’s strong-arm practices upended the trade. Hundreds of impartial bookstores went out of enterprise as Barnes & Noble grew. And Mr. Riggio—a sublime Brooklyn-raised liberal and artwork lover dedicated to civil rights and democratic causes—discovered himself roundly vilified as probably the most loathsome unhealthy man within the publishing world and a neighborhood hitman and philistine.
“Why am I the predator, but when a pleasant impartial bookstore opens a department, it is like welcome to the Messiah?” he requested in an interview with The Wall Road Journal in 1992. “I feel each new bookstore needs to be celebrated, no matter her pedigree.’
In 1998, the American Booksellers Affiliation, the commerce group for impartial shops, sued Barnes & Noble and one other chain, Borders, for unfair commerce practices. The case was settled out of courtroom and each side declared the settlement a victory. (Borders filed for bankruptcy in 2011)
When Nora Ephron celebrated Barnes & Noble’s popularity as a company goliath in her 1998 romantic comedy You’ve got Received Mail—starring Tom Hanks as a grocery store supervisor, she slyly forged Joe Fox and Meg Ryan because the proprietor of the beloved neighborhood bookstore that his enterprise was falling aside—she hoped Mr. Riggio would possibly let her shoot the film in certainly one of his shops. Over dinner one evening at Verbena, a restaurant in Decrease Manhattan that has since closed, she tried to allure him into doing it. However Mr. Riggio, fearful about being forged because the villain in her script, objected.
“Belief me,” Ms. Ephron instructed him, as David D. Kirkpatrick later did reported in New York journal, “if I had been to do it your method, I might select John Travolta over Tom Hanks.”
Leonard Steven Riggio was born on February 28, 1941, on Mott Road within the Little Italy neighborhood of Manhattan and grew up within the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn. His mom, Lena (Cappuccio) Riggio, was a seamstress; his father, Stephen Riggio, was a taxi driver and former fighter who had twice defeated Rocky Graziano, the middleweight champion. Steven was a task mannequin for Lenny, the oldest of three brothers, a person so disciplined that he saved in form by leaping from his cab at site visitors lights to doing push-ups on the sidewalk.
Lenny skipped two grades earlier than attending Brooklyn Technical Excessive Faculty, a choose magnet college the place he studied drafting, structure and design. After graduating, he labored days as a clerk within the New York College bookstore and enrolled within the college’s evening college, the place he studied metallurgical engineering.
His studying preferences on the time had been traditional comics, till a paperback purchaser on the college bookstore launched him to the literary canon by giving him works by Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, and Albert Camus. He typically stated that his favourite ebook was Kafka’s Metamorphosis.
After two years of evening college, he dropped out, give up his day job and opened his personal school bookstore, SBX — the letters stand for Scholar Guide Trade — close to campus and commenced contracting to handle others.
A proud political leftist, he supplied his store’s basement and mimeograph machine to anti-war activists, together with a good friend of his Tibor Kalmanto allow them to print brochures there. Mr. Kalman, who would later be often known as the graphic design activist unhealthy boy, and his future spouse, the artist Myra Berman, additionally labored at SBX, sorting books.
A couple of years later, in 1971, Mr. Riggio, armed with a mortgage of $1.2 million (equal to about $9.3 million immediately), purchased Barnes & Noble, a bookstore on Fifth Avenue at 17 avenue which William Barnes and G. Clifford Noble was opened in 1917. He quickly commissioned Mr. Kalman to design the shop’s signature buying luggage, that includes a woodcut of a medieval scholar.
This was Mr. Kalman’s first design fee. For the subsequent eight years, as the corporate expanded past the textbook market and opened shops throughout the nation, he was Barnes & Noble’s design director. Mr. Riggio was recognized for his consideration to element, typically altering the design or lighting of a brand new retailer hours earlier than it opened. Within the first 5 years, annual gross sales on the Fifth Avenue retailer rose to $10 million from $1 million.
“It was thrilling,” Mayra Kalman he stated over the cellphone, recalling working the money register and writing promoting copy for the brand new firm. “Len and Tibor had been strong-willed eccentrics and collectively they did one thing unbelievable.”
Mr. Riggio met his future spouse, Louise Gebbia, when she was editor of the Faculty Retailer Govt, a commerce publication, and got here to interview him about his success. He took her out for espresso and melon. They married seven years later.
As the corporate grew, Mr. Riggio ran it as a small household enterprise. His brother Stephen serves as vice chairman and runs the net enterprise, launched in 1997; his brother Vincent, often known as Jimmy, labored for a delivery firm that delivered Barnes & Noble’s books. When Mr. Riggio took Barnes & Noble public in 1993, all of his staff acquired inventory choices.
However after many years of explosive progress, the corporate faltered when Amazon almost took over the market. Barnes & Noble misplaced greater than a billion {dollars} on its Nook e-reader, touted as a competitor to Amazon’s Kindle.
As its fortunes turned more and more precarious, Barnes & Noble discovered itself first within the arms of the ebook trade, which noticed it as a bulwark towards Amazon for its continued funding in brick-and-mortar shops. It has suffered a sequence of administration crises over the previous decade – Mr Riggio stepped down as chief government in 2002 however remained chairman – and struggled to show a revenue, closing greater than 150 shops. Lastly, in 2019, Barnes & Noble has been acquired from hedge fund Elliott Advisors for $683 million, and the issuers collectively breathed a sigh of aid.
“Shedding Barnes & Noble could be catastrophic for the trade,” Carolyn Reidy, president and CEO of Simon & Schuster, told The New York Times.
Mr. Riggio is survived by his spouse; his daughters, Lisa Rollo, Donna Cortese and Stephanie Bulger; his brother Stephen; and 4 grandchildren. His brother Vincent died in 2019. An early marriage resulted in divorce.
In 1999, Mr. Riggio’s internet price was estimated at $700 million (greater than $1.3 billion immediately), however his liberal enterprise insurance policies — elevating staff’ wages amongst them — made him an outlier amongst his fellow plutocrats. .
“Cash can turn out to be a burden, like one thing you carry in your shoulders,” he instructed Mr. Kirkpatrick of New York journal. “My nature is to be a ball catcher, however my function is to assist folks.”
His philanthropy was wide-ranging, specializing in the humanities, training and social justice. He funded Dia Beacon, the museum and artwork park in Beacon, NY. He put up $1 million to construct a library dedicated to books by African-American authors and books concerning the black expertise of the campus of the Youngsters’s Protection Fund in Clinton, Tennessee. He additionally funded the elegant minimalist campus chapel and chosen architect Maya Lin to design each buildings.
The Riggios lived in an art-filled house on Park Avenue in Manhattan and in addition had properties in Palm Seaside, Florida, and in Bridgehampton, New York, the place they turned a part of their property into a non-public sculpture park anchored by a 300-ton metal construction work on Richard Serra.
Mr Riggio has additionally dabbled in politics. He was the marketing campaign finance supervisor for Mayor David N. Dinkins’ unsuccessful bid for re-election in New York Metropolis in 1993, supported Invoice Clinton in his first presidential marketing campaign in 1992, and supported Invoice Bradley in his bid for the White Home in 2000 .
“From the issues they write about me, you’d suppose I get up within the morning eager about who I will kill,” Mr. Riggio stated in 1999. “I get up seeking to do one thing good! We promote books. We don’t promote weapons of mass destruction. You stroll right into a bookstore, see Len Riggio’s life’s work, and say, “Not a nasty lifetime’s work.”
