NEW YORK — Leonard Riggio, a brash, self-described maverick who revolutionized the publishing industry by building Barnes & Noble into the country’s most powerful bookseller before his company was overwhelmed by the rise of Amazon.com, has died at age 83.
Riggio died on Tuesday “after a brave battle with Alzheimer’s disease,” his family said in a statement. He resigned as chairman in 2019 after Barnes & Noble was sold to hedge fund Elliott Advisors.
Riggio’s nearly half-century-long reign at Barnes & Noble began in 1971, when he used a $1.2 million loan to buy the company name and its flagship store on lower Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Over the next 20 years, he acquired hundreds of new stores and by the 1990s had created a nationwide empire of “superstores” that combined the discount prices and huge selection of a chain with the cozy atmosphere of sofas, reading chairs and cafes.
“Our bookstores were designed to be inviting, not intimidating,” Riggio told the New York Times in 2016. “They weren’t elite places. You could walk in, get a cup of coffee, sit down and read a book for as long as you wanted, and use the restroom. These were innovations that no one thought possible.”
He grew up in working-class New York City, liked to say he preferred his childhood friends to other businessmen, and was so easy-going with colleagues that he was called “Lenny.” But in his day, no one in the book world was so feared. Riggio had the power to make any book a bestseller or a flop, and to change the market at will. He could terrify publishers by simply suggesting that prices were too high, or that he could sign and self-publish bestsellers like Stephen King and John Grisham. In 1999, he even tried to buy out the country’s largest book wholesaler, Ingram, but backed out when he encountered government opposition.
By the late 1990s, it was estimated that one in eight books sold in the United States was purchased through the chain, whose counter displays were so valuable that publishers paid thousands of dollars to have their books listed there. Thousands of independent sellers were forced to close, despite Riggio’s insistence that he would expand the market by opening in neighborhoods without existing stores. Instead, independent owners spoke of being overwhelmed by competition from Barnes & Noble and Borders Book Group, with the rival chains sometimes opening stores in close proximity to each other and local businesses.
Barnes & Noble became so known as an overdog that in one of the most popular romantic comedies of the 1990s, You’ve Got Mail, Tom Hanks played a manager at the Fox Books chain and Meg Ryan played the owner of a dying independent store in Manhattan.
“We’ll seduce them with our square footage, our discounts, our deep armchairs and our cappuccino,” Hanks’ character explains confidently. “At first they’ll hate us, but in the end we’ll get them.”
