Leonard Riggio, who solid a bookselling empire at Barnes & Noble, useless at 83

Article content material

NEW YORK (AP) — Leonard Riggio, a brash, self-styled underdog who remodeled the publishing business by constructing Barnes & Noble into the nation’s strongest bookseller earlier than his firm was overtaken by the rise of Amazon.com, has died at age 83.

Riggio died Tuesday “following a valiant battle with Alzheimer’s illness,” in accordance with a press release issued by his household. He had stepped down as chairman in 2019 after Barnes & Noble was offered to the hedge fund Elliott Advisors.

Article content material

“His management spanned many years, throughout which he not solely grew the corporate but additionally nurtured a tradition of innovation and a love for studying,” reads a press release from Barnes & Noble.

Riggio’s near-half century reign started in 1971 when he used a $1.2 million mortgage to buy Barnes & Noble’s title and its flagship retailer on decrease Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. He acquired tons of of latest shops over the subsequent 20 years and, within the Nineties, launched what turned a nationwide empire of “superstores” that mixed a sequence’s low cost costs and large capability with the comfy enchantment of couches, studying chairs and cafes.

“Our bookstores had been designed to be welcoming versus intimidating,” Riggio instructed The New York Occasions in 2016. “These weren’t elitist locations. You may go in, get a cup of espresso, sit down and skim a ebook for so long as you want, use the restroom. These had been improvements that we had that nobody thought was doable.”

By the tip of the Nineties, an estimated one among each eight books offered within the U.S. had been bought by means of the chain, the place entrance desk shows had been so beneficial that publishers paid 1000’s of {dollars} to have their books included. Hundreds of impartial sellers went out of enterprise whilst Riggio insisted that he was increasing the market by opening up in neighborhoods with out an current retailer. As a substitute, impartial homeowners spoke of being overwhelmed by competitors from each Barnes & Noble and Borders E book Group, the rival chains typically organising shops in shut proximity to one another and to the regionally owned enterprise.

Article content material

Article content material

Barnes & Noble turned so recognized as an overdog that one of many Nineties’ hottest romantic comedies, “You’ve Obtained Mail,” starred Tom Hanks as an government for the “Fox Books” chain and Meg Ryan because the proprietor of an endangered impartial retailer in Manhattan.

“We’re going to seduce them with our sq. footage, and our reductions, and our deep arm chairs, and our cappuccino,” Hanks’ character confidently declares. “They’re going to hate us initially, however we’ll get ’em ultimately.”

The web shifts bookselling

Riggio started the 2000s on the peak of energy, with greater than 700 superstores and tons of of others shops. However web commerce was rising rapidly and Barnes & Noble, with its roots in bodily retail, lacked the creativeness and suppleness of the startup from Seattle that known as itself “Earth’s Greatest Bookstore,” Amazon.com. The net big launch in 1995 by Jeff Bezos gained enterprise all through the 2000s and by the early 2010s had displaced Barnes & Noble by means of such improvements because the Kindle e-book reader and the Amazon Prime subscription service.

Article content material

Bezos would liken himself to David taking down Goliath, though the distinction between the leaders additionally had the texture of an Aesop’s fable: The muscular, mustachioed Riggio, a boxer’s son, upended by the short and intelligent Bezos.

“We’re nice booksellers; we all know how to try this,” Riggio acknowledged to the Occasions in 2016. “We weren’t constituted to be a know-how firm.”

Leonard S. Riggio was the eldest son of a prize fighter (who twice defeated Rocky Graziano) turned cab driver and a gown maker. Even in childhood, he superior rapidly, skipping two grades and attending one of many metropolis’s prime excessive faculties, Brooklyn Tech. He studied metallurgical engineering at New York College’s night time faculty earlier than specializing in commerce, and by day absorbed the bookselling world and the rising cultural insurrection of the Sixties.

Riggio and the impartial neighborhood might have appeared to carry opposing values, however they shared a love of studying and the humanities and a liberal political outlook. He was a beneficiant philanthropist and a distinguished supporter of Democratic politicians. He was even pleasant with the buyer activist and presidential candidate Ralph Nader, who featured Riggio, Ted Turner and Yoko Ono amongst others in his 2009 novel “Solely the Tremendous-Wealthy Can Save Us!”, through which Nader imagines a progressive revolution from above.

“Ever since he was a boy from Brooklyn, he’d had a visceral response to the way in which workings stiffs and the poor had been handled on a day-to-day foundation,” Nader wrote of Riggio, who did at instances stand aside from different his administration friends. When some 200 enterprise leaders had been questioned by Fortune journal within the Nineties about their political concepts, solely Riggio supported the elevating of employee pay.

“Cash can change into a burden, like one thing you carry in your shoulders,” he instructed New York journal in 1999. “My nature is to be a ball-buster, however my function is to assist folks.”

Article content material