Barnes & Noble buys Colorado bookstore chain Tattered Cover

Leonard Riggio, a brash, self-described maverick who revolutionized the publishing industry by turning Barnes & Noble into the country’s most powerful bookseller before his company was overtaken 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 the chain was sold to hedge fund Elliott Advisors.

“His leadership spanned decades during which he not only grew the company but also fostered a culture of innovation and a love of reading,” Barnes & Noble said in a statement.

Riggio’s nearly half-century-long reign began in 1971, when he used a $1.2 million loan to buy the Barnes & Noble name and its flagship store on lower Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Over the next 20 years, he acquired hundreds of new stores and in the 1990s created a nationwide empire of “superstores” that combined the discount prices and enormous capacity of a chain with the cozy atmosphere of sofas, reading chairs and cafes.

“These were not elite places”

“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.”

Growing up in working-class New York City, he liked to say he preferred his childhood friends to other businessmen, and he was so at ease with colleagues that he was known as “Lenny.” Yet in his day, no one was more feared in the book world.

Riggio had the power to make any book a bestseller or a flop, and to change the market at will. He could scare publishers by simply suggesting that he would charge them too high a price or suggest that he could sign bestsellers like Stephen King and John Grisham and publish them himself. In 1999, he even tried to buy out the country’s largest book wholesaler, Ingram, but backed out in the face of 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 table displays were so valuable that publishers paid thousands of dollars to have their books included. Thousands of independent sellers were forced to close, despite Riggio’s insistence that he would expand the market by opening new stores in neighborhoods without existing stores.

Instead, independent owners said they were being overwhelmed by competition from Barnes & Noble and Borders Book Group as the rival chains opened their stores in close proximity to each other and local businesses.

Impact on independent bookstores

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.”

For a while, it seemed that industry talk was a constant reaction to Barnes & Noble. Publishers were known to change the cover or title of a book simply because a Barnes & Noble employee objected. The author of My Mother’s Ashes, Frank McCourt, was condemned by the American Booksellers Association, the trade organization for independent booksellers, after agreeing to appear in a Barnes & Noble commercial. At the industry’s annual national trade show, long hosted by the ABA, employees of independent stores hissed at visitors wearing Barnes & Noble badges.

When novelist Russell Banks declared at Barnes & Noble’s annual shareholder meeting in 1995 that he was both a shareholder and a satisfied B&N customer, some independent sellers stopped carrying his books.

“You must know that I will never read, buy or sell another word of yours,” wrote Richard Howorth, owner of Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi. “Those are the kindest things I can say to you.”

Tensions led to legal action when the ABA announced on the eve of the 1994 convention that it would sue Barnes & Noble and five leading publishers for unfair business practices. Some of the publishers were so angry that they boycotted the event the following year and did not participate again until 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).

Amazon effect

Riggio began the 2000s at the height of his power, with more than 700 supermarkets and hundreds of other stores. But e-commerce was growing fast, and Barnes & Noble, with its roots in brick-and-mortar retail, lacked the imagination and flexibility of the Seattle startup that billed itself as the “world’s largest bookstore,” Amazon.com.

Founded in 1995 by Jeff Bezos, the online giant saw revenue growth in the 2000s and had displaced Barnes & Noble by the early 2010s 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 frontrunners also recalls an Aesop’s fable: the muscular, mustachioed Riggio, the son of a boxer, is knocked out by the fast and clever Bezos.

“We’re great booksellers; we know how to do this,” Riggio admitted to the Times in 2016. “We weren’t founded as a technology company.”

Barnes & Noble launched its own online site in the late 1990s, but initiatives such as the Nook e-book reader and a self-publishing platform failed to stop Amazon. Not even the collapse of Borders following the 2008-2009 economic crisis played a role for Barnes & Noble. After decades of expansion, the company closed more than 100 stores between 2009 and 2019.

When Riggio retired, independent retailers no longer viewed the chain 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 Teicher, once enemies in business and in court, praised each other during a joint appearance.

“Standing here doing what I’m about to do (introduce Riggio) would have been unthinkable a few years ago,” Teicher said at the time. “The simple fact is that our business is stronger and American readers benefit when there is a vibrant and healthy network of brick-and-mortar bookstores across the country.”

Turning the tide

In the 2010s, Barnes & Noble seemed unmanageable and undesirable. The board announced in 2010 that the company was for sale, but no one offered to buy it. Four CEOs left within five years, and Barnes & Noble’s stock fell 60% between 2015 and 2018. New rumors of a sale persisted for months before Elliott Advisors, which had previously bought 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’ve had enough of that. But I miss the part of selling books, helping to find books to recommend to customers,” Riggio told Publishers Weekly in 2021.

Bookstore and family often overlapped for Riggio. His brother, Steve Riggio, was vice president of Barnes & Noble for years, and another brother, Thomas Riggio, helped run a shipping company that shipped the store’s books. After Leonard Riggio was interviewed by the trade publication College Store Executive in 1974, he met for coffee with the publisher Louise Altavilla, who seven years later became his second wife (Riggio had three children, two with his first wife, one with his second).

Leonard S. Riggio was the eldest son of a prizefighter (who beat Rocky Graziano twice) who later became a taxi driver and tailor. He progressed quickly as a child, skipping two grades and attending one of the city’s best high schools, Brooklyn Tech. He studied metallurgy at New York University’s night school before concentrating on commerce, and by day he immersed himself in the world of book selling and the emerging cultural rebellion of the 1960s.

As a department manager at the campus bookstore, he learned enough to drop out of college and open a rival store in 1965—SBX (Student Book Exchange), where he allowed student activists to use the copier to print copies of antiwar leaflets. SBX was so successful that he bought several other campus stores and in 1971 was able to buy Barnes & Noble and its only Manhattan store. A few years later, he was the rare bookseller to run television ads with the slogan “Barnes & Noble! Of course! Of course!”

Riggio and the independent community seemed to represent different values, but they shared a love of reading and the arts, as well as liberal political views. He was a generous philanthropist and a prominent supporter of Democratic politicians. He was even friends with consumer activist and presidential candidate Ralph Nader, who featured Riggio, Ted Turner, and Yoko Ono, among others, in his 2009 novel The Rich and the Free, in which Nader imagines a progressive revolution from above.

“From his childhood in Brooklyn, he reacted instinctively to the way workers and the poor were treated on a daily basis,” Nader wrote of Riggio, who at times did stand out from his colleagues in the executive suite. When Fortune magazine surveyed some 200 business leaders about their political views in the 1990s, Riggio was the only one who 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 break people’s balls, but my role is to help people.”