Barnes & Noble founder Leonard Riggio, who turned a single bookstore into a national success, died in New York City on Tuesday, the company announced. He was 83 years old.

Riggio died “after a brave battle with Alzheimer’s disease,” his family said in a statement.

The brash Riggio’s reign, which lasted nearly half a century, 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.

“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.

“Len’s vision and entrepreneurial spirit have changed the retail landscape.”

He acquired hundreds of new stores over the next twenty years and in the 1990s built 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 took the company public in 1993 and then opened new stores in droves. By 1997, Barnes & Noble was opening more than one new store a week.

“It was a huge leap forward because it helped bring hardcovers, which had previously been sold in carriage trade, to the mass market,” said publishing veteran Laurence Kirshbaum in a 2023 interview. “Barnes & Noble brought reading into living rooms outside of major metropolitan areas.”

The chain became so powerful that it was accused of driving smaller independent bookstores out of business.

“Why am I the predator when a nice independent bookstore opens a branch, it’s like welcoming the Messiah?” Riggio told the Wall Street Journal in 1992. “I think every new bookstore should be celebrated, regardless of its origin.”

Riggio dedicated his life to literacy, education and the arts, supporting organizations such as the Children’s Defense Fund, the Anti-Defamation League and Dia, a contemporary art museum in northern Beacon County.

He also founded the nonprofit Project Home Again with his wife Louise. The charity built and donated 101 homes in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city.

A native New Yorker, Riggio grew up in Brooklyn and attended New York University, where he worked in the university bookstore.

He dropped out of college in 1965 to open his first bookstore, SBX, or Student Book Exchange.

His father was a taxi driver and prizefighter who defeated Rocky Graziano twice. This perhaps explains why the bookstore founder was so often described by the media as “feisty” or “brave.”

Riggio lived in an apartment on Park Avenue and owned a Tudor-style mansion with a sculpture garden in Bridgehampton.

He served as Grand Marshal of the 2017 Columbus Day Parade in New York and mingled with friends such as singer Tony Bennet and former New York Mayor David Dinkins.

“My nationality is New York City,” he told Business Week in 1998. “I don’t mean that I’m a New Yorker in the way that The New York Times is a New Yorker. I mean it in the Horatio Algerian sense.”

Increasing online competition and the failed Nook e-reader project led to a drop in sales at Barnes & Noble in the late 2010s.

Riggio sold the company in 2019 to Elliott, an activist investor group founded by billionaire Paul Singer.

He left B&N in 2016 but remained optimistic about the company’s future and was determined to retain his sizable stake despite strong competition from Amazon and the e-book industry.

“The future of the book business has always been bleak and hopeless, but it just keeps going,” Riggio told the Washington Post in 2016.

He leaves behind his wife, three daughters and four grandchildren.