(Bloomberg) -- Leonard Riggio, the feisty entrepreneur who turned a single Barnes & Noble store into the world’s largest bookseller, has died. He was 83.
He died on Tuesday, the company announced in a post on X.com. “His leadership spanned decades, during which he not only grew the company but also nurtured a culture of innovation and a love for reading,” the company said. Citing his family, the Associated Press reported that Riggio had battled Alzheimer’s disease.
As chairman and, for a long time, the largest shareholder of Barnes & Noble Inc., Riggio ruled over a chain of bookstores that reached 726 locations at its peak in 2008. It was the first to advertise on television, in 1974, and, a year later, became the first to steeply discount literature, selling New York Times bestsellers at 40% off the publishers’ list price.
In the early 1990s, Riggio borrowed the idea of a book superstore from competitor Borders Group Inc. and made it better, with coffee shops, reading nooks, and music and gift departments. There were author appearances, events for children and singles nights. Some stores were as large at 60,000 square feet.
“These weren’t elitist places,” Riggio told the Times in 2016. “You could go in, get a cup of coffee, sit down and read a book for as long as you like, use the restroom. These were innovations that we had that no one thought was possible.”
Long criticized as a book-selling behemoth that threatened the existence of independent stores — the plot, more or less, of the 1998 romantic comedy You’ve Got Mail — Barnes & Noble came to be seen more sympathetically as the brick-and-mortar David against the goliath Amazon.com Inc.
Along the way to amassing a net worth of $800 million as of 1999, when he made the Forbes 400 list, Riggio acquired the 800 stores of mall bookseller B.Dalton, bought the Scribner’s bookstore trade name in 1989 and a year later owned Doubleday’s. He founded GameStop, the No. 1 retailer of video games, and also ran a leading seller of college textbooks.
He took Barnes & Noble public in 1993 and, in 1997, created a digital unit that became the second-largest online bookseller, after Amazon.com.
Nook Tablet
Competing with Amazon presented a steep challenge. More than 100 Barnes & Noble locations closed since 2008, leaving about 600 stores open as of 2024. In 2009, Riggio introduced the Nook tablet to vie with Amazon’s Kindle e-reader, but competition from it and Apple Inc.’s iPad forced him to turn manufacture of the device over to third parties and sell his digital products for use on any device.
Riggio relinquished the chief executive officer title in 2002 to his younger brother, Stephen, but remained chairman. In 2016, in his mid-70s and having fought off an attempted takeover by investor Ron Burkle, Riggio planned to retire. But following the departure of a third CEO in three years, he took on the role of interim CEO.
With profits and the stock price falling, he said the company would consider attaching restaurants to superstores and would use a multichannel business model of stores, the Internet and digital commerce to exploit B&N’s retail stores and its strong brand.
Riggio’s 48-year run at the company’s helm ended in 2019 when Elliott Management Corp., the US hedge fund led by Paul Singer, acquired Barnes & Noble for $683 million including debt, with a plan to revitalize the brick-and-mortar book-buying experience.
Leonard S. Riggio was born Feb. 28, 1941, on Mott Street in New York’s Little Italy and grew up in the city’s Bensonhurst neighborhood. His mother was a dressmaker; his father, Steve Riggio, was a taxi driver and boxer who twice beat middleweight champion Rocky Graziano.
Skipped Grades
Riggio skipped two grades before entering Brooklyn Technical High School, graduating in 1958.
Riggio began his career as a clerk at a bookstore owned by New York University, where he was attending night classes in metallurgical engineering. In 1965, he dropped out and opened his own competing store, the Student Book Exchange. Soon he had five more.
In 1971, with a loan, he purchased the venerable Barnes & Noble bookstore on 5th Avenue in Manhattan and christened it the “world’s largest bookstore,” given the 150,000 titles offered. He soon expanded across the street with a discount store. Its slogan was, “If you paid full price, you didn’t get it at Barnes & Noble.”
In his early days of dominance, he was accused of antitrust violations for forcing publishers to give him better discounts than independent stores, who were joined by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in accusing Riggio of killing off mom-and-pop book operations with his cutthroat tactics.
A philanthropist, he donated $1 million to his high school and more than $700,000 to the Children’s Defense Fund for building a library on the farm of the late Alex Haley, author of Roots. He liked to gamble on horses, play golf and was an avid collector of large modern sculpture and wine.
Riggio had two daughters with his first wife, Geraldine, and one with his second wife, Louise.
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