NEW YORK (AP) โ Leonard Riggio, a brash, self-styled underdog who transformed the publishing industry by building Barnes & Noble into the countryโs most powerful bookseller before his company was overtaken by the rise of Amazon.com, has died at age 83.
Riggio died Tuesday a โfollowing a valiant battle with Alzheimerโs disease,โ according to a statement issued by his family. He had stepped down as chairman in 2019 after Barnes & Noble was sold to the hedge fund Elliott Advisors.
Riggioโs near-half century reign at Barnes & Noble began in 1971 when he used a $1.2 million loan to purchase the companyโs name and its flagship store on lower Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. He acquired hundreds of new stores over the next 20 years and, in the 1990s, launched what became a nationwide empire of โsuperstoresโ that combined a chainโs discount prices and massive capacity with the cozy appeal of couches, reading chairs and cafes.
โOur bookstores were designed to be welcoming as opposed to intimidating,โ Riggio told The New York Times in 2016. โThese werenโt elitist places. 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.โ
He grew up working class in New York City, liked to say he preferred socializing with childhood pals over fellow business leaders and was informal enough among associates to be known as โLenny.โ But in his time no one in the book world was more feared. With the power to make any given book a best seller, or a flop, to alter the market on an idle whim, the Riggio could terrify publishers simply by suggesting prices were too high or that he might sign up such top sellers as Stephen King and John Grisham and publish them himself. He even tried to buy the countryโs biggest book wholesaler, Ingram, in 1999, but backed off after facing government resistance.
By the end of the 1990s, an estimated one of every eight books sold in the U.S. were purchased through the chain, where front table displays were so valuable that publishers paid thousands of dollars to have their books included. Thousands of independent sellers went out of business even as Riggio insisted that he was expanding the market by opening up in neighborhoods without an existing store. Instead, independent owners spoke of being overwhelmed by competition from both Barnes & Noble and Borders Book Group, the rival chains sometimes setting up stores in close proximity to each other and to the locally owned business.
Barnes & Noble became so identified as an overdog that one of the 1990sโ most popular romantic comedies, โYouโve Got Mail,โ starred Tom Hanks as an executive for the โFox Booksโ chain and Meg Ryan as the owner of an endangered independent store in Manhattan.
โWe are going to seduce them with our square footage, and our discounts, and our deep arm chairs, and our cappuccino,โ Hanksโ character confidently declares. โTheyโre going to hate us at the beginning, but weโll get โem in the end.โ
โLenโs vision and entrepreneurial spirit transformed the retail landscape, establishing Barnes & Noble as the largest bookstore chain in the U.S,โ reads a statement from the bookstore chain. โHis leadership spanned decades, during which he not only grew the company but also nurtured a culture of innovation and a love for reading.โ
