Leonard Riggio, hard-driving entrepreneur who made Barnes & Noble a bookstore behemoth
Leonard Riggio, who has died aged 83, bought a struggling Manhattan bookshop called Barnes & Noble in 1971 with a $1.2 million loan and transformed it into America’s biggest bookshop chain, in the process putting numerous small neighbourhood booksellers out of business.
Riggio was no great bookworm, admitting that he could just as easily have sold household goods. Nevertheless, his empire of more than 600 literary “superstores”, combining discount deals and huge bookshelf and display space with couches, armchairs, cafés – and even crèches – appealed to consumers, and by the late 1990s one in eight books bought in America was bought at a Barnes & Noble store.
Along the way, Riggio was accused of breaking antitrust laws, bullying publishers and caring nothing for the small businesses he destroyed. He responded by accusing his critics of elitism. “Our bookstores were designed to be welcoming as opposed to intimidating,” he said. “You could go in, get a cup of coffee, sit down and read a book for as long as you like, use the restroom.”
The line could almost have come from Nora Ephron’s 1998 rom-com You’ve Got Mail, and although the writer-director denied basing the character of Joe Fox (played by Tom Hanks), a cocksure book-chain executive bent on out-competing Meg Ryan’s struggling family bookshop, on Riggio, the parallels were obvious.
“We are going to seduce them with our square footage, and our discounts, and our deep arm chairs, and our cappuccino,” Hank’s character declares. “They’re going to hate us at the beginning, but we’ll get ’em in the end.”
Riggio asked the Wall Street Journal in 1992: “Why am I the predator, but if a nice independent bookstore opens a branch, it’s like welcome to the Messiah?” He admitted that his nature was “to be a ball-buster”, but insisted that he wanted “to help people”.
From the early Noughties, however, sales at Barnes & Noble began to slide, as the new big beast, Amazon, encroached and Riggio found himself battling to stay afloat alongside his erstwhile foes in the book trade.
His immediate response was to try to innovate, expanding into games and toys and spending heavily on developing Barnes & Noble’s own e-reader, the Nook, to compete with Amazon’s Kindle.
Arguably, though, innovation was where Barnes & Noble went wrong. Other big booksellers, such as the UK giant Waterstones, tackled the Amazon juggernaut and turned loss to profit by, as its chief executive James Daunt put it, going back to “good old-fashioned bookselling”.
Barnes & Noble, however, was said to have lost $1.3bn on the Nook before abandoning it. In 2010 its board announced that the company was for sale, but there were no takers. Riggio had stepped down as CEO in 2002, but four CEOs left in five years and between 2015 and 2018 its stock dropped by 60 per cent.
Riggio remained chairman, presiding over the closure of some 150 shops, until 2019 when the company was acquired for approximately £500 million by Elliott Advisors, and James Daunt was appointed to run it in addition to Waterstones.
Leonard Stephen Riggio was born in Little Italy, Lower Manhattan, on February 28 1941. His mother was a dressmaker and his father a cab driver and former prize fighter who had twice defeated Rocky Graziano.
Riggio dropped out of an engineering course at New York University to work as a floor manager at a campus bookshop. In 1965 he opened his own rival shop, SBX (Student Book Exchange), in Greenwich Village, gaining credibility among the student population by allowing anti-war protesters to print leaflets on the shop’s copying machine. By 1971, when he bought Barnes & Noble, he had opened several more campus bookstores.
He is survived by his second wife, Louise, by their daughter, and by two daughters from an earlier marriage.
Leonard Riggio, born February 28 1941, died August 27 2024
