Brooklynites are mourning. Leonard Riggio, who transformed 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 Tuesday “following a valiant battle with Alzheimer’s disease,” according to a statement issued by his family. He had stepped down as chairman in 2019 after the chain was sold to the hedge fund Elliott Advisors.

He grew up in Brooklyn and was a proud member of Brooklyn Technical High School’s Class of 1958. He later served on the board of the school’s alumni foundation and donated $1 million to the school. 

“His commitment to the school extended far beyond board meetings; he engaged directly with students, encouraging them to strive for excellence and to embrace personal development and public service,” a post on the Brooklyn Tech Alumni Foundation reads. “In recognition of his contributions, the school’s auditorium was named in his honor in 2018, marking the 60th anniversary of his graduation.”

Riggio’s career began as a clerk at the NYU bookstore. In 1971, he used a $1.2 million loan to purchase Barnes & Noble’s name and what was then the company’s only 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 “superstores” that combined a chain’s discount prices and massive capacity with the cozy appeal of couches, reading chairs and cafes.

“Our bookstores were designed to be welcoming as opposed to intimidating,” Riggio told The New York Times in 2016. “These weren’t 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.”

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. Independent owners spoke of being overwhelmed by competition from both Barnes & Noble and the now-defunct Borders Book Group.

Acrimony from independent booksellers

For a time, it seemed industry conversation was an ongoing response to Barnes & Noble. Publishers were known to change the cover or title of a book simply because a Barnes & Noble official had objected. “Angela’s Ashes” author Frank McCourt found himself condemned by the American Booksellers Association after agreeing to appear in a Barnes & Noble commercial. On the floor of the industry’s annual national trade show, long hosted by the ABA, independent store employees would hiss at attendees wearing Barnes & Noble badges.

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

“You must know that I’ll never read, buy or sell another word you write,” Richard Howorth, owner of Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi, wrote to him. 

The internet shifts bookselling

Riggio began the 2000s at the height of power, with more than 700 superstores and hundreds of other outlets. But internet commerce was growing quickly and Barnes & Noble, with its roots in physical retail, lacked the imagination and flexibility of the startup from Seattle that called itself “Earth’s Biggest Bookstore,” Amazon.com. 

The online giant launched in 1995 by Jeff Bezos gained business throughout the 2000s and by the early 2010s had displaced Barnes & Noble through such innovations as the Kindle e-book reader and the Amazon Prime subscription service.

“We’re great booksellers; we know how to do that,’’ Tiggio acknowledged to the Times in 2016. “We weren’t constituted to be a technology company.”

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

The board of Barnes & Noble announced in 2010 that the company was for sale, but no one offered to buy it. Four CEOs left in five years. New rumors of a sale lasted for months before Elliott Advisors, which had previously purchased the British chain Waterstones, bought Barnes & Noble for $638 million and hired Waterstones chief executive James Daunt to lead the chain.

“I don’t miss being a business person, I had enough of that. But I do miss the bookselling part, helping to find books to recommend to customers,” Riggio told Publishers Weekly in 2021.

Bookselling and family often overlapped for Riggio. His brother Steve Riggio served for years as vice chairman of Barnes & Noble and another brother, Vincent “Jimi” Riggio, helped run a trucking company that shipped the store’s books. After being interviewed in 1974 by the trade publication College Store Executive, Leonard Riggio met for coffee with the editor, Louise Gebbia, who seven years later became his second wife Riggio had three children, two with his first wife, one with his second.

“Ever since he was a boy from Brooklyn, he’d had a visceral reaction to the way working stiffs and the poor were treated on a day-to-day basis,” Ralph Nader wrote of Riggio, who at times stood apart from his management peers. When some 200 business leaders were questioned by Fortune magazine in the 1990s about their political ideas, only Riggio supported the raising of worker pay.

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