Leonard Riggio, the daring man who reworked the publishing trade by constructing Barnes & Noble into the nation’s strongest bookstore earlier than his firm was eclipsed by the rise of Amazon, has died at 83.
Riggio died Tuesday “after a brave battle with Alzheimer’s illness,” in keeping with an announcement from his household. He had stepped down as chairman in 2019 after the chain was bought to hedge fund Elliott Advisors.
“His management spanned a long time, throughout which he not solely helped develop the corporate, but in addition fostered a tradition of innovation and a love of studying,” Barnes & Noble mentioned in an announcement.
Riggio’s almost half-century reign started in 1971 when he used a $1.2 million mortgage to purchase the Barnes & Noble identify and its flagship retailer on Decrease Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. He acquired tons of of recent shops over the following 20 years, and within the Nineties he launched what grew to become a nationwide empire of “malls” that mixed low cost costs with huge house and the comfortable enchantment of couches, studying chairs and low retailers.
“These weren’t elite locations.”
“Our libraries have been designed to be welcoming, not intimidating,” Riggio advised The New York Occasions in 2016. “These weren’t elitist locations. You could possibly stroll in, get a cup of espresso, sit and skim a e book so long as you needed, and use the toilet. These have been improvements that nobody thought have been attainable.”
Raised in working-class New York Metropolis, he favored to say that he most popular socializing with childhood buddies to his fellow enterprise leaders, and was casual sufficient amongst his friends that he was generally known as “Lenny.” However in his day, nobody within the e book world was extra feared than him.
With the power to show any e book right into a bestseller or a flop, and to vary the market to his liking, Riggio might scare publishers away by merely suggesting that costs have been too excessive or that he would possibly signal with bestsellers like Stephen King and John Grisham and publish them himself. He even tried to purchase the nation’s largest e book wholesaler, Ingram, in 1999, however backed out after operating into authorities resistance.
By the late Nineties, an estimated one in eight books bought in the USA was bought via the chain, the place the front-of-house shows have been so invaluable that publishers paid 1000’s of {dollars} to have their books listed within the shops. Hundreds of unbiased sellers went out of enterprise at the same time as Riggio insisted he was increasing the market by opening shops in neighborhoods the place there was no established retailer.
As a substitute, unbiased retailer house owners described feeling overwhelmed by competitors from Barnes & Noble and Borders Ebook Group, with rival chains generally establishing shops inside shut proximity of one another and domestically owned companies.
Affect on Impartial Bookstores
Barnes & Noble grew to become so well-known that some of the fashionable romantic comedies of the Nineties, You’ve got Bought Mail, starred Tom Hanks because the CEO of the Fox Field chain and Meg Ryan because the proprietor of an endangered unbiased Manhattan retailer.
“We’ll entice them with our sq. footage, our reductions, our comfy chairs, and our cappuccinos,” Hanks confidently declares. “They’ll hate us at first, however we’ll finally kill them.”
For some time, it appeared just like the trade debate was a continuing response to Barnes & Noble. Publishers have been identified to vary a e book cowl or title just because a Barnes & Noble government objected. The creator of Angela’s Ashes, Frank McCourt, discovered himself denounced by American Booksellers Association, The commerce affiliation for independents, after agreeing to seem in a Barnes & Noble business. On the ground of the annual nationwide trade commerce present, lengthy hosted by the American Bar Affiliation, unbiased retailer workers have been booing attendees sporting Barnes & Noble badges.
When novelist Russell Banks introduced at Barnes & Noble’s annual shareholders’ assembly in 1995 that he was a cheerful Barnes & Noble stockholder and buyer, some unbiased sellers stopped carrying his books on the market.
Richard Howorth, proprietor of Sq. Books in Oxford, Mississippi, wrote to him: “You must know that I’ll by no means learn, purchase, or promote one other phrase you write. These are the kindest issues I can consider to say to you.”
Tensions led to authorized motion when, on the eve of the 1994 conference, the Writers Guild of America introduced that it was suing Barnes & Noble and 5 different main publishers for unfair enterprise practices. The outrage was such that some publishers boycotted the conference the next 12 months, solely to return after the Writers Guild of America bought the truthful to Reed Exhibitions. In 1998, the Writers Guild of America sued Barnes & Noble and Borders for unfair enterprise practices (each instances have been settled out of courtroom).
Amazon impact
Reggio started the 2000s on the top of its energy, with greater than 700 malls and tons of of different retailers. However on-line commerce was rising quickly, and Barnes & Noble, based on bodily retail, lacked the creativeness and suppleness of a Seattle startup that billed itself as “the biggest bookstore on Earth,” Amazon.
The net large launched by Jeff Bezos in 1995 gained floor through the 2000s, and by the early 2000s had displaced Barnes & Noble with improvements just like the Kindle e-book reader and the Amazon Prime subscription service.
Bezos likened himself to David defeating Goliath, although the distinction between the 2 leaders was additionally Aesop’s fable: the muscular, mustachioed Reggio, the son of a boxer, was turned in opposition to him by the fast and intelligent Bezos.
“We’re nice booksellers; we all know tips on how to do it,” says Reggio. He was recognized by The Times in 2016. “We weren’t constructed to be a expertise firm.”
Barnes & Noble began its personal web site within the late Nineties, however initiatives just like the Nook e-book reader and a self-publishing platform did not cease Amazon. The collapse of Borders after the financial disaster of 2008 and 2009 was not a giant deal for Barnes & Noble, which after a long time of enlargement closed greater than 100 shops between 2009 and 2019.
By the point Riggio retired, unbiased sellers considered the chain not as a menace however as an ally within the struggle in opposition to Amazon to maintain its bodily shops alive. On the 2018 Booksellers Convention, Riggio and American Booksellers Affiliation CEO Oren Teicher, who had been enemies in enterprise and on the courtroom, praised one another throughout a joint look.
“It will have been unimaginable to think about myself standing right here, doing what I’m about to do (presenting Reggio) just a few years in the past,” Teicher mentioned on the time. “The straightforward reality is that our enterprise is stronger and American readers profit when there’s a vibrant and wholesome community of conventional bookstores throughout the nation.”
Flip the web page
Through the first decade of the twenty first century, Barnes & Noble appeared unmanageable and undesirable. The board introduced in 2010 that the corporate was on the market, however nobody provided to purchase it. 4 CEOs left in 5 years, and Barnes & Noble’s inventory fell 60% between 2015 and 2018. New rumors of a sale continued for a number of months earlier than Elliott Advisors, which had beforehand purchased the British Waterstones chain, purchased Barnes & Noble for $638 million and employed Waterstones CEO James Daunt to steer Barnes & Noble.
“I don’t miss being an entrepreneur, I’m bored with it. However I additionally miss the bookselling half, serving to discover books to suggest to purchasers,” Riggio advised Publishers Weekly in 2021.
Bookselling and household typically overlapped for Riggio. His brother, Steve Riggio, had labored for years as a vice chairman at Barnes & Noble, and one other brother, Thomas Riggio, helped run a transport firm that shipped the shop’s books. After being interviewed in 1974 by the commerce journal Faculty Retailer Govt, Leonard Riggio met for espresso with editor Louise Altavilla, who seven years later grew to become his second spouse (Riggio had three kids, two by his first spouse and one by his second).
Leonard S. Riggio was the eldest son of knowledgeable boxer (he twice defeated Rocky Graziano) turned cab driver and tailor. At the same time as a toddler, he superior shortly, skipping two grades and attending one of many metropolis’s prime excessive colleges, Brooklyn Tech. He studied metallurgical engineering at night time college at New York College earlier than concentrating on enterprise, and by day he absorbed the world of bookselling and the rising cultural revolt of the Nineteen Sixties.
Working as a ground supervisor on the campus bookstore, he discovered sufficient to drop out of college and begin a rival retailer in 1965—SBX (Scholar Ebook Alternate), which allowed scholar activists to make use of a replica machine to print copies of anti-war pamphlets. SBX was so profitable that it purchased out a number of different campus shops and was ready by 1971 to purchase Barnes & Noble and its solely retailer in Manhattan. Just a few years later, he grew to become the uncommon bookseller to run tv commercials, with the phrases, “Barnes & Noble! After all! After all!”
Riggio and the unbiased group might have appeared to have opposing values, however they shared a love of studying, the humanities, and a liberal political outlook. Riggio was a philanthropist and a vocal supporter of Democratic politicians. He was even a pal of client activist and presidential candidate Ralph Nader, who cited Riggio, Ted Turner, and Yoko Ono, amongst others, in his 2009 novel, “Solely the Wealthy Can Save Us!” during which Nader imagines a progressive revolution from above.
“Ever since he was a boy in Brooklyn, he had a intestine response to the best way employees and the poor have been handled every day,” Nader wrote of Riggio, who generally stood other than his company friends. When Fortune journal questioned about 200 enterprise leaders about their political concepts, Riggio was the one one who supported increased wages for employees.
“Cash generally is a burden, like one thing you carry in your shoulders,” he advised New York journal in 1999. “My nature is to be a hard-working particular person, however my function is to assist individuals.”
