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American bookshops in the 1980s tended to be stodgy spaces located in city centres, college towns and the windowless corridors of shopping malls. Leonard Riggio, who has died aged 83, had a different vision.
As chief executive of the US shop chain Barnes & Noble, in the 1990s he built book palaces as large as 60,000 sq ft in communities as far-flung as Council Bluffs, Iowa and West Bountiful, Utah. He lured readers with discounted bestsellers, cosy chairs, coffee bars and well-signposted restrooms. “Hey, once I got them in the store, I didn’t want them leaving,” he explained.
Barnes & Noble became the nation’s largest bookseller, competing with independent shopkeepers and outlasting its arch-rival Borders. But Riggio’s empire struggled to respond to the rise of Jeff Bezos’s Amazon.com, presaging the challenges awaiting bricks-and-mortar retailers in other lines of merchandise.
Born in 1941, Riggio was raised in the working-class neighbourhood of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. His father was a taxi driver and former prizefighter with radical social views, his mother a dressmaker. He graduated from Brooklyn Technical high school at the age of 16, enrolling in night school at New York University in the intellectually lively milieu of Greenwich Village.
A job as a stock boy in NYU’s college bookstore launched him into the sector. Seeing students turned away when books were out of stock, he dropped out of college in 1965 and opened a rival shop called SBX (Student Book Exchange), down the street.
In 1971, he took out a $1.2mn loan to buy Barnes & Noble’s store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, expanding the business through a string of acquisitions. By 2008, the chain controlled nearly a fifth of the US consumer book market, with more than 700 stores in all 50 states.
“When I moved out of New York with the superstores, people said it couldn’t be done. The publishers and the newspapers scoffed. I said, ‘Hell, watch me’,” he told the journalist Tom Brokaw. “America was full of very smart people who wanted to grow, study and read. I thought it was a joke that New Yorkers believed they were intellectually superior to people from Lincoln, Nebraska.”
Scores of independent bookshops folded as readers deserted them for the superstores of Barnes & Noble and Borders. Their plight received cinematic treatment in You’ve Got Mail, Nora Ephron’s 1998 film in which a big-box book executive played by Tom Hanks puts co-star Meg Ryan’s neighbourhood store out of business.
That same year, independents sued Barnes & Noble and Borders on antitrust grounds, alleging they exploited their heft to obtain illegal discounts from publishers. When the case was settled for a modest sum, Riggio called it “a total vindication for Barnes & Noble”.
However, in 1999 he was forced to call off plans for a $600mn takeover of book distribution giant Ingram in the face of pushback from authors, rival sellers and the Federal Trade Commission. He also had less success fending off Amazon, which began shipping books in 1995. Barnes & Noble’s Nook ereader, launched in 2009, lagged behind Amazon’s Kindle, Apple’s iPad and the ubiquity of smartphones.
“‘We’re great booksellers; we know how to do that’,” Riggio told the New York Times in 2016, when he announced his retirement as chair. “We weren’t constituted to be a technology company.”
Wearing a close-trimmed moustache and speaking with traces of his Brooklyn roots, he was known as a tough operator in a tradition-bound industry. “Len has generated more book sales, more ideas and more controversy than anyone in the book business,” Peter Olson, chief executive of Random House, said at a meeting of publishers in 2000.
Riggio was outspoken in support of social justice causes, including the Children’s Defense Fund where he served on the board. He also raised millions of dollars for Democratic campaigns.
With his second wife Louise, he became a major art collector. Guests arriving at their home in Bridgehampton, New York, encountered a 300-tonne steel sculpture by Richard Serra on the lawn.
James Daunt, the UK bookstore boss who took over the Barnes & Noble chain in 2019 after it was sold to Elliott Management for $683mn, is now its chief executive. He said talks with Riggio dwelled as much on art as the business of selling books: “For as long as we remained in the old offices, he let us keep his art hanging on the walls.”
Riggio funded Dia Beacon, a contemporary art museum built in Hudson River valley. When it opened in 2003, he told the FT: “Here the visitor rules. No museum shop to distract your arrival.”
