World Courant
NEW YORK — Leonard Riggio, a brash, self-proclaimed underdog who publishing business by constructing Barnes & Noble into the nation’s strongest bookseller earlier than his firm was acquired by the rise of Amazon.com, has died at age 83.
Riggio died Tuesday “after a brave battle with Alzheimer’s illness,” based on a press release from his household. He had stepped down as chairman in 2019 after Barnes & Noble was bought to hedge fund Elliott Advisors.
“His management spanned many years, throughout which he not solely grew the corporate but additionally cultivated a tradition of innovation and a love of studying,” a Barnes & Noble assertion stated.
Riggio’s practically half-century reign at Barnes & Noble started in 1971, when he used a $1.2 million mortgage to purchase the corporate’s title and its flagship retailer on Decrease Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. He acquired a whole lot of recent shops over the following 20 years and within the Nineties launched what turned a nationwide empire of “superstores” that mixed the low cost costs and big capability of a series with the comfy attraction of couches, studying chairs and cafes.
“Our bookstores had been designed to be welcoming reasonably than intimidating,” Riggio instructed The New York Instances in 2016. “These weren’t elitist locations. You can go in, get a cup of espresso, sit down and skim a e-book for so long as you wished, and go to the toilet. These had been improvements we had that nobody thought had been attainable.”
He grew up working-class in New York Metropolis, preferred to say that he most popular hanging out with childhood buddies to fellow enterprise executives, and was casual sufficient amongst colleagues to be often known as “Lenny.” However in his day, nobody within the e-book enterprise was extra feared. With the ability to make any e-book a bestseller, or a flop, to alter the market at a whim, Riggio may frighten publishers by merely suggesting that costs had been too excessive or that he may signal such bestsellers as Stephen King And John Grisham and self-published them. He even tried to purchase the nation’s largest e-book wholesaler, Ingram, in 1999, however backed out after dealing with authorities resistance.
By the late Nineties, an estimated one in eight books bought within the U.S. was bought by the chain, the place the front-table shows had been so invaluable that publishers paid 1000’s of {dollars} to have their books included. Hundreds of unbiased sellers went out of enterprise, whilst Riggio insisted he was increasing the market by opening shops in neighborhoods with out current shops. As a substitute, unbiased house owners stated they had been overwhelmed by competitors from each Barnes & Noble and Borders E book Group, with the rival chains generally opening shops close to one another and the native enterprise.
Barnes & Noble turned so recognized as an overdog that probably the most common romantic comedies of the Nineties, “You have Bought Mail,” starred Tom Hanks as an government for the “Fox Books” chain and Meg Ryan because the proprietor of a threatened unbiased retailer in Manhattan.
“We’ll seduce them with our sq. footage, our reductions, our deep chairs and our cappuccino,” Hanks’ character declares confidently. “They will hate us at first, however we will get them ultimately.”
For a time, it appeared just like the business dialog was considered one of fixed response to Barnes & Noble. Publishers had been identified to alter the duvet or title of a e-book just because a Barnes & Noble official objected. “Angela’s Ashes” writer Frank McCourt discovered himself condemned by the American Booksellers Affiliation, the commerce affiliation for unbiased employees, after they agreed to seem in a Barnes & Noble industrial. On the ground of the business’s annual nationwide commerce present, lengthy placed on by the ABA, workers of unbiased shops hissed at guests sporting Barnes & Noble badges.
As a novelist Russell BanksIn a speech at Barnes & Noble’s annual shareholders assembly in 1995, he declared himself each a shareholder and a happy buyer of B&N. At the moment, a number of unbiased sellers stopped carrying his books.
“You need to know that I’ll by no means learn, purchase or promote one other phrase you write,” Richard Howorth, proprietor of Sq. Books in Oxford, Mississippi, wrote to him. “These are the kindest issues I can consider to say to you.”
Tensions led to authorized motion when the ABA—on the eve of the 1994 conference—introduced that it was suing Barnes & Noble and 5 main publishers for unfair commerce practices. Some publishers had been so indignant that they boycotted the conference the next yr, returning solely after the ABA bought the present to Reed Exhibitions. In 1998, the ABA sued Barnes & Noble and Borders for unfair commerce practices (each instances had been settled out of courtroom).
Riggio entered the 2000s on the top of his energy, with greater than 700 supermarkets and a whole lot of different retailers. However on-line commerce was rising quickly, and Barnes & Noble, with its roots in brick-and-mortar retail, lacked the creativeness and agility of the Seattle startup that referred to as itself “Earth’s Greatest Bookstore,” Amazon.com. The web behemoth launched by Jeff Bezos in 1995 gained enterprise within the 2000s and had ousted Barnes & Noble by the early 2010s with improvements such because the Kindle e-book reader and the Amazon Prime subscription service.
Bezos compares himself to David slaying Goliath, although the distinction between the leaders can also be harking back to an Aesop fable: the muscular, mustachioed Riggio, the son of a boxer, is defeated by the short and agile Bezos.
“We’re nice booksellers; we all know tips on how to do it,” Riggio stated. acknowledged by the Instances in 2016. “We weren’t based to be a expertise firm.”
Barnes & Noble launched its personal on-line website within the late Nineties, however initiatives just like the Nook e-book reader and a self-publishing platform couldn’t cease Amazon. Even the collapse of Borders after the financial disaster of 2008-2009 didn’t matter to Barnes & Noble, which closed greater than 100 shops between 2009 and 2019 after many years of enlargement.
By the point Riggio retired, unbiased retailers noticed the chain not as a risk however as an ally within the struggle towards Amazon to maintain brick-and-mortar shops alive. On the 2018 Booksellers Conference, Riggio and ABA CEO Oren Teicher, as soon as enemies in enterprise and in courtroom, praised one another in a joint look.
“My place right here, doing what I am about to do (introduce Riggio), would have been unimaginable to think about a couple of years in the past,” Teicher stated on the time. “The easy reality is that our enterprise is stronger and American readers profit when there’s a vibrant and wholesome community of bodily bookstores throughout the nation.”
Within the 2010s, Barnes & Noble appeared ungovernable and undesirable. The board of administrators introduced in 2010 that the corporate was on the market, however nobody supplied to purchase it. 4 CEOs left in 5 years, and Barnes & Noble’s inventory fell 60% between 2015 and 2018. Recent rumors of a sale continued for months earlier than Elliott Advisors, which had beforehand purchased British chain Waterstones, purchased Barnes & Noble for $638 million and employed Waterstones CEO James Daunt to steer B&N.
“I don’t miss being an entrepreneur, I’ve sufficient of that. However I do miss the bookselling half, serving to discover books to advocate to prospects,” Riggio instructed Publishers Weekly in 2021.
The bookstore and household usually overlapped for Riggio. His brother, Steve Riggio, was vice chairman of Barnes & Noble for a few years, and one other brother, Thomas Riggio, helped run a trucking firm that shipped the shop’s books. After being interviewed by the commerce journal School Retailer Govt in 1974, Leonard Riggio met for espresso with its editor, Louise Altavilla, who turned his second spouse seven years later. (Riggio had three youngsters, two together with his first spouse, one together with his second.)
Leonard S. Riggio was the eldest son of a prizefighter (who twice defeated Rocky Graziano) who turned a cab driver and tailor. Whilst a baby, he superior shortly, skipping two grades and attending one of many metropolis’s finest excessive colleges, Brooklyn Tech. He studied metallurgical engineering at New York College night time faculty earlier than turning to enterprise, and by day he soaked up the world of bookselling and the rising cultural rebel of the Nineteen Sixties.
Working as a flooring supervisor on the campus bookstore, he discovered sufficient to drop out of faculty and in 1965 open a competing retailer—SBX (Scholar E book Trade), the place he allowed pupil activists to make use of the copy machine to print copies of anti-war pamphlets. SBX was so profitable that he purchased a number of different campus shops and by 1971 was ready to buy Barnes & Noble and its solely retailer in Manhattan. A number of years later, he turned the uncommon bookseller to run tv commercials, utilizing the slogan “Barnes & Noble! After all! After all!”
Riggio and the unbiased neighborhood might have appeared to have opposing values, however they shared a love of studying and artwork and a liberal political outlook. He was a beneficiant philanthropist and a outstanding supporter of Democratic politicians. He was even buddies with the buyer activist and presidential candidate Ralph Naderwith Riggio, Ted Turner And Yoko-Ono together with in his 2009 novel “Solely the Tremendous-Wealthy Can Save Us!”, through which Nader imagines a progressive revolution from above.
“Since he was a Brooklyn boy, he had a visceral response to the way in which working class stiffs and the poor had been handled each day,” Nader wrote of Riggio, who generally stood out from his different administration colleagues. When Fortune journal surveyed some 200 enterprise leaders within the Nineties about their insurance policies, Riggio was the one one who supported elevating employee pay.
“Cash can change into a burden, one thing you carry in your shoulders,” he instructed New York journal in 1999. “My nature is to interrupt balls, however my position is to assist folks.”
Leonard Riggio, who constructed a bookstore empire at Barnes & Noble, dies at 83
World Information,Subsequent Large Factor in Public Knowledg
