Len Riggio, who revolutionized bookselling—first by making Barnes & Noble the dominant bookstore chain in the United States and then by opening hundreds of superstores—died on August 27 from complications of Alzheimer's disease. He was 83.
Riggio opened his first college bookstore in 1965, and in 1971 acquired the Barnes & Noble trade name and its New York City flagship store. He quickly built B&N into a force in the bookselling world, and by 1985, B&N was the country’s third largest bookstore chain, with 37 trade stores, 142 college bookstores, and sales of about $225 million. In late 1986, Riggio, with financial backing from the Dutch company Vendex International, acquired the much bigger B. Dalton chain; in 1985, it boasted sales of $538 million and comprised 798 stores. The purchase made B&N the country’s largest bookstore chain (a term Riggio despised), and so it remains today.
Riggio ran B&N during a time of rapid growth in the number of bricks-and-mortar bookstores and the emergence of a host of bookselling chains, including Waldenbooks and Borders, which would eventually merge into Borders Group, Inc. The expansion of the chains and the emergence of the "superstore" concept—vast, one-stop shops for books, often in dense urban centers, that offered bestsellers at steep discounts—led to the closing of hundreds of independent bookstores.
As a result, Riggio was seen by many indie booksellers as the man responsible for bringing about their demise. That perception led to conflict between B&N and the indies that snowballed into two lawsuits filed by the American Booksellers Association. The first was filed in 1994, against B&N and five publishers charged with offering the chain favorable discounts. The second was filed in 1998, against B&N and Borders, charging them with unfair trade practices. Both were eventually settled.
Legal concerns aside, nothing stopped Riggio from expanding B&N’s reach. That included a foray into the book publishing business, a move that both spooked publishers and foreshadowed a similar move by its ever-more-potent rival, Amazon. After quietly starting an in-house publishing program focused principally on producing low-cost versions of out-of-print books, B&N took a bolder step in 2003 when it bought Sterling Publishing—a business it still operates today under the name Union Square & Co.
“Len. For several generations of publishers, there was no need for a last name. There was only one Len,” said former Macmillan CEO John Sargent. “Len was brash. When he bought Sterling Publishing in 2003, he invited all the publishing CEOs down to Barnes & Noble for a meal. When the food arrived, he stood: ‘I know you are all wondering why I bought Sterling.’ And then, with heat, he let us have it: ‘I have been telling you how to run the publishing business for years, and you ignored me. Now I’m gonna show you.’ ”
The son of a boxer, Riggio responded to Amazon’s rise with a perhaps predictable combativeness. He launched BN.com in 1997 in a bid to compete with Amazon in the online space, and the companies fought over numerous things, including which had the right to call itself the world’s biggest bookstore. B&N was able to keep Amazon at bay for a few years after the online retailer was launched in 1995, but the rise of e-books made it inevitable that Amazon would surpass B&N as the country’s largest bookseller, which it did in 2008.
Under Riggio, B&N also fought back against Amazon’s Kindle e-reader by launching its own, the Nook, in 2009. Nook was later spun into a standalone division with the help of Microsoft, into which the bookseller invested, and lost, some $300 million. All the while, the rise of online shopping gradually chipped away at the viability of physical bookstore chains, and the growth of online retailing made for some difficult times towards the end of Riggio’s reign at B&N.
Riggio attempted to retire from the bookseller in April 2016, when he considered the era of radical change in the book business during the first two decades of the internet age to be “settling down,” but returned as CEO just four months later following disappointing quarterly results. He then turned the CEO chair over to Demos Parneros in July 2017, who was fired just before the 4th of July holiday in 2018 in what became a bitter dispute. In June 2019, B&N reached an agreement to sell the bookstore to the private equity firm Elliott Advisors. The sale closed shortly before the 2019 holiday shopping season began, ending Riggio’s 54-year tenure with the company.
“Len was creative and analytical, a determined cyclone of ambition,” said Sargent. “But above all else, Len was an extraordinary bookseller. And he was proud to be a bookseller, all day every day. I feared him, I trusted him, I admired him, and most of all I respected him. It is hard to imagine he is gone.”
While Riggio had his battles with different parts of the publishing and bookselling businesses, there was no question that he was a major force in the industry, helping to expand readers’ access to books even as he expanded his company; he had long advocated for publishers to lower, not raise, their prices, in order to entice more readers. Riggio also succeeded outside of the trade book business, launching Barnes & Noble College Stores (which was spun off from B&N in 2015), MBS Textbook Exchange, and GameStop. David Steinberger, who knew Riggio from his days heading the Perseus Books Group, said he admired Riggio’s business acumen.
“Len was not only a visionary retailer. He knew how to execute, both as a merchant and as a business builder,” Steinberger said. “It was in his blood.”
“In mourning the passing of Len Riggio, we also celebrate the life of a book-loving visionary who transformed the way America reads," said Penguin Random House CEO Nihar Malaviya in a statement. "Len was a giant, commercially and culturally. It is a privilege to benefit from all he contributed to our world.”
Oren Teicher, who retired as CEO of the ABA at the end of 2019, had a relationship with Riggio dating back to the late 1980s, when B&N was still an ABA member. The common ground then was Riggio’s backing of ABA’s First Amendment and free expression initiatives. Riggio and the ABA parted ways when the association filed its lawsuits against the company, but mended fences when Amazon emerged as a threat to both entities. “Len was a fascinating character,” Teicher said. “And, though over the span of our respective careers we probably disagreed more than we agreed, I never doubted that he loved bookselling.”
Teicher’s ties to Riggio extended into politics, where both were well-known supporters of the Democratic party. Riggio was also well aware of his need to balance his commitment to B&N with other pursuits, and was very active in supporting causes in the arts, education, and social justice worlds.
“My father lit up a room with his smile, drew people in with his wit and intellect, kept them close with his generosity and enormous heart,” Stephanie Riggio-Bulger, his daughter, said. “He worked tirelessly to leave the world a better place than he found it. May he rest comfortably knowing he succeeded.”
In 2010, when Riggio was named PW’s Person of the Year, he said that he never envisioned himself working for anyone else, and delivered what could be considered a perfect epitaph. “I started four companies from scratch: Barnes & Noble, Barnes & Noble College, GameStop, and MBS Textbook Exchange,” he said. “I like to think I've been a great entrepreneur, a good executive, and a decent manager.”
A mass of Christian burial will take place on August 30 at 10:00 am at the Basilica of St. Patrick's Old Cathedral at 263 Mulberry Street in Manhattan, with a public celebration of Riggio's life to be announced at a later date. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made in his memory to the Alzheimer's Association.
This article has been updated with further information.
