Almost every one of us book lovers has our own Barnes & Noble story — a distinct memory of when and how we became hooked on America’s favorite bookstore. For me, it was when I was about 10 years old. A Barnes & Noble had opened up next to the Holyoke Mall in western Massachusetts, my family’s favorite shopping destination when I was growing up. For the young read-a-holic I was, Barnes & Noble was like a book version of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, an enchanting place of wonder and delectation filled with rows upon endless rows of multicolored treats of every shape and size and every possible genre. I still remember exactly where I was in that Barnes & Noble when I discovered H. P. Lovecraft and which section I needed to check out to see if there were any new installments of R. L. Stine’s Goosebumps or Fear Street.
We book lovers whose reading lives were shaped in some way or another by Barnes & Noble all have one man to thank: Leonard Riggio, the founder of Barnes & Noble and the figure who, more than anyone else, outside of perhaps Jeff Bezos, decisively affected American book culture over the past 30 years. Riggio, who died on Aug. 27 at 83, was the founder of Barnes & Noble in the sense that Michael Keaton’s character, Ray Kroc, in the 2016 movie The Founder was “the founder” of McDonald’s. Like Kroc, who did not create the original McDonald’s hamburger restaurant in California but who was largely responsible for creating the McDonald’s fast-food franchise, Riggio did not create the first Barnes & Noble bookstore. But when he perceived that it had the potential to become something greater, he bought it and subsequently helped turn it into the nationwide franchise that it is today.
Leonard Stephen Riggio was born in the Little Italy section of New York City on Feb. 28, 1941, and was raised in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. His mother was a dressmaker, and his father was a cab driver and a retired boxer who, in his youth, had twice squared off against Rocky Marciano. After graduating from Brooklyn Technical High School, Leonard attended New York University for night classes. While working at the college’s bookstore, where he saw its student-customers routinely frustrated by the shop’s subpar selection, among its other inadequacies, he realized there could be a better way to go about running a bookstore.
To test out his theories, he dropped out of school and opened up a rival bookstore, SBX, the Student Book Exchange, nearby. Six years later, buoyed by his experience with SBX, Riggio decided it was time to take his bookstore-operating ideas to wider audiences. He took out a loan of over $1 million to buy a lower Manhattan bookstore called “Barnes & Noble,” with plans of bringing such kinds of large, attractive bookstores within the reach of all readers. After redesigning the store — Riggio had studied architecture and engineering in school — and increasing the store’s earnings within a few years by nearly tenfold, Riggio was ready to take his model bookstore out on the road and offer it up to the rest of the country. Within a few decades, Barnes & Noble bookstores could be found in all 50 states, becoming the nation’s dominant bookseller while also defying skeptics who had said that franchising a bookstore wouldn’t work.
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Riggio, who said his favorite book was Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, effected his own astounding transformation upon the American book industry. Under Riggio’s stewardship, bookstores became places that, for children, were as exciting as toy stores and that, for adults, were as addictive as Starbucks. (The Simpsons parodied the books + coffee aspect of Barnes & Noble by naming Springfield’s book superstore “Bookaccino’s.”) Barnes & Noble’s success spawned imitators like Borders (Pepsi to Barnes & Noble’s Coke), but no bookstore chain has managed to replicate Barnes and Noble’s winning formula — proven by the fact that only Barnes & Noble, and not Borders, has been able to withstand the rise of Amazon.
Like a character in a Thomas Mann or Hermann Hesse novel, some of Riggio’s other favorite writers, Riggio went through several transformations himself, from hero, for bringing bookstores to non-urban areas that had been literary deserts, to villain, for purportedly having driven many independent bookstores out of business, to back to hero again, for standing up to Amazon and for old-fashioned brick-and-mortar bookstores. Through it all, Riggio’s passion for books and for providing readers with the best possible book-browsing experience remained constant. The more that book culture has changed in the digital age, the more Riggio’s Barnes & Noble has helped ensure that the inimitable pleasures of holding a physical book in your hands have remained the same.
Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and the author, most recently, of Soloveitchik’s Children: Irving Greenberg, David Hartman, Jonathan Sacks, and the Future of Jewish Theology in America.