As head of America’s Barnes & Noble chain he reinvented the business, but could not compete with Amazon’s disruption
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.
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”.
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