Leonard Riggio, Who Built Barnes & Noble Into a Bookselling Titan, dies at 87: 10 Things to Know About Him and His Empire.

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I was going to do a giant catalogue of book lists I have been collecting over the last few weeks, but the news that Leonard Riggio, who built Barnes & Noble into the Goliath we know today, died today is going to preempt that.

Instead, I offer the 10 most interesting things to know about Riggio, one of the most influential figures in American books of all time. (If you want to read a good obit, I recommend this one in the Chicago Sun-Times.)

1. Riggo started in the book-selling business while studying at NYU with first business, The Student Book Exchange.
2. In 1997, at the height of Barnes & Noble’s dominance, Riggio said he read 7 books.
3. Nora Ephron tried to convince Riggio to let her shoot You’ve Got Mail in a Barnes & Noble, but Riggio declined, saying he thought the movie was a criticism of him and his business (to which Ephron replied, “if I had wanted to model it after you, I would have cast John Travolta instead of Tom Hanks.”)
4. Barnes & Noble, under Riggio’s leadership, was the first major retailer to be open on Sundays….and to have public restrooms.
5. In the five years before Barnes & Noble was sold to Elliot Advisers in 2019, the company had four different CEOs.
6. Stephen Riggio worked for his brother Leonard starting at the age of 14 and at one point was CEO of barnesandnoble.com.
7. Leonard Riggio, through his charitable organization, committed $20 million dollars toward helping build homes for victims of Hurricane Katrina.
8. Riggio bought the original Barnes & Noble store on 5th Avenue in 1971 with a $1.2 million dollar loan.
9. A few years later, that same 5th Avenue store became “The World’s Largest Bookstore,” stocking more than 150,000 titles.
10. At BookExpo in 2018, the President of the American Booksellers Association President Oren Teicher himself introduced Riggio for his keynote address after decades of animosity between indie bookstores and Barnes & Noble: “My standing here, doing what I’m about to do, would have been impossible to imagine several years ago.”