Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
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.)
- Riggo started in the book-selling business while studying at NYU with first business, The Student Book Exchange.
- In 1997, at the height of Barnes & Noble’s dominance, Riggio said he read 7 books.
- 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.”)
- Barnes & Noble, under Riggio’s leadership, was the first major retailer to be open on Sundays….and to have public restrooms.
- In the five years before Barnes & Noble was sold to Elliot Advisers in 2019, the company had four different CEOs.
- Stephen Riggio worked for his brother Leonard starting at the age of 14 and at one point was CEO of barnesandnoble.com.
- Leonard Riggio, through his charitable organization, committed $20 million dollars toward helping build homes for victims of Hurricane Katrina.
- Riggio bought the original Barnes & Noble store on 5th Avenue in 1971 with a $1.2 million dollar loan.
- A few years later, that same 5th Avenue store became “The World’s Largest Bookstore,” stocking more than 150,000 titles.
- 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.”
