Founder and former chairman of Barnes & Noble Leonard Riggio has died at 83. Riggio had Alzheimer’s disease.
He started his career at the New York University bookstore and opened a competing store in 1965. In the early ’70s, he bought the flagship Barnes & Noble store, according to his alma mater Brooklyn Technical High School.
Riggio started building out store locations beginning in the 1970s and lasting for decades, until he created the largest network of big-box bookstores in the U.S. He would go on to found Barnes & Noble College Booksellers, the largest operator of college campus bookstores.
In 1996 Riggio, along with Richard Fontaine and Dan DeMatteo, founded what would later become GameStop Corporation. At one point the companies Riggio operated totaled over 5,000 retail stores and employed over 100,000 people, according to an announcement by his family.
Riggio retired as chairman of Barnes & Noble in 2016. “I’ve done everything I have wanted to do in business and now it is time for me to pursue the many other endeavors related to my philanthropic and social interests,” Riggio said at the time.
Riggio earned the Ellis Island Medal of Honor, the Frederick Douglass Medallion and the Anti-Defamation League’s Americanism Award. He created Project Home Again following Hurricane Katrina and built the Freedom School’s Langston Hughes Library and Riggio-Lynch Chapel at the Alex Haley Farm in Clinton, Tennessee.
Mass will take place on Friday in New York City at the Basilica of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral. A public celebration of his life will be announced at a later date.
