Founder and former chairman of Barnes & Noble Leonard Riggio has died at 83. Riggio had Alzheimer’s illness.
He began his profession on the New York College bookstore and opened a competing retailer in 1965. Within the early ’70s, he purchased the flagship Barnes & Noble retailer, in line with his alma mater Brooklyn Technical Excessive Faculty.
Picture courtesy of Nathan Smith Studios
Riggio began constructing out retailer areas starting within the Nineteen Seventies and lasting for many years, till he created the biggest community of big-box bookstores within the U.S. He would go on to discovered Barnes & Noble School Booksellers, the biggest operator of school campus bookstores.
In 1996 Riggio, together with Richard Fontaine and Dan DeMatteo, based what would later grow to be GameStop Company. At one level the businesses Riggio operated totaled over 5,000 retail shops and employed over 100,000 individuals, in line with an announcement by his household.
Riggio retired as chairman of Barnes & Noble in 2016. “I’ve achieved every part I’ve needed to do in enterprise and now it’s time for me to pursue the numerous different endeavors associated to my philanthropic and social pursuits,” Riggio stated on the time.
Riggio earned the Ellis Island Medal of Honor, the Frederick Douglass Medallion and the Anti-Defamation League’s Americanism Award. He created Venture House Once more following Hurricane Katrina and constructed the Freedom Faculty’s Langston Hughes Library and Riggio-Lynch Chapel on the Alex Haley Farm in Clinton, Tennessee.
Mass will happen on Friday in New York Metropolis on the Basilica of St. Patrick’s Previous Cathedral. A public celebration of his life will probably be introduced at a later date.
