NEW YORK, NY.- Leonard Riggio, the brash, charismatic and literary-minded businessperson who, in founding the giant Barnes & Noble retail chain, transformed the business of selling books as thoroughly as the rise of the paperback once did, and who was cast as both a hero and a villain for doing so, died Tuesday in the New York City borough of Manhattan. He was 83.

His death, from Alzheimer’s disease, was announced by his family.

Riggio, a son of a cabdriver, was just 30 in 1971 when he bought a fusty half-century-old bookstore in lower Manhattan called Barnes & Noble and began turning it into a literary behemoth. Within decades, it was the largest bookseller in the United States, with hundreds of superstores, many of them in places that had formerly been book deserts, such as malls.

The outlets more resembled department stores than your typical bookstore: Each one offered thousands of titles, along with cappuccino and snacks, stationery and desk tchotchkes, a bountiful array of magazines and newspapers, and a congenial policy of allowing browsers to linger for hours. (It helped that there were public bathrooms.) And each store was a welcoming, if monolithic, agora that also served as an oasis for parents and caregivers, who could spread out in the expansive aisles of the children’s books section and read to their small charges.

Before the turn of the millennium, it was estimated that 1 of every 8 nonacademic books sold in the United States was bought at Barnes & Noble or its smaller B. Dalton stores, which the company acquired in 1987. Publishers paid high premiums to have their books displayed on Barnes & Noble’s capacious front tables, prime real estate that could make or break a title, even as the store deeply discounted titles from those same publishers.

The company’s strong-arm practices upended the industry. Thousands of independent bookstores went out of business as Barnes & Noble grew. And Riggio — a dapper Brooklyn-raised liberal and art lover devoted to civil rights and Democratic causes — found himself roundly vilified as the publishing world’s most heinous bad guy and as a neighborhood killer and a philistine.

“Why am I the predator, but if a nice independent bookstore opens a branch, it’s like welcome to the Messiah?” he asked in an interview with The Wall Street Journal in 1992. “I think every new bookstore should be celebrated, regardless of its pedigree.”

In 1998, the American Booksellers Association, the independent stores’ trade organization, sued Barnes & Noble and another chain, Borders, for unfair trade practices. The case was settled out of court, and both sides claimed the settlement as a victory. (Borders filed for bankruptcy in 2011.)

When Nora Ephron famously skewered Barnes & Noble’s reputation as a corporate goliath in her 1998 romantic comedy, “You’ve Got Mail” — starring Tom Hanks as the superstore executive slyly named Joe Fox and Meg Ryan as the owner of the beloved neighborhood bookstore that his business destroys — she hoped that Riggio might let her film the movie at one of his stores. Over dinner one night at Verbena, a lower Manhattan restaurant that has since closed, she tried to charm him into doing so. But Riggio, worried that he was being cast as the scoundrel in her screenplay, demurred.

“Believe me,” Ephron told him, as David D. Kirkpatrick later reported in New York magazine, “if I had wanted to model it after you, I would have cast John Travolta instead of Tom Hanks.”

Leonard Stephen Riggio was born Feb. 28, 1941, on Mott Street in the Little Italy neighborhood of Manhattan and grew up in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn. His mother, Lena (Capuccio) Riggio, was a dressmaker; his father, Stephen Riggio, was a cabbie and a former prizefighter who had twice bested Rocky Graziano, a middleweight champion. Stephen was a role model to Lenny, the eldest of three brothers — a man so disciplined that he kept fit by jumping out of his cab at stoplights to do pushups on the sidewalk.

Lenny skipped two grades before attending Brooklyn Technical High School, a selective magnet school, where he studied draftsmanship, architecture and design. After graduating, he worked days as a clerk in New York University’s bookstore and enrolled in the university’s night school, where he studied metallurgical engineering.

His reading preferences at the time were Classic Comics, until the paperback buyer at the university bookstore introduced him to the literary canon, handing him works by Thomas Mann, Herman Hesse and Albert Camus. He often said his favorite book was Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis.”

After two years of night school, he dropped out, quit his day job and opened his own college bookstore, SBX — for Student Book Exchange — near the campus and began acquiring contracts to manage others.

A proud political lefty, he offered his store’s basement and mimeograph machine to anti-war activists, among them his friend Tibor Kalman, so they could print pamphlets there. Kalman, who would later be known as the bad boy activist of graphic design, and his future wife, artist Maira Berman, worked at SBX, too, shelving books.

A few years later, in 1971, Riggio, armed with a $1.2 million loan (the equivalent of about $9.3 million today), bought Barnes & Noble, a bookstore on Fifth Avenue at 17th Street that William Barnes and G. Clifford Noble had opened in 1917. He soon commissioned Kalman to design the store’s distinctive shopping bags, picturing a woodcut of a medieval scholar.

It was Kalman’s first design commission. For the next eight years, as the company expanded beyond the textbook market and opened stores throughout the country, he was Barnes & Noble’s design director. Riggio was notoriously detail-oriented, often tweaking the design or lighting of a new store hours before its opening. Within the first five years, annual sales at the Fifth Avenue store rose to $10 million from $1 million.

“It was exhilarating,” Maira Kalman said by phone, recalling working the cash register and writing ad copy for the new company. “Len and Tibor were both strong-willed eccentrics, and together they made something fantastic.”

Riggio met his future wife, Louise Gebbia, when she was the editor of College Store Executive, a trade publication, and came to interview him about his success. He took her out for coffee and cantaloupe. They married seven years later.

Even as the company grew, Riggio ran it like a small family business. His brother Stephen served as vice chair and oversaw the online business, launched in 1997; his brother Vincent, known as Jimi, worked at a trucking company that shipped Barnes & Noble’s books. When Riggio took Barnes & Noble public in 1993, all his employees were given stock options.

But after decades of explosive growth, the company faltered as Amazon all but took over the market. Barnes & Noble lost more than $1 billion on its Nook e-reader, introduced as a competitor to Amazon’s Kindle.

As its fortunes grew more precarious, Barnes & Noble found itself, for the first time, embraced by the book industry, which came to see it as a bulwark against Amazon for its continued investment in brick-and-mortar stores. In the past decade, it endured a series of management crises — Riggio had stepped down as CEO in 2002 but remained chair — and struggled to make a profit, closing more than 150 stores. Finally, in 2019, Barnes & Noble was acquired by hedge fund Elliott Advisors for $683 million, and publishers collectively exhaled.

“The loss of Barnes & Noble would have been catastrophic for the industry,” Carolyn Reidy, president and CEO of Simon & Schuster, told The New York Times.

Riggio is survived by his wife; his daughters, Lisa Rollo, Donna Cortese and Stephanie Bulger; his brother Stephen; and four grandsons. His brother Vincent died in 2019. An early marriage ended in divorce.

In 1999, Riggio’s net worth was estimated to be $700 million (more than $1.3 billion today), but his liberal business policies — raising workers’ wages among them — made him an outlier among his fellow plutocrats.

“Money can become a burden, like something you carry on your shoulders,” he told Kirkpatrick of New York magazine. “My nature is to be a ball-buster, but my role is to help people.”

Riggio’s philanthropy was wide-ranging, focusing on the arts, education and social justice.

He funded Dia Beacon, the museum and art park in Beacon, New York. He put up $1 million to build a library devoted to books by African American authors and books about the Black experience on the campus of the Children’s Defense Fund in Clinton, Tennessee. He also funded the campus’s elegant minimalist chapel and chose architect Maya Lin to design both buildings.

The Riggios lived in an art-filled apartment on Park Avenue in Manhattan and also had homes in Palm Beach, Florida, and in Bridgehampton, New York, where they turned part of their estate into a private sculpture park anchored by a 300-ton steel work by Richard Serra.

Riggio had also dabbled in politics. He was campaign finance chief for Mayor David Dinkins’ failed bid for reelection in New York in 1993, backed Bill Clinton in his first presidential campaign in 1992 and supported Bill Bradley in his White House bid in 2000.

“From the things they write about me, you would think I wake up in the morning thinking about who I am going to kill,” Riggio said in 1999. “I wake up looking to do some good! We are selling books. We aren’t selling weapons of mass destruction. You go into a bookstore, you see Len Riggio’s life’s work, and you say, ‘Not a bad lifetime of work.’”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.