Leonard Riggio, 83, Dies; Founded Barnes & Noble and Upended Publishing

Leonard Riggio, the brash, charismatic and literary-minded businessman 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 on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 83.

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

Mr. 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, like 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 one of every eight 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 Mr. 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.