Who

Riggio is chairman of Barnes & Noble, the largest bookseller in the US with more than 800 retail locations.

Backstory

The son of a cabbie turned prizefighter (who twice defeated Rocky Graziano), Little Italy-born Riggio dropped out of college and took a job at the NYU bookstore in the early 60s. In 1965, at the age of 24, he took out a $5,000 loan to open his own college bookstore, the Waverly Book Exchange. He soon expanded to 10 locations, and in 1971 used the profits to acquire the venerable—but faltering—Barnes & Noble, which was then just a single store on lower Fifth Avenue. He bestowed the B&N name on his other shops and continued his expansion, focusing on the academic market in the 1970s before broadening the company's scope with the purchase of the B. Dalton chain in 1986 for $300 million.

Riggio introduced the "superstore" concept in the 1990s—monster-sized venues with cafes, couches, children's play areas, and wide aisles, all of which encouraged shoppers to browse, linger, and buy. And then came the internet. B&N launched barnesandnoble.com in 1997, but the site never managed to match the sales or popularity of Amazon.com, which had launched two years prior.

In 2002, Riggio stepped down as CEO and turned the job over to his younger brother, Stephen Riggio. He remains B&N's chairman.

Of note

Riggio dramatically changed the nature of the book business, in ways good and bad. The explosive growth in the industry can be partially credited to Barnes & Noble's expansion, but romantics also single him out as the man responsible for the disappearance of independent bookstores, many of which were forced to close after they found themselves unable to match the chain's discounted prices and massive selection. (The 1998 Nora Ephron film You've Got Mail highlighted the conflict between superstores and the indie bookstores; Ephron asked Riggio if she could shoot a scene at a Barnes & Noble store. He declined.) Publishers also regularly bemoan Barnes & Noble's oversized influence. Because the chain controls such a huge percentage of the market, a book's commercial success often hinges on how it performs at the company's stores, and publishers now have to pay B&N substantial sums to display their books in heavily-trafficked sections.

Keeping score

Amazon surpassed Barnes & Noble as the world's largest bookstore a long time ago, but don't shed any tears for Riggio just yet. His stake in the chain is worth more than half a billion dollars.

Board game

Riggio has served on the boards of the New York Fund for Public Schools, Children's Defense Fund, the Black Children's Community Crusade, and the Italian American Foundation. He has also donated extensively to his high school, Brooklyn Tech.

On the side

One of the city's most prolific art collectors, Riggio owns works by Willem de Kooning, Richard Serra, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Mark di Suvero, Claes Oldenburg, and Henry Moore. From 1998 to 2006 he served as chairman of the Dia Art Foundation and spearheaded the construction of the widely-hailed $57 million Dia gallery in the upstate hamlet of Beacon. (He personally contributed $35 million.) In a move that set New York's art community abuzz, he resigned from the Dia board in late 2006, both because he resented its plan to build a branch in the meatpacking district (he wanted to continue funneling Dia's resources toward his baby, Dia: Beacon) and because of his lingering fury at the sudden departure of Dia's longtime director Michael Govan months earlier.

Personal

Riggio and his second wife, Louise, live in a David Piscuskas-designed apartment on Park Avenue, in the same building as Donald Marron and former ad king Carl Spielvogel. He has three children and three grandchildren and spends weekends at his "baronial estate" in Bridgehampton.

No joke

Riggio's chauffeur deliberately avoids passing by the corner of 59th and Park when taking his boss to work. Why? Riggio finds the sight of the Borders bookstore "offensive."