And so Riggio finds himself once again in the spotlight. In an irony not lost on Riggio, Bezos even teamed up with the small bookstores’ trade group to lobby antitrust regulators into opposing the acquisition. “Goliath is always in range of a good slingshot,” Bezos (whose personal net worth is probably ten times that of Riggio) announced when Barnes & Noble agreed to acquire the distribution giant Ingram Book Group. ’s preppy 35-year-old founder, Jeff Bezos, has beguiled the press and won the allegiance of trend-setting consumers by portraying his company as hip and innovative while casting Barnes & Noble as a predatory behemoth. And as Barnes & Noble tries to catch up with in online bookselling, his public image as a greedy monopolist is beginning to catch up with him.
Still, much as Riggio may like to devote his energies to “the movement,” as he calls it, he has a business to run. I mean, what are we going to do about all this?” “But what aggravates me is that there is no call to arms. He opined to Maya Lin about the achievements of the artist Donald Judd and bantered with former New York City deputy mayor Bill Lynch about Al Sharpton’s “leadership qualities.” “This whole thing is wonderful,” Riggio said, leaving one panel discussion. At the dedication, Riggio hobnobbed cheerfully with the assembled liberal activists, scholars, and writers, happy to be respected not only for his money and power but for his ideas. Riggio’s cajoling (and the promise of transportation onboard a Riggio-chartered jet) helped persuade Morrison to sign on, and she joined Hillary Clinton, Rita Dove, and Joyce Carol Oates on the event’s program. And he’d derailed the group’s plans to name the library after himself, suggesting instead that it be dedicated to Langston Hughes. Riggio had put up $1 million to build and stock it, and picked the artist Maya Lin, whose Vietnam Veterans Memorial he’d long admired, to design it. In fact, Riggio was trying to enlist Morrison not to hawk books but to read at the dedication of a new library for the Children’s Defense Fund’s campus in Clinton, Tennessee. He sees himself as something else entirely: a man of high purpose, committed to art, literature, the best that has been thought and said. A decade of criticism has battered his public image into a caricature: college dropout from Bensonhurst and swarthy, hotheaded philistine. The success of his capacious, librarylike superstores has ironically made him the villain of the literary world – accused of breaking antitrust laws, closing down thousands of independent bookstores, bullying publishers, and flattening the literary landscape.
and well acquainted with the moral burdens of wealth and power. “Toni,” Riggio finally asks, “are you so rich now that you don’t care anymore?” Riggio himself is one of the richest people in the U.S. But Morrison’s rare success – she has won both the Nobel Prize and the Oprah Winfrey seal of approval – gives her license to be stubborn. Most authors are eager to please Riggio, the head of the country’s biggest bookstore chain. Leonard Riggio, the 58-year-old chairman and chief executive of Barnes & Noble, is on the phone trying to close a deal with the writer Toni Morrison.