We won’t see his like again. What a useful cliché that is. And while at first I was interested in Leonard Riggio only for Minden, the 11-plus-acre estate he owned on Ocean Road in Bridgehampton, I found that his death signifies another kind of passing.
The mustachioed man’s man, that is, the boxer’s son from Bensonhurst, the salesman, the hustler who built a bricks-and-mortar retail juggernaut on the strength of a loan and a dream, the tough corporate boss with a soft spot for the warehouse worker and the truck driver.
As opposed to the rise of the nerds, the no-conscience tech geeks who think they owe no taxes, but are owed a free pass to surveil us no end, the monopolists who short-circuit unions and work their drivers till they piss in Gatorade bottles.
If these were pre-coding days, say, 1978 (and don’t we wish that it were?), what would these guys be, exactly — actuaries?
And so, Barnes & Noble. Sure, I understand the lumps it takes for its box stores, the cookie-cutter chain stores. I get the virtue-signaling vis-a-vis independent shops, too. Never mind that in another lifetime when I lived in Flanders I used to enjoy sipping a cup of joe at the late, lamented Borders Books in Riverhead as I looked over a new hardback redolent of wood pulp, need it be said that these are still bookstores we’re talking about? Preferable, in short, in their perusing opportunities and in their employment of the bookish, to online-only.
As for Riggio at Minden, the 1912 Newport-style former summer cottage of John Berwind, coal titan, how about all that Richard Serra steel out front? Admirable is the art aficionado who decorates his spacious lawn with such a hulk. It looks like an oil tanker’s hull dropped from a passing U.F.O.
Long may it rust.