It's almost understandable how the New Yorker could make that mistake, which has since been corrected. Tattered has long epitomized the independent bookstore, a model and inspiration for booksellers across the country — not to mention a destination for book lovers worldwide.
But when B&N announced its purchase of Tattered for $1.83 million this summer, there were as many groans as there were cheers. Despite assurances to the contrary from the buyer, people wondered if the big-box blandness of B&N would erase the warm, homey Tattered Cover vibe. Would a major chunk of Denver's cultural DNA be rendered synthetic?
Four months after B&N's acquisition, though, Tattered is still Tattered. The main location on East Colfax Avenue feels roughly similar to how it was before — and in many ways better. The stock that had dwindled catastrophically over the past two years has rebounded. There are now books on the shelves, which is sort of an existential requisite for a bookstore. The website is slowly being reconstructed, the newsletter has shaped up, and author events are repopulating the calendar, even if customers still must pay to attend (but at least get a copy of the book with their ticket).
Still, while some Tattered diehards are heartened, others are heartbroken.
The Opening Chapter
The independent ethic of the Tattered Cover has never been a mere marketing tag. It's institutional. After being founded by Stephen Cogill in 1971, then bought by Joyce Meskis in 1974, Tattered gradually became synonymous nationwide with bookselling integrity and First Amendment advocacy. That had everything to do with Meskis's almost religious passion for safeguarding and promoting the power of the written word, a zeal that extended far beyond moving units. As a result, even as large, homogenous chains — Barnes & Noble chief among them — began usurping independent bookstores in the ’80s, Tattered continued to thrive and became renowned nationwide.
Meskis even began expanding the book business into a mini-empire in the ’90s, first with a location in LoDo that opened in 1994 right by the not-yet-renovated Union Station. That store became an engine that helped drive downtown Denver's revitalization in the late ’90s and early ’00s. A third location opened in Highlands Ranch in 2004, but that signaled the start of a perpetual shuffling of the store's outlets. The four-story flagship store in Cherry Creek was closed and the Colfax branch launched in 2006 in the historic Lowenstein Theatre complex; Highlands Ranch moved to Littleton and then LoDo, to McGregor Square. More stores sprang up along the way, including a compact shop in the renovated Union Station and a kid-oriented store in Stanley Marketplace. There were even three franchised spots at Denver International Airport.
While all that activity seemed like a sign of health to some, it underpinned a growing instability at Tattered. The advent of the commercially available ebook in the early ’00s prompted doomsayers to predict the demise of the brick-and-mortar bookstore. And for a time, that fate seemed inevitable, but as the novelty of ebooks wore off, readers came around to the idea that electronic-versus-paper wasn't an either/or proposition. You could whip out a Kindle when convenient yet still maintain an attractive bookshelf at home. And you could definitely hang out in a bookstore for hours with coffee to drink and plenty to browse.
Getting ready to retire and facing health issues, Meskis sold Tattered in 2015. A legend in the publishing industry, she had steered the company through every imaginable upheaval and stayed on for a time to advise the new owners, Len Vlahos and Kristen Gilligan, who moved from Connecticut to Denver to take over.
Joyce Meskis handed over ownership of Tattered Cover in 2017.
Evan Semón
“She never thought she’d retire, so she didn’t have a succession plan," Vlahos told Westword in 2017. "Her kids loved the business but didn’t want it for their own. Her senior staff had been with her for so long, but they were at the points in their careers where they were a little more risk-averse. And here I was, this guy with all this book-industry experience, and she knows me, and she knows my reputation. She’s thinking, ‘Maybe there’s a succession plan in this for me.’ And I’m thinking, ‘Holy crap, how cool would this be?’”
As it turned out, not that cool. Despite punching up the store's live events and children's programming, the couple's leadership was brief and tumultuous. In 2020, already hit by the pandemic, Vlahos and Gilligan botched their response to the Black Lives Matter movement with a tone-deaf statement about maintaining neutrality in the wake of George Floyd's murder by a police officer in Minneapolis. A hasty recanting of that statement was too little, too late, and they threw in the towel.
A group of local investors acquired the chain in December 2020, and there was hope that the group's leaders, Denver natives David Back and Kwame Spearman, would bring their lifelong love of Tattered to the rescue. But nostalgia and affection weren't enough to square the balance sheet. By 2023, tumbleweeds blew across the stores' shelves as unpaid invoices from book distributors piled up and orders went unfulfilled. Meanwhile, Spearman made an unsuccessful run for mayor, then lost his position as CEO.
Following Spearman's departure, Brad Dempsey was installed as interim CEO. Dempsey insists that bankruptcy was not a foregone conclusion when he took over in July 2023, even though he's a bankruptcy lawyer by trade. Instead, he says, he wielded his expertise in bankruptcy law in an attempt to save Tattered from that very fate. He managed to negotiate amnesty on some of the business's vast debts to publishers and distributors. That was a vital step forward, but it wasn't enough. Tattered wound up filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy three months after Dempsey took over. Three locations were closed, including McGregor Square in LoDo and a new spot opened by Spearman and company in Colorado Springs, and more than two dozen employees were laid off.
Tattered began looking for new suitors. And in July, Barnes & Noble announced that it had purchased the business after the behemoth retailer outbid other potential investors.
One of those potential investors was Spearman.
"I actually thought it was some wealthy individual who had outbid us," he says, citing the investment group he had helped put together to purchase Tattered Cover — which for him might have meant a shot at redemption. "I thought it was a scenario like Jeff Bezos buying the Washington Post. I didn't even fathom that it could have been Barnes & Noble, because, quite frankly, that's just not what Tattered Cover is."
Alex Mack worked for Tattered Cover for three years before being fired without notice.
Courtesy of Alex Mack
The Plot Thickens
"We were told that the Tattered Cover wasn't going to change, but the fear of a corporation like Barnes & Noble coming in was very valid. The way that Barnes & Noble is run is just very different and impersonal," says Alex Mack, who was fired from Tattered in October after working there for over three years as a bookseller and barista. "That was the biggest fear for us, for all the employees there. We cared so deeply about the Tattered Cover as a place of community. We considered all of our co-workers our family, so we were scared of having a corporation come in."
Alex Mack worked for Tattered Cover for three years before being fired without notice.
Courtesy of Alex Mack
Those fears were not unfounded. When B&N announced that it had purchased Tattered, it said that "substantially all" of the seventy employees would be retained. But it wasn't long before the new owners started interviewing the current employees — for the jobs they already had.
"The second we found out about Barnes & Noble, we were like, 'Are our jobs safe?'" Mack recalls. "So our managers were like, 'Yes, our jobs are safe.' Barnes & Noble would keep all of the staff, is what I was told. Then immediately we were told that we were having re-interviews. Management was like, 'This is just a formality, just to check in where everyone's at. Since this is a new company, we technically have to do interviews. Don't worry.' Then a week or two later, they started firing us based on the quote-unquote results of those interviews.
"I was told that I was let go because the results of my interview showed that I didn't have what they wanted for Barnes & Noble," Mack continues. "They said that I didn't align with what Barnes & Noble was looking for, but they didn't tell me what that meant. And I had already been told my job was safe."
Merak Alosa, a fellow former employee, agrees with Mack: "During the re-interviews, there was this looming kind of unease about our jobs. But we were being told that we had nothing to worry about, that everything's going to be fine, that they're not going to let anyone go who works on the floor, like Alex and me."
Derek Holland, a longtime bookseller who'd been with Tattered since the ’80s and managed the McGregor location, took over as the local managing director after the store was purchased by B&N. Employees took that as a good sign...while they still had their jobs.
"We let go of fifteen employees," says Holland. "We now have 51 employees across all four of the Tattered Cover locations. We conducted a thorough rehiring process for all booksellers led entirely by me and all four store managers. Based on the results of those interviews, we let go of a handful of booksellers at Colfax. There were also certain office roles at the Tattered Cover that overlapped with operations that are now covered by Barnes & Noble, so the employees who previously held those positions were let go."
Alosa, who had worked at the Colfax store for three years, was shown the door on the same day as Mack.
"Someone was fired out of the blue the day before," Alosa recalls. "Everybody was freaking out that day when they heard the news, and management promised us there would be no more firings that day. They were honest about that. They waited until the next day to fire Alex and me."
In addition to being given no notice, Alosa was offered no severance — unless a certain stipulation was met. "They said I could have two weeks' worth of severance pay, but I didn't take it," he says. "I would have had to sign a non-disparagement agreement to get the money. Two weeks of minimum-wage pay to stay silent."
Dempsey doesn't believe that Barnes & Noble acted in bad faith. "They had the right," he says. "There's no legal obligation for them to keep any employees on other than just, you know, how people might feel about the company. But there's no legal obligation. The agreement said 'substantially all,' and so there was there was room in there."
Dempsey refers to the firings as "consolidating the number of booksellers." At the same time, he says, "Booksellers have a lot more control now. That's the methodology. It's now a bookseller-led store. The initiative here is to give more power to the booksellers."
James Daunt, CEO of Barnes & Noble, echoes that sentiment. “Let booksellers be booksellers," he says. "Leave them alone and let them do what they do.”
Daunt began his career as a bookseller himself in his native England, where he founded a string of stores called Daunt Books. B&N appointed him its CEO in 2019, following the chain's purchase for $683 million by the United Kingdom-based hedge fund Elliott Advisors. By then, he already had a soft spot for Tattered. “I remember going to the Tattered Cover for the first time in the ’90s," he says of the massive Cherry Creek store. "I had already heard so much about it. It was this legendary place.”
So when Tattered entered bankruptcy proceedings, Daunt jumped at the chance to be part of its legacy. “We want to preserve the culture of the Tattered Cover," he says. "We just wanted to put books on the shelves. That's it."
Merak Alosa refused to sign Tattered's non-disparagement agreement after being fired.
Evan Semón
A Real Page-Turner
The Tattered Cover's tribulations since 2020 have devolved into a lot of finger-pointing. Spearman, however, doesn't feel he is above blame. "One thing I've reflected upon since leaving the Tattered Cover is I should have done more," he says. "I should have deepened myself within that family and done more to try to preserve that familial vibe. But, you know, the Tattered Cover is one of those organizations where people are not working because of the compensation. They're not working there because they are fascinated about retail. They're working there because they love books and love their community. Put this together, and you have that family feel."It's increasingly hard to have a business like that right now," he continues, "just with all of the macro factors that are going on, whether it's inflation or the cost of housing. But I think, in many ways, that actually created an even stronger bond amongst the staff when I was there. They knew that they were trying to do something that was incredibly improbable, and I think there was a pride that they could accomplish that. But change is difficult. Businesses have to make decisions that allow those businesses to succeed, and not everyone's going to be happy with that. The Tattered Cover is something that we as Coloradans are proud to say we created, that we support and that we have. The Tattered Cover has to succeed."
On that point, Spearman and Dempsey agree.
"Like most Coloradans, I feel it would be unacceptable to think of a world without the Tattered Cover," Dempsey says. "People don't understand how close we were to closing the store at multiple points in 2023 and 2024. We fought the battle. Now they've signed a new twenty-year lease at the Colfax store. This is a generational commitment to that location." Spearman wishes that Tattered's survival hadn't come at such a cost. "The Tattered Cover, to me, is known for two things," he says. "One, obviously, books, but second, being a Colorado treasure. And so now, for the owners to not be remotely based in Colorado is frustrating.
"I hope they can succeed," he adds, "but the challenge is that the Tattered Cover is more than just a retail environment. It's a place where people feel ownership. That's what it means to me. And I think that the employees are part of that DNA. If you're Barnes & Noble and you're going to make a bid to purchase the Tattered Cover, you have to be signed up for those employees and the type of development that's needed for that team. If you didn't want to do that, if you wanted to re-interview everyone immediately, you shouldn't have bought the organization, because you're fundamentally changing what it is. To me, that's not right."
Tattered is looking for a good holiday season.
Photo by Molly Martin
Mack and Alosa were both hired during Spearman's reign, which saw its share of firings and instability, not to mention abysmal spirits.
"The financial problems were so severe back then," Alosa recalls. "There would be, like, four books on every shelf. The lights were busted. The carpet was dirty. Your entire job was telling people why you don't have Huck Finn in stock, then having them say, 'Well, what kind of bookstore are you?' And that was every single day, over and over."
Mack also acknowledges Tattered's rocky history — and current reality. "Obviously, things were not in the best shape before Barnes & Noble took over. Spirits were collectively down there even before the Barnes & Noble thing. People would come and be, like, 'Oh, I'm just going to get this book on Amazon because you guys can't do it.' It was really limiting, but we were sticking together. When I say the staff was like a family, it really was. We had each other's backs. We were trying to figure out how to do this, how to survive in the bankruptcy. Like, I came up with this idea, a blind date with a book, in order to sell dead stock that we had on the shelves that was unreturnable. We would all just come up with little ideas like that. We were really trying as hard as we could to keep that business open because it was personal to us, because we loved it."
Tattered's acquisition by B&N still feels like a mismatch to Mack.
"When Barnes & Noble took over," Mack says, "they were saying, 'Hey, this is the Tattered Cover. The name Barnes & Noble will be nowhere in the store.' And then we got all this stuff, like machines, that said Barnes & Noble on them. It definitely feels like they took the Tattered Cover and gutted everything out, and now we're just living in its skin. It's like this parasite has taken over, and it's trying to convince everybody that it's still the same."
Despite their treatment by the new owners, Mack and Alosa both say they want Tattered to persevere, even if they have qualms about how that perseverance might look.
"I don't think Barnes & Noble is an intrinsic evil in the same way Amazon is," Alosa says. "It's good that there are still physical stores that sell books in the world. But with anything like Barnes & Noble, you're going to see it get worse and worse. Just a few years back we had stores that were more personalized and local, but I think that's just going to get leaner and leaner. It is kind of a bargain with the devil, I guess. But I don't want to see the Tattered Cover entirely gone, either."
