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After 34 years, city's landmark shop shelves its old location for a new one
DENVER -- For the first weekend in memory, the famed Tattered Cover Book Store won't be open Saturday night or Sunday.
After more than three decades, the landmark is moving out of the city's priciest retail zone, Cherry Creek. The flagship store, beloved locally and admired nationally as a haven for book hounds, will transfer all 125,000 volumes to a new home in time to reopen Monday morning.
The new store is a refurbished theater where Tattered Cover owner Joyce Meskis once sold theater and drama books at intermission.
No book will be boxed until after 6 p.m. Saturday, lest a customer need to thumb through it, curl up with it in one of the store's trademark easy chairs -- or even buy it. "The books stay on the shelves until Saturday night. It's all about the books," Meskis says.
Tattered Cover's new chapter, after more than 34 years in Cherry Creek, says as much about the embattled business of independent bookselling as it does about one local store's uncommon success. The number of independent book stores has declined for more than a decade, much like Meg Ryan's little shop besieged by Tom Hanks' big bookstore in the 1998 movie You've Got Mail. Independents struggle today to hold just 10% of the book market.
Tattered Cover wins praise for customer-conscious survival against the tide of Internet sales and superchains, which buy in bulk and discount more deeply.
"The key to successful independent bookstores is the connection they have to the community. Tattered obviously is a superb example," says Oren Teicher,chief operating officer of the American Booksellers Association, a 1,800-member league of independents. The store's service is legendary: expert and friendly, but not pushy. Legions of authors read and sign there.
Meskis herself headed the bookseller group in the early 1990s and won acclaim from First Amendment advocates for resisting a search warrant in 2000 for sales records of a customer suspected of illegal drugmaking. The store won the case in the Colorado Supreme Court.
It also is one of 4,700 stores and sellers whose sales are used to calculate USA TODAY's weekly Best-Selling Books list.
Meskis says the store has struggled like any other with expensive parking and rent, worsening traffic and shifting needs of customers. "The marketplace has changed with superstores and with the Internet, so we have to work within that context to continue to serve customers the very best we can."
So 12 years ago, the store gambled on a second location in Lower Downtown's warehouse district, which paid off when the neighborhood was reborn as the hip "LoDo." In 2004, Tattered Cover opened a third branch in Highlands Ranch, cul-de-sac capital of Denver's suburbs.
Teicher of the booksellers group acknowledges "significant decline" for independents from the early 1990s until about two years ago. The association once had 4,500 merchants with 7,000 locations. Today it has 1,800 merchants with 2,500 stores. He says a modest recovery is underway, though store closings still outnumber openings.
Local bookselling remains a challenge. Last week, San Francisco's landmark A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books announced it will close. Across San Francisco Bay, Cody's Books, a Berkeley institution for 50 years, will shut its original Telegraph Avenue location, though it has two other successful branches.
Cincinnati's New World Bookshop closed last December after 33 years, citing inability to compete. In Cambridge, Mass., WordsWorth Books on Harvard Square shut down a year earlier. Last fall, New England's 30-store Buck-A-Book discount chain also closed.
When Meskis bought the 3-year-old Tattered Cover in 1974, Cherry Creek was a sedate enclave of bungalows and small businesses. Over the years, it grew several times before moving to a former department store for the last 20 years. Meanwhile, Cherry Creek became Denver's toniest retail address. But traffic began to push away even loyal customers.
"Inevitably, the neighborhood changes where your store is located," Meskis says. The lease was up this year, too. It was "a confluence of circumstances," she says.
The new store will be in the Lowenstein Theater on Colfax Avenue in east-central Denver. The main auditorium will house most of the store's 63 categories of books.
The store surveyed customers before the move on a critical question: Will you shop us in the new location?
"Seventy percent said they would. That's not bad," says Linda Milleman, a staffer since 1979 who is supervising the move. Still, she admits, "It's a leap of faith."
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