by Ronald Rice
Stephen White
Tattered Cover Book Store, DENVER, COLORADO
Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead.
Or if one is a bookseller that recognizes the value of the unspoken word.
The wisdom in the first line is Benjamin Franklin’s. The awkward qualification is mine. Years ago, as I fell in love with Tattered Cover the way thousands of other book lovers in Denver fell in love with Tattered Cover, I had no way to know a day was coming when I would need a great bookstore that could keep a damn secret.
But that day did come, and Tattered didn’t disappoint.
I didn’t know her then, but the reason that Tattered didn’t disappoint was because of Joyce Meskis. Joyce believes that there is a right way to sell books, and to treat customers. She has a set of principles about bookselling that guide her vision, and she has a rock-solid determination to do her best to meet them.
Honestly? As I became a regular in the original store on the north side of Second Avenue in the seventies, the principles and vision of the owner were not on my radar. I just knew I adored the shop she created, a place where I would spend hours sitting on the stairs, looking at books.
Joyce was just one of the people who would ask me to please scooch over a little bit.
Although there’s a good chance my name rings no bell—my first editor told me that I had the misfortune of being born with a pseudonym—I have written almost twenty novels, a few screenplays, a single lonely short story, and some number of essays.
But for most of my adult life, long before my first novel found its way to Tattered’s shelves, I was a guy enamored of books. In Denver, loving books means some degree of devotion to Tattered Cover.
Writing had not been a lifelong goal. The aspiration came late. I began to write in secret. My wife knew. My toddler-aged son knew (in his toddler way). But that was it. As pages accumulated and my effort began to look suspiciously like a manuscript, I finally admitted to myself that I was probably writing a book and that I definitely had a dream. But the dream—to publish a novel, and maybe even, ha, to write for a living—felt like a fantasy, and often like a vice. As a practicing psychologist, I knew enough about vices to keep evidence of mine to myself.
To shed my ignorance about the steps, creative and practical, necessary to enter the marketplace of writers, I eschewed attending writers conferences and writers groups and creative writing classes. Instead I chose to teach myself about writing the way I had learned almost everything since my father started dragging my brothers and me to used-book stores when I was a kid.
I read.
Long addicted to fiction, I had a comforting history with the wonders of the creative side of what I yearned to do. But the practical side? How to negotiate an introduction to the mostly New York world of publishing houses and literary agents?
If you find yourself with the kind of need I had—or really any urge that requires knowledge or guidance or wisdom or inspiration or reflection or escape, any of the things that literature, little l, or Literature, big L, can provide—I hope you have the great fortune that I had to live within blocks of a bookstore like Denver’s Tattered Cover.
At my fingertips I needed a lovingly curated collection of the best fiction from all the greats who came before, as well as a selection of the most questionable fiction from the not-so-greats who came before. Tattered Cover had all that for me.
On the business side, as I became inclined—and I did—to want to read a dozen How To’s (… Get Published, … Write a Novel,… Negotiate a Contract, … Pen a Query Letter). Or all the Memoirs of…, or the Biographies of….
Tattered had those.
I would also need access to all the advice that had been offered writer-to-writer since, say, Fitzgerald, F. Scott, in addition to the latest wisdom and the freshest counsel published only days or weeks before. Back in 1989 there was no Internet to search; all the books I might need would have to be in stock. Visible and available. On a shelf. So that I could browse them, and peruse them, and choose them, and own them.
Tattered had me covered there, too.
The opium den where I fed my addiction was a tiny elbow of shelves, maybe four feet by four feet, on the top floor between the elevators and the bathrooms, across from the endless titles that comprised the store’s collection of non-genre fiction.
A cardboard sign marked my alcove—I felt some ownership; I was almost always alone up there—as Writing.
To me, it might just as well have been called Dreaming.
The Tattered of that phase of my life was the iteration that filled a converted four-story department store from plaster to plaster and from floor to ceiling with books.
The shop was immense, but it never felt as big as it was, though sometimes on weekends and during book signings and always around the holidays it somehow managed to feel not quite large enough.
That edition of Tattered—I consider it the third but others insist that depends on how you count—was a place where I occasionally went to locate a specific title, but where I usually went just to be around books. To discover new books. To be entranced.
Tattered was a great bookstore by then. While no one—certainly not Joyce Meskis—intended for it to be anything more than a great bookstore, it somehow became much more than that to Denver.
For locals, the big Cherry Creek Tattered Cover became an anchor, a destination, even an institution. That Tattered on First Avenue became our city’s crossroads, our town square, our community center. For two decades the glorious big Tattered kept the beat of our collective urban heart.
It was a lot to ask from a bookstore. By then, though, we’d been spoiled by Tattered Cover for years. We had come to expect a lot from Joyce’s place.
Other than in size, and perhaps in degree of wonder, the First Avenue store wasn’t much different from its predecessors, or from the Tattereds that would follow.
It had been years since Tattered busted out of the pleasantly cramped first home, the one that Joyce bought in the mid-seventies on the north side of Second Avenue. Then too fast, like a teenager outgrowing shoes while they are barely scuffed, Tattered shed its bigger, second location—the expansive, partly subterranean store across Second Avenue—and moved to the palace less than a block away.
Most things stayed constant at Tattered as the locations changed.
The bookmarks, for sure.
The collections, though growing, always felt right.
The carpet. All Tattered Covers have green carpet. The green is a certain hue that is more Celtic than British Racing, more warm than daring. It is not a spring green; when I settle into a chair with a book in Tattered it is always summer transforming into fall.
The bookcases. Tattereds share distinctive, darkly stained knotty pine bookshelves that reach high above the head. Some of the cases line walls, a few stand back-to-back to create islands in the green sea. Most butt end-to-end in short runs, or break into perpendicular turns that lead to alleys. Those lanes might truncate in a wide cul-de-sac, or meander like the rows of a corn maze through book-cluttered spaces.
Another constant? Yes, be careful. You must always watch your step in Tattered.
The unpredictability that is Tattered means that locating a specific section inside any store requires a good memory, an experienced guide, or a well-drawn map. The alternative, getting lost, leads to the joy of discovery. By design, discovery is its own reward.
Long before it was fashionable for booksellers to encourage leisured browsing by customers—or extended reading or occasional napping by customers—Tattered provided ample nooks to hide in, plenty of overstuffed chairs to get lost in, and old sofa after old sofa to snuggle next to your kid and read her a book in.
It was all part of Joyce’s vision.
As was the staff that executed that vision. The staff in Tattered Cover became as familiar to me as were the carpet and the shelves. I saw the same helpful faces, store after store, year after year. The staff, I was sure, recognized m
e as a regular—one of thousands of contented anonymous Tattered regulars. But in the many years before I began dreaming that a book of mine might someday be found on Tattered’s shelves, I would have been surprised to learn that any staff member in the store knew my name.
What I knew about the staff wasn’t complex. They read more than I did. That meant they read a lot. Intuition seemed to inform them when I was just looking, which was usually. But engage one of them on the floor with a question or a request for guidance and any staff member would talk books with you, patiently. Find books for you, eagerly. Ask what you had liked, recently. Tell you about books they loved, passionately.
A day arrived that my dream of becoming a writer transformed into my determination to be a writer, and that metamorphosis, too, crystallized at Tattered.
Some book in my hand, I was perched at the edge of a tread on the wide staircase that led from the first floor to the second in the big First Avenue location. A few feet away, through pine spindles, I overheard a woman, a staff member I had seen many times, speaking with a man I didn’t know about something about which I knew nothing.
I listened impolitely, captivated.
Their conversation was hardly private. That big staircase in Tattered was no place to keep a secret in Denver. It was Main Street for anyone in town who loved books, or who knew someone else who loved books, or who wanted to raise a child who loved books, or who was interested in having a thing, intellectual or profane, with someone who loved books.
The woman in the conversation was a “buyer” for Tattered. The man was a “rep” for Random House. He was selling titles from his “fall list” of forthcoming books. She was buying new books to fill Tattered’s endless shelves. I knew little of book publishing or bookselling then, but my ignorance didn’t concern me. I was assembling a fine collection of Tattered-supplied reference volumes at home. I could look up the details.
The impromptu meeting was no hard sell; the buyer seemed to be buying everything the rep was selling. Yes, he took notes about her orders—three of this, two dozen of that—but their interchange did not seem to be about commerce, buying and selling.
It was about books. And authors. His excitement about what was coming. Her joy about what she had just read. And what galleys from other publishers were near the top of the stack beside her bed, the ones she couldn’t wait to get to. What he was trying to convince her she had to read next.
The consequence of what I heard that day was tucked in the tangents between the affirmations of the buys, in the illuminating back-and-forth between two people whose lives were focused, in that moment, on their mutual love of books.
That was the day my dream became my determination. The day I knew I had to do whatever I could to become a writer, to earn membership into the world of books, a world that included a place like Tattered Cover, so I could know and work with and be among people who loved books as much as that woman, that buyer, loved books.
But I hadn’t earned it. Not yet. I was not ready to reveal my dream about becoming a writer. Until I was a writer. With a contract.
And that truth about my aspiration leads back to the part about why I needed a bookstore that could keep a damn secret.
Once I, or you, carried a book to any staff member at any cash register for purchase at Tattered, the passionate, opinionated, hyper-knowledgeable, book-loving staff would become mute about the titles that comprised the purchase.
The familiar staff at the register at Tattered never once offered a single comment to me—not of approval, not of wonder or curiosity, not of judgment or disdain—about any book I was buying. If the staff had figured out that I was busy accumulating the most comprehensive home collection of guides for prospective writers that might exist west of the Mississippi—and I was sure they had—they never breathed a word that they recognized my plans.
“Are you interested in writing?” Never asked. Not once.
“What are you hoping to publish? Fiction? Nonfiction?” Never asked. Not once.
It was no different for any other customer. If the book you were buying was about baby names, or erectile dysfunction, or the history of lesbian erotica? No comment.
The latest Grisham, or an early Bellow? No comment.
“Romance” as in bodice ripper, or Romance as in the Durants, The Story of Civilization, AD 1100–1300? Not a word. Ever.
If your desire on any day, or your need on any day, made a difference to the person at the cash register, you would not know it. Not from their words. Not from the look in their eyes. The curiosity that drew you in Tattered’s door, or that developed as you browsed—the curiosity of yours that deserved to be sated by a book—is held in trust at Tattered Cover.
In that green-carpeted pine-shelved store full of cushy furniture, the act of buying a book is as privileged as a whisper to a coconspirator, or a secret shared with your priest or your rabbi.
One of Joyce Meskis’s principles of selling books the right way is her insistence that no customer should ever feel the slightest hesitation about carrying any purchase to a cash register. Any purchase. Not the slightest hesitation.
How sacrosanct are her principles? Once challenged by the government to reveal the specifics of a purchase, Joyce Meskis went to court to protect her customer’s right to privacy.
I would guess 99 percent of customers didn’t care, or didn’t notice, that their transactions were completed without comment at Tattered. But the 1 percent? They cared.
Meeting the needs of everyone who entered her store was part of Joyce’s principle about selling books the right way.
We can argue about whether Tattered is the best bookstore of a generation—based on a dozen metrics, it is certainly part of the conversation—or even which Tattered was, or is, the best of the bunch. (I am prepared to make a case for stores one and three and four and six, but don’t make me choose only one. I can’t.)
You won’t win the arguments. I won’t lose. In the end it doesn’t matter. There are multiple Tattered Covers now, each with its own charms. The quality of the stores in other locales that book people count as peers of Tattered—it’s a short list—only confirm that Tattered’s reputation in the world of books is not mere legend.
But any discussion about the bookseller with the most indelible vision about how to sell books the right way, any discussion about the most principled bookseller in an industry full of great role models, or any discussion about the single most influential bookseller of our lifetime?
Those discussions start with Joyce Meskis, and her Tattered Cover.
Stop by when you’re in Denver. Browse for a while. Pick up a book, maybe something controversial.
The book will be your secret.
Tattered Cover? It’s ours.
New York Times best-selling writer STEPHEN WHITE (authorstephenwhite.com) is the author of 19 crime novels. Tattered Cover is his neighborhood bookstore. How cool is that?
Joan Wickersham
The Toadstool Bookshop, PETERBOROUGH, NEW HAMPSHIRE
When it comes to bookstores, I’m polygamous. I love the one I’m with. Like Mozart’s Don Giovanni, who adores fair ladies and dark ones and the old and the young, I am passionately susceptible to the many different ways in which a bookstore can entice—a basement full of remainders, a fireplace, a window overlooking a river, a table display that opens your eyes to books you’ve never noticed before, a weird little back room full of used books in which you discover a copy of something you’ve been craving for years. But I confess to having a special tenderness for The Toadstool Bookshop in Peterborough, New Hampshire.
The Toadstool is huge and it wanders.
It has a room devoted to new books; another that is a broad, deep, and quirky used-books store; and a third, smaller room filled with CDs and films.
It also has a café, tucked into its own space apart from the books, avoiding that awkward jostling bookstore-café thing where the book browsers feel like they are disturbing the soup eaters and vice versa.
But admirable as these assets are, I fell in love with The Toadstool because it’s right down the road from the MacDowell Colony, and my experience of the store is bound up with the happiness of the time I have spent writing at MacDowell.
A MacDowell residency is a time of intense solitude and utter freedom. You are given a studio, meals, and a place to sleep. Your time is yours to structure in any way you want. During my first residency, in the fall of 2004, I quickly fell into a rhythm of waking early, hiking over to my studio, making tea and listening to music and plunging into my work before the sun was up. My writing took off in a way it never had before. By the middle of the afternoon, I would be excited and exhausted, ready for a break; and I would head down the hill into the town of Peterborough, where I would inevitably find my way into The Toadstool.
It was November, and I remember I bought a lot of books to give as Christmas presents. And I bought a CD by Anonymous 4 called Wolcum Yule, an album of serene and austere old carols that I played over and over in my studio. But as tempted as I was by The Toadstool’s bulging shelves of fiction and biography, I don’t think I bought a single book for myself. I was listening to the voice of my own book telling me what it wanted to be; I couldn’t afford to become distracted by another writer’s preoccupations and cadences. The store was rich and packed, alluring; I was falling in love with The Toadstool, but we were careful not to become too deeply involved. We exchanged longing glances but acknowledged that the timing was wrong.
The MacDowell residency ended, and I went back home but never quite forgot about The Toadstool. I talked about it in a wistful paradise-lost kind of way, especially to my older son who in his late teens had become an avid comber of bookstores. He would mention a writer he was hooked on—David Goodis, Chester Himes—and I would say, “I bet you could find more of his books in the used section of The Toadstool.” Finally one morning we got in the car and drove up to Peterborough. After all that advance praise The Toadstool could have been a disappointment, but my son and I were both enthralled. He came away with a shopping bag full of used noir-ish novels, and I bought a stack of recent fiction to make up for all those books I’d denied myself during my time at MacDowell.
