When it comes to how a sale of Tattered Cover to Barnes & Noble would change the storied Denver bookstore, James Daunt is insistent: that will be up to the team managing and staffing the business.
Daunt, CEO of Barnes & Noble, was in Denver Friday and Saturday to talk to Tattered Cover’s booksellers, or employees. Barnes & Noble, the country’s largest bookseller, has offered $1.83 million in cash to buy Tattered Cover out of bankruptcy, covering $50,000 in back rent and $1.6 million in secured debt the store owes.
Tattered Cover’s parent company, Bended Page, approved the offer June 17, but the agreement needs the approval of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Denver. The closing is set to take place by July 31.
Patrons sit in the children’s section at the Tattered Cover Book Store’s East Colfax Avenue location in Denver on June 28, 2024. (Photo by Zachary Spindler-Krage/The Denver Post)
After a short stint as an investment banker, Daunt opened a few bookstores in Britain. He later became managing director, or CEO, of Waterstones, Britain’s largest bookstore chain, and then CEO of Barnes & Noble, but still has his own stores.
“I’m a student of other bookstores. I visited Tattered Cover in the past,” Daunt told The Denver Post while sitting at a table among the bookcases at the store’s main location on Denver’s East Colfax Avenue.
“It’s obviously one of the great names in bookselling,” Daunt added.
And while TC Acquisition Co. LLC, an affiliate of Barnes & Noble, has made an offer on the store, Daunt insisted that the book chain doesn’t plan to remake the 53-year-old independent business in some kind of corporate image.
“Barnes & Noble isn’t coming in, as such. It’s providing all of the structure. We’re there to provide all that is necessary for the teams to run a good bookstore,” Daunt said. “Tattered Cover is going to figure out how it becomes Tattered Cover again.”
After taking the helm at Waterstones and Barnes & Noble, Daunt said he has encouraged employees to run stores like independent booksellers
“It’s the store team that runs a good bookstore, whether it’s the Barnes & Noble in Fort Collins or Tattered Cover here,” Daunt said. “Some of them will do it brilliantly, some of them will do it shockingly awfully and some of them in between.”
In Britain, Waterstones has bought well-known independent bookstores that still operate under their original names, such as Blackwell’s, Hatchards, Foyles and Hodges Figgis.
“What we’ve done is really empower those teams to reinvent themselves back to what they were,” Daunt said. “Hatchards now is most definitely not a Waterstones. It’s Hatchards. It’s a very, very distinct and different bookstore and dramatically more successful as a consequence of that.”
James Daunt, chief executive officer of Barnes & Noble, in the Tattered Cover Book Store’s East Colfax Avenue location in Denver on June 28, 2024. (Photo by Zachary Spindler-Krage/The Denver Post)
Hatchards is the oldest bookshop in the United Kingdom and the official bookseller to the royal household, according to its website.
The agreement between Bended Page and Barnes & Noble calls for the bookstore to continue operating under the name of the Tattered Cover Book Store and to continue its program of events. All four metro-area locations will remain open.
Daunt said that he hopes “the vast majority” of Tattered Cover’s approximately 70 employees will want to stay on staff.
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The lease on the East Colfax store will be extended through 2038 and the lease on the store in the Aspen Grove shopping center in Littleton would run through 2030.
Under the ownership of Joyce Meskis, Tattered Cover Bookstore became a Denver icon that hosted former presidents, future presidents (Barack Obama) and literary luminaries through the decades. Tattered Cover also forged a national reputation for fighting censorship and defending First Amendment rights.
In 2017, book-industry veterans Len Vlahos and his wife Kristen Gilligan acquired controlling interest in the Tattered Cover. Bended Page, co-founded by Denver natives Kwame Spearman and David Back, bought the struggling company in 2020.
Tattered Cover filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy less than a year after the death of Meskis in December 2022. The parent company put the bookstore up for sale in March.