Imagine a Great Bookstore

This is something that needs saying, and to my knowledge no one in this town has dared to say it, at least in the print or electronic media: the Tattered Cover Bookstore needs help. I don't mean that it needs volunteers to help it move (as happened in 1983 and again in 1986, when it moved twice during the years when it was a great bookstore). No, I mean: it needs saving from itself.

The Tattered Cover is one of Denver's sacred cows--beloved of so many, the store that thrived as the town suffered through a long post-oil-boom malaise in the 1980s, the institution that has valiantly battled the chain bookstores and bookselling websites for so many years now. So how dare I criticize? Because, as those of you who know me will attest, I adore the Tattered Cover. I gave it more than five years of my life, working for incredibly low wages during the Clinton boom years when everyone was getting rich, except for us dedicated, bookloving idiots. Of course, for me that job was one of convenience: I needed flexibility and low responsibility as I went through college, and the store was a perfect place (plus I could by textbooks cheaper than any of my classmates).

It's not too hyperbolic to say that the bookstore, in a large part, made me who I am today. I remember my first encounter, with the Old Store on 2nd Avenue, on a hot August afternoon in 1980. I had heard of this bookstore where you could find just about anything, and if you couldn't they would order it for you. I rode my bike down there and spent at least an hour (this at a time when no Walden Books or B. Dalton could hold my attention--or anyone's--for more than about 15 minutes). This was the summer after high school graduation. I was a bit adrift--I was starting my interior design studies at the Colorado Institute of Art at the end of September, and I spent the summer just savoring the fact that I was no longer in thrall to the Denver Public Schools. I remember going to the old Cherry Creek Twin Cinema--approximately where Neiman-Marcus is today--to see the newly expanded version of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (in which we see a suddenly older-looking Richard Dreyfuss ascend into the mother ship), and went to the Tattered Cover afterword.

I had always wanted to read the novels of Charles Dickens. I had read A Christmas Carol, and of course A Sale of Two Titties back in Junior High, but I wanted to delve into Dickens. The TC had not only every single novel Dickens ever wrote--it had them in three or four different editions each (keep in mind, the Old Store of the TC was tiny, not even as large as one floor of the Cherry Creek store today, if memory serves). There were something like four shelves of Charles Dickens. A B. Dalton or Walden would have four or five of his best-known, one copy each. Of course the reason I was into Charles Dickens in the first place was because 1980 was the year Trevor Nunn's stage adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby, all 10 or 12 hours of it, was filmed for PBS, and I was enthralled.

Over the next few years I read all of Charles Dickens, with most of my books coming from the Tattered Cover. After I decided to come out as a gay man in January of 1984 (a decision precipitated by a letter from my best friend at the time, a thoroughly heterosexual man), the Tattered Cover helped me tremendously--they had a whole bookcase (one of the narrow endcaps, but still a whole case) of books with titles like The Best Little Boy in the World and The Front Runner. By this time, of course, the Tattered Cover had moved to the other side of Second Avenue, to a two-level space that was twice the size (or more) of the original store. They kept the Old Store open as a bargain book outlet, and no visit was complete without crossing the street to check out both halves of the store (for those of you who didn't live through Denver's depressed years, this was the space now occupied by Kazoo & Company).

In the late 1980s, after my Houston sojourn (where I was utterly disappointed and shocked to find nothing on the scale of the Tattered Cover--there was the mediocre Sam Houston Bookstore in the lower level of the Galleria, and in 1985 a Bookstop opened inside the old Alabama Theater on Shepherd Drive next to this new little health food store from Austin called "Whole Foods"), the Tattered Cover had outgrown its new home. The old Neusteter's luxury fashion chain (which at one time had had a dozen stores stretching from Boulder to Colorado Springs) had gone out of business, and their prime Cherry Creek location on the corner of First Avenue and Milwaukee was sitting vacant. But not for long--Neusteter's closed its doors in February or March, and the Tattered Cover opened right before the holiday shopping season that same year (for the life of me I can't remember if it was 1986, 87, or 88).

This was paradise--three full floors of books, and even more density of selection than they had had in either the Old or Middle stores. The bargain section was re-consolidated into the new store, and going to the TC became something I did nearly every week. And I wasn't alone--soon the store had three times as much business as it had had before the move. Suddenly the Tattered Cover was a tourist attraction, and everyone--including (unfortunately, in retrospect) The New York Times--was noticing. Leonard Riggio, a scrappy guy who had bought the venerable New York local chain Barnes & Noble (I used to get their mail order catalogs when I was in high school) was looking for a way to really make a lot of money off of books. Voila! The book superstore was born--in Denver, with Joyce Meskis as midwife. Riggio sent teams of people to Denver to study the store, and by the turn of the decade was ready to blanket the land with ersatz Tattered Covers--Barnes & Noble stores were flashy (in the beginning they didn't have the warm color scheme they have now--it was all 1980s purple and pink and neon) and had places to sit, and lots and lots of books, just like the Tattered Cover.

I give great credit to Joyce Meskis and her people for weathering the onslaught of Barnes & Noble (and later Borders) stores in the Denver area. First, right about 1990 or 1991, four B&N stores opened on the same day, at four points of the compass--they had stores on Arapahoe Road, near the Aurora Mall, out west somewhere, and up north somewhere. Sales at the TC took a hit, but the store bounced back. But then there were more and more. In 1996 when Park Meadows opened, things got really bleak for the store--there were more B&Ns, there was Denver's first Borders (managed by a former TC staffer), and the new mall out south pulled a lot of shoppers away from Cherry Creek (the area has bounced back since then, of course).

Then there was this new idea of buying books on the Internet. Customers started coming in with printouts from Amazon.com, asking if the store had the book they were looking for, and if the price was the same as Amazon's. The answer to the first question was usually "yes," but the second question was always answered negatively--no discounting at the TC except for school teachers buying books for classroom use. Soon those people with the printouts weren't coming in at all--they were staying at home and waiting for the USPS to deliver.

Joyce fought back, of course--adding a coffee bar, opening a second (and much more beautiful and relaxing) location, and augmenting sales by hosting mega-booksignings like those with Hillary Clinton, Ah-nuld, Generals Powell and Schwartzkopf, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, and other uber-celebs. This was not to mention hundreds of actual writers who all came to the the TC and not to the chainstores.

That's still the formula, even though both of the older stores have had to downsize. Cherry Creek, which expanded to four floors in about 1990 or 1991, is back to having just three. Lodo, which began as one floor and expanded to three, is down to two. In the recent down-sizings, they made some incredibly poor spaceplanning choices. The Lodo store's children's section is on the first floor, occupying what used to be the travel room and spilling out into the main part of the store--the books look "wrong" in this location. They've stuffed the second floor with so many shelves that it has lost much of its former beauty--and they've spread history--a section I always browse--across an ill-defined traffic aisle. You can't tell where history is supposed to start or where it should end.

Cherry Creek is even worse. Here they've taken children's books out of the basement (where children were neither seen nor heard) and put them back on the third floor, where they were when the store opened. But they got rid of the old third-floor events space, and jammed the history and travel sections right up into kids--you can never escape the sounds, the pleadings, the whinings (lest you think I'm a grinch: I don't hate kids--I hate parents who let their kids misbehave in public).

Both stores have lost their old sense of cohesiveness--both feel like they've seen better days (and they have). Cherry Creek's lighting is just atrocious--almost all fluorescent, and it does a really bad job of illuminating. In Lodo, a store that has never had good lighting, the increased density of bookshelves means you'd better shop when the sun is out, because after dark it's just too gloomy to see anything.

Of course, there is a bright spot. The Highlands Ranch store, almost a year old, is all on one level. It's well-planned, cohesive, and better-lit. You have to put up with Highlands Ranch people shopping there, which is why I haven't been back to that store since last winter (that, and why drive 15 miles when Lodo is just 1.5 miles from my house?). But it's a nice store, and from all reports it's doing well.

Last spring's news that the Tattered Cover, Twist & Shout (one of Denver's last remaining indy music shops), and a new art cinema run by the Denver International Film Society would be the anchors of a redeveloped Loewenstein (former Bonfils) Theatre on East Colfax across the street from East High School was incredibly welcome. Rumor had it that the TC would abandon Cherry Creek, where the landlord was demanding more money (and this is Denver's most expensive retail address). Or that the new Colfax store would open and the TC would keep a boutique-sized presence in Cherry Creek. Or the the Cherry Creek store would stay intact as it is now, and the Colfax store (less than 2 miles away) would complement it. Whatever it was, I was all for it, and still am.

Except that it doesn't seem to be happening. There has been no news for many months. A recent article in the newspaper of my alma mater says that the Starz Film Center hasn't yet committed to the project, and that the developer has November 1 as the deadline. If the film center doesn't commit, the project may not happen.

If it happens, great. If it doesn't happen, fine. But whatever happens, the Tattered Cover needs a makeover. I don't mean just physically. I mean that every time I shop there I see a demoralized staff. I mean that I don't see what I should see: innovation. The store's in a dreadful rut that began ten or more years ago, and without a change in culture (and an infusion of cash) I don't know how it can get out of it.

Late in my college career, professors (who knew I worked at the TC) would ask me "what's happening at the Tattered Cover?" They--a core constituency for any bookstore--had been increasingly disappointed by the selection of books. Professors would tell me that all they'd see anymore were bestsellers, that the store was no longer regularly carrying the kinds of books that they used to be able to find there--recently published works that filled in knowledge niches. And it's true--there was a culture at the store then (that's probably still there) of "sell more of what sells." In the history section that means never going out of stock on Howard Zinn's A People's History of America, and there are similar titles all over the store. But Howard Zinn does not a complete history section make.

To never run out of bestsellers is great retail wisdom, but the Tattered Cover used to be more than that. It used to be highly committed to carrying things that perhaps only one person in all of Denver might buy. Money, of course, is the reason this has changed, and I would explain that to my professors. To them that was no excuse (easy to say), but as much as I defended the store then, they were right. After visiting the architecture section in Cherry Creek yesterday, I decided I had to say something--it had less selection than a Barnes & Noble, and it shouldn't have been that way, not at the Tattered Cover.

What to do? I don't know--although I know there's a lot of deadweight still employed behind the scenes, wasting the store's precious financial resources and depressing the morale of those staffers who are still loyal and committed. For my part, I'm still very loyal, buying almost all my books from them (spending several hundred dollars per year). We'll just have to wait and see what time brings.

To any TC staffers: please do not bring this post to the attention of Ms. Meskis.

Villages and Cities

Hello again.

Sorry it's been so long--nearly a month--since I last posted.

Before I get to today's posting, I offer a plug for my sister's recently published book. It Takes The Whole Damn Village by Sandra Barnhouse offers her views on the best way to raise children in our semi-post-industrial society (my term, not hers). I've read a draft copy, and it makes a lot of sense. Her premise: instead of warehousing children in obsolete buildings called "schools," which by and large are a relic of the Industrial Revolution, let's re-integrate them into human society. In her system, every adult in a community is responsible for raising that community's children in such a way that they emerge into adulthood as more fully-realized complete persons than the typical high school graduate is today. People with specialized knowledge or talents would become mentors. Children would still be taught the basics of reading, writing, history, etc., but by adolescence--when their attention is most easily diverted from the task at hand in the current educational system--they'd begin to specialize in what mosts interests them. As a result, they'd naturally be more interested and involved with their own destiny. The transition to adulthood would be far more smooth--people in colleges would no longer behave like 13-year-olds, as they do now (I'm getting really tired of hearing about drinking problems on our college campuses, because it's such an unnecessary waste of human potential). So buy it!

Here's a link: http://www.authorhouse.com/BookStore/ItemDetail.aspx?bookid=28094

It's cheap at $13.40 (paper only), and with shipping it comes to about twenty bucks.

* * * * * *

Where have I been, you ask? I've been too busy. I've re-discovered my creative muse, in the form of a novel I began writing about seven years ago. For those of you who don't know this work, it began in 1995 (I know, that's ten years ago) as a short story. I was in a creative writing class in college, and the main comment from the instructor was that it was not a short story at all--it was too novelistic. I put it away after that semester, but her comment stayed in my mind.

A few years later, during the summer of 1998, I found myself pulling out that story and trying to figure out what the central character was going to do with his life (not that I could ever relate to that dilemma!). It didn't come easily. His name is Steven Travis Brown, and at the beginning of the story he's two months away from high school graduation. He's gay, and a virgin (this is 1983, light years away from "gay/straight alliances" in schools, XY magazine, etc.--many, perhaps most, gay men of my generation were still virgins at the end of high school). His best friend, Troy, is straight, and Jewish. They live in Houston, and as their parents are well-off, they live in the Memorial neighborhood, a land of tall pine trees and large houses. They attend a school that is based on Kincaid Academy, a prestigious private school (this school is, I'm certain, also the basis for Rushmore Academy, in the film Rushmore--but I had the idea for this school in 1998).

But how trite is that? Very. Gay coming-of-age novels are a dimeadozen. So one summer morning while listening to Broadway showtunes and drinking lots of coffee in front of the computer, it came to me: Steven is an Innocent. He must explore the world, just as that naive Westphalian youth Candide (more like the character in the Leonard Bernstein musical than in the original satire by Voltaire) did. So it became a much larger book: how Steven grows into adulthood over a couple of decades, and bad things befall him, but how he remains ever optimistic even as he learns and suffers.

To make the connection with Candide apparent, I'm setting the story in various locales: Houston/Galveston, Provincetown, New York, Tokyo, London, and New York (and a garden in Montclair, NJ) again at the end.

Just as Candide endures the tribulations of seeing his beloved Cunegonde raped by the Bulgarian army (into which he himself is conscripted); of living through the terrible Lisbon earthquake; of seeing his mentor Dr. Pangloss hanged by the Inquisition; of being reunited with Cunegonde only to discover that she's become a concubine, shared between the Grand Inquisitor and an extremely rich Jew (both of whom he accidentally kills); of being appointed Governor of Montevideo even as the locals rise up in rebellion; of discovering Eldorado, only to be robbed of the riches he brings back by scoundrels he trusts; of pursuing Cunegonde back to Europe--so too must Steven endure having his heart broken by his best friend and by his first love in quick succession; of being sundered from his true love by family politics and Japanese tradition; of seeing his almost-true love killed in front of his eyes in an accident involving London Transport; and of being reunited with childhood friends--including his former best friend Troy--only to see him die in an act of terrorism (yes, that one, and no, I'm not being gratuitous--if and when I ever get this written you'll see that I'm not).

There's a lot more too it, of course--this isn't the Lives and Romances of Steven T. Brown (in fact I don't yet have a title). I'm trying to create a complete portrait of our decadent, affluent, angst-and-anomie-ridden society, just as Voltaire satirized Enlightenment Europe (mine isn't a satire--that's a rare talent). Many characters will suffer and learn, not just the hero.

I hope I'm on the right track now--I threw out much of what I had written in 1998 through 2000 (where I stopped writing until this year, for the most part), and my new prose is much better than the turgid mess of those days, I hope. That there's a new movie called Protocols of Zion that I heard about after I conceived of Troy being killed in the WTC is a good sign. This movie, which is currently just on the coasts (and maybe just NYC), is a documentary about the book Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that famous anti-Semitic forgery that people read to this day and still use to justify their fear and hatred. More importantly, it explores the myth that no Jews died on 9/11--that they had all been warned not to go to work that day--which is utter nonsense. My fictional Troy dies that day, and the final scene of his novel is a memorial service in a garden, bringing the New Candide story to a suitable ending.

If this all sounds like utter nonsense, please tell me. There are times when I feel like I'm no more of an artist than public television's Bob Ross, with his "happy little trees" that he paints faster than Rachael Ray puts together a complete meal. But at other times I cling to the illusion that I'm onto something.

Reminder: do buy my sister's book!