One of the largest booksellers in the world wants to buy Denver’s independent Tattered Cover.

The owners of Tattered Cover are deliberating on a bid from the U.S. bookstore chain Barnes & Noble — which could mark the end of Tattered Cover’s legacy of being an independently-owned bookstore — a source familiar with the process told the Denver Gazette.

The retailer’s bid is the highest and could help cover Tattered Cover’s debts and put an end to its bankruptcy chapter, the source added.

Yet, nothing is set in stone.

Barnes & Noble could still withdraw and the bid would need to be approved by the board of Tattered Cover’s parent company Bended Page LLC. and the U.S. bankruptcy court.

A spokesperson for Barnes & Noble did not deny the company placed a bid, but declined to comment, as did Tattered Cover.

Tattered Cover filed for bankruptcy last year, citing mounting debt from navigating the pandemic’s evolving marketplace and increased competition from online sellers. The bankruptcy also follows the exit of Tattered Cover’s former CEO, Kwame Spearman, who shifted focus on his political career. Spearman ran for Denver mayor and a school board position, losing in both races.

After filing for bankruptcy, the company closed three stores in Westminster, McGregor Square and Colorado Springs, all which expanded during Bended Pages leadership, and laid off 25 employees.

Bended Pages replaced Tattered Cover’s CEO with bankruptcy consultant Brad Dempsey to help lead the company out of its struggles.

As the bookstore was climbing out of bankruptcy, Bended Pages pivoted in March to look for another owner to run the four stores it had left.

There were at least eight interested bidders aiming to buy Tattered Cover, according to court filings. Some were local, out-of-state or in the publishing industry, which could not be disclosed because of confidentiality agreements.

The company originally planned to have an auction Wednesday but canceled it the day before to have more time for discussions with potential buyers. Tattered Cover’s spokesperson said at the time that an auction may not have been needed to secure a new owner.

Tattered Cover may secure new owners this summer, documents show

How Barnes & Noble has been mimicking indie bookstores for its growth

After a decade of booksellers shrinking since the Great Recession in 2008, Barnes & Noble survived and is even growing coming out of the pandemic. And the chain’s CEO is crediting the conglomerate’s recent successes and expansions to following the example of independent bookstores.

Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt — and potentially Tattered Cover’s new leader — took over the global book retailer in 2019 and has run his own independent store Daunt Books based in London since 1990 with nine locations across the U.K.

Daunt is largely credited with saving another London-based book chain called Waterstones, helping it return to profitability, which led to investment firm Elliott Advisors to acquire the chain in 2018.

When Elliot Advisors bought Barnes & Noble in 2019, it tapped Daunt to run the U.S. book retailer right before the pandemic hit.

“Oddly and sort of slightly counterintuitively, it was bringing all of the principles of independent bookselling into a chain bookseller,” Daunt told the Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything podcast. “And that is much more appropriate in a post-Amazon world.”

One of the main changes he made to get Barnes & Noble competing against the e-commerce giant was by renovating the stores and rearranging the layout to encourage book browsing.

Many people no longer go to a physical store for a specific book when they have the convenience of Amazon, so there’s less need to shelve books alphabetically. But placing books by subject matter encourages shoppers to find other books within their interest.

The company also shifted power within the chain toward store managers, Daunt said, who have more influence in deciding which books are ordered and displayed to cater to local tastes, much like how indie bookstores operate.

“You leave the decision-making to the store teams themselves,” he said, “because each store is responding to its own physical space and to its customer base.”

Waterstones, with the help of the parent company it shares with Barnes & Noble, bought two other indie stores in the U.K. known as Blackwell’s and Foyles. Both indie stores kept their original names and Foyles’ website said it aims to stay “independent in spirit.”

If Barnes & Noble does buy Tattered Cover, the sale would mean the U.S. bookseller is following in the steps of its U.K. counterpart.

The end of an indie era?

While Barnes & Noble is modeling after indie bookstores, it’s still a big-box retailer.

The sale would not only mark the end of Tattered Cover being an independent bookstore, but locally-owned as well.

Tattered Cover was founded in 1971 as a basement shop.

It was the late Joyce Meskis who took it over in 1974 and expanded the brand into an acclaimed bookstore chain.

Meskis won two landmark cases implicating free speech rights. The first case she won was against a 1984 Colorado law criminalizing sales of “sexually oriented material,” which the state’s Supreme Court ruled was unconstitutional. The second law she challenged in 2002 would have prohibited a person’s right to anonymously purchase books.

Meskis sold a stake of Tattered Cover in 2015 to Len Vlahos and Kristen Gilligan before retiring in 2017. Meskis died in 2022 at 80 years old.

It was Meskis who “built the Tattered Cover into one of the most successful independent bookstores in the country,” according to her obituary in the New York Times.

Meskis’ successors sold Tattered Cover to a Colorado-based investment group Bended Page in 2020 during the midst of the pandemic, when many retailers struggled to survive.

Bended Page was originally run by local investors Kwame Spearman and David Back, who said at the onset of its ownership that the chain needed an infusion of capital. Spearman resigned as CEO to run for Denver’s mayor in 2023. 

Back worked at the now-closed Tattered Cover store in Cherry Creek as a cashier when he was 15. The chain nearly doubled its footprint, including its first location outside the Denver metro area in Colorado Springs.

But the leadership shook up after Spearman began dabbling in politics.

Tattered Cover looked to Dempsey, the bankruptcy attorney and former Republican congressional candidate, to lead the company when it went under bankruptcy.

Instead of consulting fees, according to court filings, Dempsey was paid $10,000 a month plus expenses to take on the role of CEO.

If Barnes & Noble, indeed, bought Tattered Cover, it’s not immediately clear if the Colorado bookstore would retain its name or merge it with the box retailer.