Finding a Bookworm in Downtown Denver

While exploring downtown Denver recently, I happened upon Tattered Cover, an independent bookstore my friend Bryna told me about. Located past the foot traffic of the 16th Street Mall, this charming bookstore invited me in with its “Indie Bound” sticker on the door, its noises and smells reminiscent of cozy school days and cloudy Saturdays.

With its hardwood floors and soft lighting and Victorian-style furniture, Tattered Cover is just the place I imagine when someone says, “curl up with a good book.” The first floor bustles and the in-house café warms the space with espresso and cookies. New books of all shapes and sizes fill the varnished shelves and tables, never crowded, never overstocked. I spend twenty minutes browsing just inside the doorway, remembering what it’s like to lose myself in thousands of stories all at once.

Unlike some corporate mega-store, Tattered Cover tells its own stories, the space itself just as important as the books it sells. I look up from an Obama picture book and watch a lonesome fifth grader find friends in her favorite chapter book. I watch a couple browse the table of film literature and a disheveled man dream of a different life in the travel section. Their stories feel like my own.

I continue through the store, making my way to the grand staircase in the back, its dark banister inviting me upstairs. Quieter, the second floor bookshelves are neatly organized in a strange pattern, creating alcoves and dark corners. It seems every corner I turn offers some new genre I’d forgotten about: philosophy, gardening, detective mysteries. Fluorescent post-its color the shelves like confetti, staff recommendations leading readers places they’d never imagined. It’s as if I’m ten again, wandering children's literature at the Brown County Library, deciding which teenage hero will be my friend, which town my new home, which plot my new life.

All afternoon, I explore Tattered Cover, stories upon stories upon stories. I want to know all the characters, learn the narrative rhythm of the writers, uncover the mysteries. I read a staffer’s opinion of Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, consider some pop fiction paperback that will rot my brain, and spend more time than I should in Children’s Literature.

That first day at Tattered Cover brought out a passion for books I hadn’t seen since fifth grade. Maybe a symptom of living alone, or being without cable, or trying to become a better writer, my thirst for reading is like never before. I can’t get enough of it; I read under the covers and stay at cafes longer than I should, engrossed with fictional towns and murder-mysteries, Austen romances and teenage vampires. I analyze characters and prose, knowing exactly why I love it and how I would have done it differently.

Starting my career as a writer, about to become a storyteller myself, I see how fitting it is that I reconnected with my inner bookworm, now hopelessly enamored by books. This is who I am, who I have always been, and it seems Denver – indie bookstores and all – was just the place to remind me.