Sarah Heath wanted to talk about burnout.
For months, employees at the Tattered Cover Book Store had been voicing their concerns about working above and beyond for what they believed to be insufficient pay, catering to the whims of new management that had big dreams for Denver’s storied chain.
So Heath, the company’s human resources director, brought the issue up in a May meeting with Kwame Spearman, Tattered Cover’s new CEO. The bookstore’s employees — including Heath — felt burned out, she told him, and requests for additional help were being ignored.
“If I don’t give you what you want,” Heath said she remembers Spearman saying, “you’re gonna keep being (expletive), aren’t you?”
Heath went back to her office, sobbing. She quit a few months later.
“That place made me sick by the end,” she said. (Spearman, in an emailed statement, said “that unequivocally did not happen.”)
When Spearman and his new ownership group took over the financially floundering Tattered Cover just over a year ago, they promised to preserve and expand one of the Mile High City’s cultural touchstones — a bookstore woven into the fabric of Denver for a half-century, a place that drew U.S. presidents and literary icons and multiple generations of loyal customers enamored by the cozy chairs, knowledgeable staff and homey feel.
But while leadership touts the bookstore’s new location in Westminster and expansion into Colorado Springs as the marks of a growing business, The Denver Post interviewed more than a dozen current and former Tattered Cover employees who say morale is flagging, the result of being overworked and belittled, promised job growth that never materialized.
The stores used to be places where bookworms and those on the fringes could find community, they said — even if the paychecks left much to be desired.
“This isn’t a workplace anymore,” said Elise Goitia, who left her job at Tattered Cover last month. “This is an abusive relationship.”
Less than a year into Spearman’s tenure, the indelible book chain faced a third-party investigation into workplace bullying and ageism allegations, both of which the CEO fervently denies. The bookstore, leadership acknowledged, hasn’t been profitable in years. And while Spearman has been adamant that Tattered Cover will only survive if it ingrains itself into the community, he last month laid off the entire community team — which included one of the store’s co-owners.
As Tattered Cover attempted to repair relationships with authors, publishers and its own employees following a divisive statement by previous owners in 2020 about the Black Lives Matter movement, current and former staffers say a commitment to diversity under new leadership has been performative and inauthentic.
“Tattered Cover is not the community institution it’s being led on to be,” said Anya Dickson-Arguello, a former employee.
Spearman declined to be interviewed by The Post for the story, but said in a series of emails that the new owners bought Tattered Cover on the brink of bankruptcy and “the response to our necessary growth has been overwhelmingly positive, both among staff and the greater community.” The chain’s leadership is determined to listen to and respect all employees, he wrote, and “(w)e are deeply invested in our employees and recognize the importance of a positive workplace culture.”
The company is proud of its efforts on the diversity front, Spearman added, and every decision Tattered Cover makes is through a lens of diversity, equity and inclusion.
Tattered Cover as a “refuge”
When Spearman and his co-owners, Denver natives David Back and Alan Frosh, bought the Tattered Cover in 2020, many employees were initially excited by the forward-thinking and business-oriented mindset that the new leaders brought to the company.
“I thought, ‘These guys must be dreamers or some kind of romantics to be buying a bookstore,’” Heath said.
Spearman didn’t come from the book world. The East High School graduate went to Columbia University, Yale University Law School and Harvard Business School before entering a career in the business world, serving in leadership positions at B.Good, Knotel and Bain & Company.
Back, who met Spearman in high school when the two competed in speech and debate, convinced his friend during the pandemic to go in with him on their beloved book chain.
But that beloved book chain was in trouble. Companies like Amazon had drastically cut into Tattered Cover’s bottom line, and the bookstore hadn’t turned a profit in years, Spearman has said in interviews.
Tattered Cover had long boasted a loyal staff, going back to the days of the bookstore’s matriarch, Joyce Meskis. Yes, the bookstore was a for-profit institution. But it didn’t always feel that way.
“To her it was almost a spiritual mission,” said Mark Barnhouse, author of “Tattered Cover Book Store: A Storied History.”
Many employees, such as Barnhouse — who worked at the bookstore for more than five years while attending college — were poor, he said. But they loved their jobs because of the positive, familial work environment.
“Joyce wanted to provide a refuge for folks who didn’t fit in other places,” Barnhouse said. “She believed that everybody has worth.”
That attitude permeated Tattered Cover even after Meskis sold the business in 2015 to Len Vlahos and Kristen Gilligan, a couple from out of state, and then into the new ownership era.
“It’s kind of a combination of salt of the earth people who really fell in love with Joyce and very hippie-dippie… people who really fell in love with books,” Heath said with a chuckle.
“‘I’m gonna burn out if I don’t get some kind of help’”
Spearman and the new owners hit the ground running.
They announced plans to open stores in Westminster and Colorado Springs, as well as a kid-focused shop at Aurora’s Stanley Marketplace. Within the first year, Tattered Cover also set up a popup at the Park Meadows mall in Lone Tree and transitioned from its Lower Downtown location to a new space in McGregor Square beside Coors Field — a move set in motion by the previous owners. The independent bookstore now boasts seven locations and a staff of about 140 workers.
The emergent CEO was playing a numbers game. Expand or die.
“When revenue is what it is,” Spearman told staff in a Jan. 21 company town hall meeting, according to a recording reviewed by The Post, “you can dramatically cut costs or you can try and grow and increase revenue. There are only two options.
“We’ve been resolute,” the CEO told his employees. “We don’t wanna do massive cost reductions — that’s layoffs — so the only other option is to grow. That’s why we’re opening new stores.”
But after an initial high, and as the pace of all the new work ramped up, employees say they felt like leadership kept asking for more without providing any additional help.
Heath was reading the monthly employee surveys that new leadership had put in place — and they were getting angrier by the month.
“People are begging,” Heath said. “Like, ‘I need resources; I need help. Things are moving too fast. I don’t understand the expectations. It’s not clear what I’m supposed to be doing.’ … It was just getting louder and louder. This crescendo of, ‘I’m gonna burn out if I don’t get some kind of help.’”
Soon after Coady Johnson took a bookseller job at the LoDo store, he learned that his job would be less book-related and more of the construction variety. The store needed to be deconstructed and moved to McGregor Square, and that job was foisted upon store employees.
That meant power tools, ladders and heavy lifting — and Tattered Cover didn’t provide any safety equipment, Johnson said. He and some of his co-workers brought in their own personal safety glasses.
“We had 70-year-olds all expected to participate in this,” Johnson, who has since left Tattered Cover, said. “It was kind of disconcerting.”
Spearman, in an email, said Tattered Cover “has always relied on its community and booksellers to assist with its moves. The company kept the move internal to “prioritize staff safety” in the middle of a pandemic, he said, adding that they hired professional movers to handle the heavy lifting.
“Instead of furloughing the staff for the two months that the stores were closed, we spent nearly $60,000 to find opportunities for employees to stay on payroll,” Spearman wrote. And despite Tattered Cover’s “vulnerable financial position,” he said, the company gave paid time off to its employees who helped with the move.
But the ethos behind the McGregor Square move was common, employees said: People constantly being asked to do more than was in their job descriptions — for what they viewed as the same low pay.
This attitude and expectation created a “culture of animosity,” said Hannah Scott, who was laid off in January from her position as outside sales coordinator.
“If you’re not on board with these new things then this new Tattered Cover is not going to be able to succeed,” Scott said she heard from management. “And if that’s the case, then we don’t want you here.”
Scott wanted to be a team player. She had ambitions. She was willing to work on a Saturday or bring in Christmas cookies for her department. But Scott and others said they felt expendable, like there wasn’t consideration for the extra work they were putting in to help the company thrive — or even survive.
“Morale was always very low,” Scott said. “And it was palpable.”
When asked about employee morale, Spearman pointed to lower-than-average turnover rate compared to the larger retail industry. And in contrast to many other stores, he said, Tattered Cover is not facing staffing shortages. One store manager position received five strong internal candidates, he said.
“This is a testament to not only the legacy of the organization, but the positive culture we’re building,” Spearman wrote.
Not all employees said the culture at Tattered Cover is toxic.
Sarah Wilcox, the bookstore’s marketing director, said “it’s definitely the most fun job I’ve ever had.”
“It really has been the only position I’ve ever had that is rewarding,” Wilcox said. “Really to the community as a whole, not just to me. It’s rewarding to see something and make something for the entire Denver community. I feel like I’m really a part of Denver.”
A third-party investigation
But between the fiscal resources, the expectations, the staffing levels and how many employees were only making at or near minimum wage, it became clear last summer to Heath that things were reaching a breaking point.
“Clean up this mess before there’s a mutiny,” Goitia wrote in her July survey.
Heath estimated that 80% of employees when she was there made minimum wage, and 90% were within two dollars of minimum wage (wages have bumped up slightly since in light of Denver’s new minimum wage). One former staffer told The Post that her teenage son helped pay their rent because she couldn’t afford to on her $40,000-a-year Tattered Cover salary.
A recent job posting for a store manager position said the pay starts at $44,000 a year, while a bookseller position is listed at $16 per hour.
As workers complained in their surveys about burnout, it didn’t appear to them that Spearman was receptive to listening to or addressing their concerns.
Last spring, on a Zoom call with department heads, Spearman opened with a monologue, in which he said he didn’t understand why everyone was stressed out, Heath said. The call came during a particularly hectic period: Workers had been scrambling to open Stanley Marketplace and McGregor Square, all in the span of two weeks.
Spearman said his sister is an OBGYN — that’s real life-or-death stuff, he said, according to Heath and another person on the call.
One employee spoke up after Spearman concluded, saying people should have the right to be stressed about their jobs and that his comments diminished the hard work they were all doing.
“This is a learning opportunity for everybody,” Spearman replied, according to two people on the call. “Ask yourselves why you can’t assume positive intent.”
When the individual pushed back, Spearman yelled, according to Heath: “If you can’t just drop it, put it in an email.”
“I was shaking,” Heath said. “I was so angry at him. To hear him say that that aggressively was disgusting. I thought, ‘I can’t protect people from this person.’”
Spearman, in an email, said “this is not an accurate representation of the interaction. Of course, there is stress in every job and my only intention in making this comparison was to alleviate the concerns and pressures that our employees were feeling at the time.”
By July, Heath had had enough. She sent an email to Frosh, the company’s then-chief community officer, outlining six “problematic behaviors” related to Spearman’s treatment of employees.
In response, Tattered Cover hired an outside attorney to investigate its HR director’s claims, which included “bullying and gaslighting department leaders,” withholding resources and compensation to older female employees, and offering jobs and implying promotional opportunities to younger female employees without following through, among other workplace concerns.
Spearman said in an email that these accusations “are completely unfounded” and that Tattered Cover has “zero tolerance for bullying.”
“We take pride in promoting within our organization, providing equal opportunities for growth and rewarding employees based on their achievements alone,” he wrote. “Any merit-based claims of bullying would be dealt with swiftly, likely with termination.”
Heath said she was told months later that Tattered Cover’s board voted unanimously not to do anything after the investigation concluded.
The outside investigator, David Zwisler, did not respond to questions about the investigation. Back, the chairman of the board, said in an email that the company wouldn’t comment on the investigation. Spearman and Back declined to provide any report or summary of the investigation’s findings.
Diversity efforts questioned
On top of the financial distress at the time of their acquisition, Spearman and the new ownership group had a lot of repairing to do — both with the community and among its own staff.
Tattered Cover’s previous owners, Vlahos and Gilligan, had issued a lukewarm statement about Black Lives Matter after the George Floyd protests erupted in June 2020, affirming the bookstore’s commitment to free speech while citing “our nearly 50-year policy of not engaging in public debate” in declining to take a visible position.
The statement was criticized as upholding white supremacy, leading to a mass exodus of employees and the fracture of long-standing relationships the bookstore had with writers’ groups and local authors.
With the statement and its fallout hanging over the company, new ownership attempted to right the ship — only to stumble out of the gates.
Soon after Spearman — who is Black — took the reins, he declared Tattered Cover to be the largest Black-owned bookstore in the country. The claim drew backlash from Black booksellers across the U.S., who denounced it as an insulting marketing ploy or an effort to hijack the Black Lives Matter progress for commercial purposes. Spearman, critics said, was the only Black person in the mostly white, 13-member investment group that he, Back and Frosh assembled to purchase the bookstore.
The new CEO later called the statement a mistake. But employees and outside literary organizations said Tattered Cover’s diversity and equity attempts under new ownership have left them disappointed.
Before the ownership transition, Vlahos and Gilligan enlisted a Denver-based diversity, equity and inclusion consulting group called Prismatic to conduct an audit of the company’s diversity efforts.
The audit — which was reviewed by The Post — recommended, among myriad changes, that Tattered Cover more prominently feature Black Lives Matter signage in its stores; showcase more people of color and LGBTQ individuals in its wall art, posters and marketing materials; add training for new staff to include conversations about equity and inclusion; and feature language about the bookstore’s diversity, equity and inclusion stance to its website.
A few months after new owners took over, however, Tattered Cover’s work with Prismatic ended.
“When the contract was stopped we had not completed all originally requested services from the previous owners,” Prismatic founder Jamie Villarreal-Bassett said in an email.
Spearman disputed this in an email, saying Tattered Cover “had fulfilled the entirety of the contract with Prismatic.”
“As everyone is aware, Tattered Cover’s policies and support of DEI were both internally and externally criticized when we bought the business,” Spearman said in the email. “While we’re not perfect, we’ve absolutely turned the corner. Under our leadership, there have been no mass resignations due to racial insensitivities.”
One of the shining examples Tattered Cover has promoted on this front is a partnership called the Hue-Man Experience, named after a longtime Black-owned Denver bookstore run by Clara Villarosa.
As part of the program, Villarosa curates a list of recommended books each month, with a “focus on identifying, curating and recommending diverse authors, writers and artists, to ensure thoughtful representation from Black, Indigenous and People of Color throughout its stores,” Tattered Cover says on its website.
The bookstore hired someone to be the Hue-Man Experience coordinator. She lasted only a few months.
When Anya Dickson-Arguello was hired to succeed that person in July, she thought this could be her life for a decade. She remembers going to Tattered Cover as a 3-year-old with her grandma — the green steps, the staircase, the tan paper bookmarks.
“When I think of home and think of community,” Dickson-Arguello said, “I think of those memories.”
In her second interview with Tattered Cover, Dickson-Arguello, who is Black, asked about the internal DEI work the company was doing with its employees.
“The response: ‘We’re not there yet,’” she said. “I don’t think it’s a priority.”
Her job, she thought, was to highlight BIPOC authors, ensure that they have representation in Tattered Cover’s stores. But she soon learned that it was really just about book sales.
“I’ve done a lot of outreach, tried to do crisis communication with people who aren’t our best friends right now,” Dickson-Arguello said. “That’s not only not appreciated, but almost discouraged.”
The message being communicated to her, she said: “‘If you’re not with us, you’re against us.’”
It all felt performative, Dickson-Arguello said. A marketing ploy.
Spearman said in an email that the company has worked on mending relationships with communities of color since new ownership took over. Last year, 31% of its events featured BIPOC individuals, he said, up from 17% in 2020.
He added that people should not “underestimate the significance of having a Black CEO and a C-suite composed of two women.”
“We’ve been active in the community to show underrepresented youth in particular that they can achieve anything,” he said. “As an organization, every decision we make is through a lens of diversity, equity and inclusion.”
Jon Marcantoni was hired to be the local author coordinator last year, with a goal to rebuild relationships after the Black Lives Matter statement and help diversify Tattered Cover’s readership and writers.
“When I came into the role, pretty much every writing organization in the city wanted nothing to do with Tattered Cover,” Marcantoni said. “It didn’t have to do with previous ownership — it had to do with Kwame and their interactions with him.”
Spearman said in an email that Tattered Cover has partnerships with Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers and the Lighthouse Writers Workshop to help source and elevate Colorado authors, an initiative he is leading personally.
After Marcantoni, who is Puerto Rican, curated a diverse list of authors, he said he was told that he shouldn’t be saying no to any writers. He said he was later fired after declining to work with an author whose book, Marcantoni believed, was racially insensitive.
“(Kwame) made this whole big thing of the importance of emboldening Black and Brown voices,” Marantoni said. “Yet time and again the only people he was trying to promote were white people.”
Spearman, in an email, said the author program promotes all Colorado authors, “and while we have a prominent focus on diversity, the role of the Local Author Coordinator is to help all Colorado authors.”
End of the community team
Both in public appearances and in internal communications with staff, Spearman has continually harped on the importance of community for Tattered Cover’s survival.
“The only way Tattered Cover continues to evolve — and continues to keep the brand equity that we’ve had for the past 50 years — is we have to become a community institution,” Spearman said during the Jan. 21 town hall. “There’s no ifs ands or buts about it. Period. We have to do that.”
The town hall came on the heels of a tumultuous week for the Tattered Cover. That Wednesday, Denverite published a story about company culture and its expansion under new leadership. That same day, Spearman announced that Dickson-Arguello and three others — including Frosh, one of the co-owners — would be laid off, their positions eliminated.
So marked the end of Tattered Cover’s community team.
“I’d be lying to you… if I told you this was an awesome situation,” Spearman told the staff. “It’s not. We’re in the fight of our lives.”
Given its financial situation, he said, the company made the strategic decision that community outreach couldn’t just live in one department. All company leaders would be taking on community responsibilities as part of their regular jobs.
Spearman said during the January town hall that he hopes Frosh will still be a “prominent member of the organization.” The CEO lauded Frosh’s spirit, kindness and general demeanor.
“It’s honestly made me a better person because I lack a lot of those things a lot of times,” Spearman told the staff. “To have that juxtaposition has been great for the organization.”
Frosh declined to comment on his tenure at Tattered Cover or his layoff.
For employees, the irony of their leader harping on community while simultaneously axing the community team was not lost.
“People think of Tattered Cover as this beloved independent bookstore,” Dickson-Arguello said. “The long-standing institution, the cozy chairs, the carpet. I think that’s being milked. That’s not what it is anymore.”
Despite the Hue-Man Experience coordinator position being eliminated, Spearman said in an email that the program “will not change and remains a top priority for the organization.”
News of the community team’s disbandment is “definitely disappointing,” said Viniyanka Prasad, executive director and founder of The Word, a Denver-based nonprofit working to build a diverse and inclusive publishing community.
“They are sending a signal to the community about what their values are,” Prasad said. “People will support independent bookstores above and beyond, and gratuitously buy from them, if they feel it is there for them.”
For those who have left Tattered Cover – either on their own accord or otherwise – in recent months, there’s been a sense that a weight has been lifted off their collective chests.
“It was like fitting a couple years into five months,” Marcantoni said. “It was really stressful. My health has improved since leaving; even unemployed I’m a much happier person. Bad jobs are like bad relationships — they do that to you.”
Goitia said she was breaking down on some nights, crying in her friend’s arms. She suffered from panic attacks due to work stress and started seeing a therapist.
“I would dread waking up to go to work,” Goitia said, “bleeding for this company that doesn’t care about you.”
Working at Tattered Cover is a weird dichotomy, said Scott, one of the employees laid off last month. She and co-workers believed fiercely in a strong, local independent bookstore. They loved being able to work with books every day.
“I think everyone loved what they did,” Scott said. “But they were unhappy with the fact that everyone understood that it could be better.”
