In 1995 the writer A.E. Hotchner presented Joyce Meskis, owner of the Tattered Cover Book Store in Denver, with a PEN American Center award recognizing her efforts on behalf of freedom of speech and expression.
“In this room,” he said at the awards ceremony, “there are writers, editors, publishers, and the rest of you are readers. If this woman fails, we all fail. We don’t exist unless the bookseller can sell us.”
And that was before Ms. Meskis went all the way to the Colorado Supreme Court to prevent law enforcement officials from knowing what books one of her customers had bought.
Ms. Meskis, who built the Tattered Cover into one of the most successful independent bookstores in the country, died on Dec. 22 in Denver, the National Coalition Against Censorship announced. She was 80. A posting on the Tattered Cover website said she died at home but did not give a cause.
In addition to creating a bookstore famed for its vast selection and bibliophile-friendly atmosphere, Ms. Meskis often took a stand in matters related to censorship and the First Amendment. Sometimes those positions were not easy ones to embrace.
In 1991, for instance, when she was president of the American Booksellers Association, she testified against the proposed Pornography Victims Compensation Act, a bill introduced by Senator Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican, that would have allowed victims of sex crimes to sue distributors of pornography, including bookstores, if they could demonstrate that pornography influenced their attacker. Opponents of that bill (which died in committee) were sometimes labeled pro-pornography, but Ms. Meskis knew the real issue was that the law would make bookstores wary of selling anything controversial.
Similarly, the case she took to the Colorado Supreme Court some two decades ago pitted her against law enforcement officials, who were trying to build a case against a customer suspected of making methamphetamine. In 2000 the police found two books on drugmaking in a trailer home used as a meth lab; they also found an envelope with Ms. Meskis’s bookstore listed as the return address. Hoping to link the drugmaking to the recipient whose name was on the envelope, they sought Ms. Meskis’s sales records — and, though her stand read as pro-drug to some, she again saw the bigger picture.
“This is about access to private records of the book-buying public,” she told The New York Times in 2000. “If buyers thought that their records would be turned over to the government, it would have a chilling affect on what they buy and what they read.”
In 2002 the State Supreme Court ruled that both the First Amendment and the Colorado Constitution “protect an individual’s fundamental right to purchase books anonymously, free from governmental interference.”
To Ms. Meskis, owning a bookstore was about more than just sales.
“It’s my view,” she told The Arizona Daily Star in 1992, “that as booksellers we have our own version of the Hippocratic oath — to maintain the health and well-being of the First Amendment.”
Joyce Ann Meskis was born on March 12, 1942, in East Chicago, Ind. Her father, John, worked for a dairy company and later a biscuit company, and her mother, Helen (Dickus) Meskis, was a nurse.
Ms. Meskis studied at Purdue University with an eye toward a teaching career.
“In my mind’s eye,” she told Publishers Weekly in 2009, “I saw myself kicking the fall leaves on a campus as I walked to my nice but not ostentatious house, where French doors would be open and I could hear the strains of Chopin being played by my children.”
But working in libraries and especially in the Purdue bookstore while in college shifted her interest. For a time she operated a bookstore in Parker, Colo., near Denver, and in 1974 she bought the Tattered Cover, initially a 950-square-foot shop.
The store changed locations a few times. When it moved into a four-story building in the Cherry Creek neighborhood of Denver in 1986, 200 customers showed up to help move books.
“I thought it would be presumptuous of us to put up a sign-up sheet for the move, but people asked to help,” Ms. Meskis told The Christian Science Monitor in 1991.
She soon added more locations. Customers were welcome to settle into lounge chairs and sample the merchandise for a few minutes or a few hours.
“Denver has one thing no other city has — the Tattered Cover Book Store,” The Times wrote in 1989, “which many people in the book business consider the best general bookstore in the United States.”
Ms. Meskis’s battles over the years included leading the fight against a proposal that would have amended the Colorado Constitution and given each of the state’s 300 municipalities the right to come up with its own definition of obscenity. Voters rejected the measure in 1994.
Her stances didn’t always involve government regulation and court battles. In the late 1980s she vowed to continue selling Salman Rushdie’s 1988 novel, “The Satanic Verses,” despite anonymous telephone threats.
In 2015 Ms. Meskis struck an agreement to sell her business (it was sold again in 2020), and she fully retired in 2017.
Information about survivors was not immediately available.
If Ms. Meskis was celebrated for her First Amendment stands, she took that spotlight reluctantly.
“Trouble finds us, we don’t go looking for it,” she told Publishers Weekly, an oft-repeated line. “When you’re in a general community, you will always have challenges. There are things I didn’t expect. I didn’t expect so many court battles. You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.”
Alain Delaquérière contributed research.
