COURT VICTORY IS ONE FOR THE BOOKS

Store Owner Is Committed To Defending Readers' Rights

DENVER -- She may be a crusader for the First Amendment, but Joyce Meskis
is no wild-eyed firebrand.

Soft-spoken and a little shy, Meskis has a manner more like the overstuffed
chairs in the nooks and crannies of her two Tattered Cover Book Stores:
curl-up comfortable.

But her victory in the Colorado Supreme Court this week raised a figurative
fist for the privacy of book buyers everywhere.

"People care passionately about the First Amendment and the rights of
readers," says Meskis, 60, who owns two of the USA's largest independent
bookstores. "To give your heart, soul, mind and energy, it's what we're about."

Two years ago, a police drug task force served her with a search warrant
and demanded sales records on suspects in the raid of an illegal drug lab.
Police had found a mailing envelope and order number from the Tattered
Cover outside the suburban drug den. Inside were two how-to "cookbooks" for
making methamphetamine and other illegal drugs.

Meskis stood her ground, saying that what books a customer buys is nobody
else's business. After losing one round in court, she appealed. On Monday,
Colorado's highest court rejected the police search request in a 6-0 ruling.

With few such cases previously, legal experts call the decision an
important precedent for the right of bookstores to keep anonymous the names
of their customers and what they buy.

Bookstore records became a national issue in 1998 during the investigation
of President Clinton's relationship with former White House intern Monica
Lewinsky. Independent counsel Ken Starr subpoenaed records at Kramerbooks
in Washington to try to determine whether Lewinsky had bought a novel about
phone sex. The bookstore challenged the subpoena, but Lewinsky's decision
to testify made the issue moot.

Modest Trailblazer

Meskis is a reluctant heroine. She deflects credit for this week's ruling
to staunch supporters: the American Booksellers Foundation for Free
Expression (which she helped found), the American Civil Liberties Union and
bookstores, publishers, authors and readers who backed the cause.

But it wasn't her first fight. Twenty-one years ago, she filed a lawsuit
that led to the overturning of a state law that banned the display of books
with sexual content at stores open to children. In 1994, she formed
Colorado Citizens Against Censorship to defeat a proposed state
constitutional amendment that would have made it easier to label and ban
materials as obscene.

"The e-mails and phone calls have been non-stop," Meskis says of this
week's wave of support. "We haven't counted them yet, but in all of them,
there were four unhappy responses."

There's no time to celebrate, however. She has more than 380 employees to
direct. Her stores host a dozen or more book signings and readings a week.
Like other independents, Tattered Cover feels constant competition from
national chain-store discounters.

"It's relentless," Meskis says of pressure from Barnes & Noble, Borders and
other big bookstores. By industry counts, independent booksellers have lost
more than half their market share in the past decade, down to about 15%.

But the Tattered Cover stores remain beloved local institutions in a city
that loves to read: Denver has more library cards per capita than any other
city in the USA.

Residents routinely bring out-of-town visitors to gawk at the stores' vast
inventory and revel in the cozy atmosphere. The stores are favorites of
authors, too, from Frank McCourt to Bob "Captain Kangaroo" Keeshan.

Walnut-stained shelves bulge with volumes. Well-read employees offer expert
but unobtrusive help. More than 600 times a year, authors famous and
obscure read and autograph their works. And there are all those sofas and
easy chairs.

"That stuff was never in bookstores before Joyce," says John Hickenlooper,
a Denver brewpub owner and Meskis' friend, neighbor and business partner.
"The big chains are so successful because they copied most of her innovations."

Loyal Customers

The original Tattered Cover was a 3-year-old, 950-square-foot shop when she
bought it in 1974. The original owner named it in the hope that its wares
"would be so well-read that they would become tattered covers," Meskis says.

Her own customers became so loyal that hundreds showed up one weekend to
help move the store to larger quarters. Hundreds did so again when it moved
to its present location, a former department store in Denver's stylish
Cherry Creek district. Eight years ago, she opened a second store in a
converted warehouse in Denver's trendy Lower Downtown.

The hallway outside her sunlit, den-like office is filled with framed
citations for her contributions to book selling, small business and the
First Amendment. "We don't like everything that's published, but the beauty
of living in this country is to be able to pick and choose, peruse, weigh
and debate," Meskis says. "And I am not going to interrogate you on what
you read."

Meskis worked part time in libraries and bookstores to pay for tuition at
Purdue University in Indiana. A student union "browsing room" full of books
and easy chairs was the inspiration for her stores' atmosphere.

"She has created the most astounding bookstore in the nation," Hickenlooper
says, "based on the simple premise that the more books are in more people's
hands, the better the world is."