More than a year has passed since Joyce Meskis, the founder of iconic Denver’s Tattered Cover bookstores and a passionate First Amendment advocate, died in December 2022, but her legacy still looms over the book industry as publishers, booksellers, librarians, and teachers contend with right wing attacks on the freedom to read. And in a new book, Karl Weber, the head of Rivertowns Books, a hybrid publishing company in New York’s Hudson River valley area, wants to draw more attention to the causes Meskis espoused throughout her career as a bookseller by publishing a collection of essays: Why Books Still Matter: Honoring Joyce Meskis—Essays on the Past, Present, and Future of Books, Bookselling, and Publishing.
Weber says that he got to know Meskis through their mutual affiliation with the Denver Publishing Institute. His motivation in producing Why Books Still Matter, he says, was to “do something to keep her memory alive, and that would give me an opportunity to immerse myself in her legacy for a while.” Weber decided to borrow from scholarly publishing for what he had in mind: the festschrift, a collection of essays loosely connected by a general theme, he explained, “written to honor a beloved and admired colleague.”
With the support of the Meskis family, Weber said, he reached out to people in the industry this past year who knew Meskis “and loved her” and who could provide insights into topics she cared about deeply: the importance of bookstores in their communities and to society in general; how bookselling and publishing have both evolved over the course of the past century. “And, perhaps most important," he said, "the urgency of defending the freedom to write, read, and publishing against those who would limit or suppress it,"
“Talk about a book being a labor of love,” he added, “It was a project that gave me so much happiness from beginning to end, because it meant that I was in the presence of someone that I think represents so much of what is the best in the world of books, and by extension, in America.”
All of the proceeds from sales of Why Books Still Matter will be donated to the American Library Association Office for Intellectual Freedom. Weber is hoping to launch the book in Denver at Tattered Cover this spring and to schedule events promoting the book “in various places” over the next six months, including events scheduled to coincide with Banned Books Week in October.
The book, which will be published in May, includes 15 essays by friends, professional colleagues, and employees of Meskis, ranging from U.S. (D-Colo.) Senator John Hickenlooper (“The Bookseller as Entrepreneur: Joyce Meskis and Her Mission”); publisher David R. Godine with Jill Smith (“Training the Booksellers of Tomorrow”); civil liberties advocate Chris Finan (“Fighting for the Freedom to Read, 1923-2023”); and fellow pioneering bookseller Betsy Burton of The King’s English Bookshop in Salt Lake City (“The First Amendment: Standing Our Ground with Joyce”); plus long-time Tattered Cover bookseller Matt Miller (“The Saga of a Superstore”), who was hired by Meskis in 1978 and retired in 2020.
There’s also an essay written by Meskis herself, “Judging a Book,” that was originally published in the Denver Law Review in 2002, in which Meskis gave her account of the court case, Tattered Cover v. Thornton, which established that the government does not have the right without a compelling reason to access the sales records of a bookstore or its customers.
