The Tattered Cover is a venerable independent bookstore, located in the historic Lowenstein Theater, Tattered Cover Colfax Avenue has two floors of books and a space for autographings and events. With more than 150,000 titles in inventory and an extensive newsstand, the Colfax Avenue Store promises readers hours of leisurely browsing. Reading lamps and overstuffed chairs furnish the comforts of home, while a coffee shop on the main floor provides ready sustenance for those who want to spend the day perusing our shelves. Come in and explore the aisles, alcoves, and "sequestered nooks, and all the sweet serenity of books." (Longfellow).

Author autographings and literary happenings are standard fare at the Tattered Cover, with writers as wide-ranging as Daniel Handler and Annie Proulx, Barack Obama and Newt Gingrich, Christopher Moore and Susan Sontag, Armistead Maupin and Anne Rice, Hunter Thompson and Joyce Carol Oates, Ursula K. Le Guin and Ishmael Beah, Terry Pratchett and Chuck Palahniuk, Mary Oliver and Christopher Paolini.

Owner Joyce Meskis, a courageous defender of free expression and reader privacy, has won numerous awards for promoting literacy and defending against those who would restrict what we read and what we think, including the Privacy International Brandeis Award, the PEN/Newman Award, The Authors Guild of America Award, the William J. Brennan Jr. Award, and the American Library Associations Freedom of Expression Award.

View a tour of our shop