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| Kristen Gilligan and Len Vlahos | |
As we sit down at Amore Cucina & Bar in Stamford, Conn., for lunch, Kristen Gilligan prompts me to ask for the kids' menu. Her husband, Len Vlahos, and I are confused, but I take the bait and make the request. The waitress nods knowingly, and in a moment, I'm looking through a plastic Viewfinder, clicking its button repeatedly and seeing a succession of images of mac-and-cheese, spaghetti, etc. Len and I are fascinated, and Kristen assures us that kids love it, too. Then, in an instant, Len and Kristen, who are moving next month to Denver to join the senior management of the Tattered Cover, with the aim of taking on majority ownership in two years, are brainstorming casually but intensely on how something like the Viewfinder might be adapted to the bookstore. ("We could put new titles or upcoming events on something like this." "We could have them on the tables in the café.")
And in a demonstration that his technical know-how extends beyond the book world, Len quickly figures out why the writing on the images in the Viewfinder is backwards--he shifts the image wheel around, which fixes everything.
There's no certainty that the Viewfinder idea will make the jump to Denver, but it's indicative of the kind of creativity and knowledge that the pair bring to what Len calls "a once-in-a-lifetime kind of change."
They've sold their house in Connecticut and bought a house in Colorado. Len's last day as executive director of the Book Industry Study Group is June 12. On June 19, the family begins driving to Colorado, with a detour through Alabama. On July 1, the couple begin working at the Tattered Cover, just in time for inventory at all four stores. Tattered Cover owner Joyce Meskis has devised a "training orientation" period for the pair that will last several months and educate them about each part of the business.
The two spent a week in Colorado earlier with their two children, looking at houses and schools. Coincidentally, they were in town when the Highlands Ranch Tattered Cover store moved nearby to Littleton. They all spent a day helping pack the store and a day unpacking. Saying that while he loves his job, he's missed being around books, Len calls the two days in the store "the best two days at work I've had in years." The trip included a reception at Joyce Meskis's apartment. Joyce's daughter Catherine helped the pair house-hunt.
Including senior staffers Matt Miller and Cathy Langer, Tattered Cover has "a team approach," much like the ABA, Len says. As for the obligatory question about plans the future owners might have for the store, Len says, "At this point, we have no specific plans. We're focused on getting into the daily routine and getting inculcated in the culture." He emphasizes, too, that Joyce and the staff "have built an unbelievably iconic brand and legacy, and we don't want to mess it up!" Kristen notes that the day after the change at Tattered Cover was announced, the Denver Post ran an editorial that began "The new owners of the Tattered Cover bookstores will have some big shoes to fill," and ended "Given that Meskis hand-picked her successors, we have reason to believe they'll continue the venerable traditions she established. We surely hope so." She comments: "I think it's a message to us."
The new challenge will draw on what Len calls the couple's combined "Ph.D. in bookselling with some field work." That background includes, for Kristen, managing the Second Story Book Shop, Chappaqua, N.Y.; working at the ABA for a decade, mostly in meeting and events management and communications; a stint running the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression art auction; consulting with the Book Industry Charitable Foundation (Binc); and running book fairs at her children's school. For Len, that includes his current job at BISG, which he began in 2011; 20 years at the ABA in a variety of positions, most recently as chief operating officer; work at several bookstores, including the NYU Bookstore, Atlantic Books and Waldenbooks; and, last but not least, being an author--of The Scar Boys, the upcoming Scar Girl, and two books that Bloomsbury recently bought that will be published in 2017 and 2018. (At BEA this week, he can theoretically wear bookseller, exhibitor, speaker and author badges.)
The story of how this change in ownership of one of the best-known, revered bookstores in the country began with a long-held wish. "We always had the dream of owning a bookstore," Kristen says. In recent years, the two, who grew up and have worked most of their lives in the New York metropolitan area, also began to think more about getting their two boys into "better schools and having a better quality of life," Kristen continues. "We talked for a long time about possible opportunities and locations."
A year ago, they went to Colorado for a wedding. Kristen had lived in the state for a short while and "always loved it," she says. "We thought, how can we get ourselves out here?" The next week Len called Joyce Meskis, saying, "You know us. What kind of jobs are possible in the area?" They had a long discussion that ended with Joyce saying she had started thinking about succession and for a variety of reasons, her senior staff and daughters were not interested in becoming owners. Did Len and Kristen have any interest? That was in June of 2014, and the discussion went for nine months until the March announcement.
One sure thing on the agenda after their training orientation: the next ABA Winter Institute is in January in Denver. Besides the fun of helping host the event for 500 fellow booksellers, there's a sense of something coming full circle for Len and Kristen: in 2005, while they were senior staff members at the ABA, they were called into then-ABA CEO Mark Domnitz's office, where he gave them the task of following up on then-ABA president Mitchell Kaplan's idea of having some kind of event during the winter on the West Coast featuring ABA programming from BEA. --John Mutter