Highly Personal Bookstore Review - Harvard Bookstore - Cambridge, MA

Reader(s), I'm trying a new format, which is the very-much-autobiographical review of a bookstore. I've been to many, many bookstores in my day, and have deeply-felt reactions to all of them, so this should become a regular thing. Enjoy.

It used to be that the Harvard Bookstore was the only worthwhile place to go. When I lived at MIT, a single block away from the Kendall T stop, itself only two stops away from the Harvard one on the red line, at night or on weekends or after a soul-deadening lecture I would have no greater desire than to go to the Harvard Bookstore and descend into the basement of used books, to pick a few and take them home.

My mother retains fragments of her father's obsessive-compulsive disorder, mostly presenting themselves in her compunctions about food preparation, green beans and mushrooms and potatoes in particular. I have even more watered-down impulses, mainly my overwhelming desire to own, and surround myself with, books. I have books crammed into bookcases, and in piles stacked on top, and in further piles colonizing the floor around them. I currently have only three bookshelves, and somewhere on the order of a thousand books; in college I was much worse, with five bookshelves and around 2500 volumes. Not all of these books were useful, or well-loved, or even read; I sold and gave away and just discarded many of them when I moved to California, and again when I moved from one apartment to another and decided I needed to face up to the stagnant tide pools of my collection. The important part, for me, was that each of them was a promise of some future moment of literary enjoyment, and most of them carried a memory of their acquisition, of the promise and splendor they seemed to represent on a shelf, and then in my hand, in a bag, and, at last, at home atop the most recent pile that represented the most pressing acquisitions.

The Harvard Bookstore was open until 11, which was the first good thing about it; part of my OCD-like book purchasing impulse is that when it comes on, it's likely to be at an hour when most bookstores and libraries are closed. The Harvard Bookstore was also, like another bookstore of lore, a clean, well-lit place for books. It has wooden bookshelves, and I believe it has green carpet, and its staff give off the air of being knowledgeable, literary people older than myself, which is a key component of the kind of adult sanctuary a bookstore can offer. The upstairs of the Harvard Bookstore, by which I mean the street level portion to which one enters, is all new books, thoughtfully curated to be sure, but of about as much interest as the stock of the local Borders or Barnes and Noble college-affiliated bookstore. (Less, actually, because the Harvard Bookstore has only one surface in the entire store upon which one might sit, a cushioned window seat that can only accommodate two people who are shopping together, and is at any given time almost certainly already occupied. The Barnes and Noble affiliate across Harvard Square, on the other hand, has armchairs, a tasteful cafe, and three floors entirely out of sight of the cashiers, where one can stretch out on the floor and contemplate the entire shelf of Nietzsche offerings, as I did on one occasion.)

The only part of the main floor of the Harvard Bookstore that I would be drawn to was the right-hand, window-flanking shelves, stemming out by the entrance and winding halfway back on the side. There were the remainders, the otherwise-new books that had been marked down drastically, and offered some hope of catching a bestseller just as it was falling off the NY Times list, but before it was dogeared and a year old and wound up downstairs on the used shelves. The remainders changed regularly enough to be interesting, but offered none of the peril of the used shelves, where the very day after having seen it, a fine edition of Paul Auster's New York Trilogy may have been snapped up by a fellow bibliophile. (Paul Auster bore a striking resemblance to my freshman-year chemistry professor, which was not the least of the reasons why I liked him.)

Heading downstairs involves a single turn of staircase, the landing of which is adorned with new or new-ish art books from the used section, which are worth a perusal. Then, upon reaching the basement, an entirely different sensory atmosphere takes hold. Here the lighting is dim-fluorescent, the wooden bookshelves are plastered with detritus from the insides of books that people have sold and left things in, and the tables are heavy with more remainders, anthologies, and cookbooks that didn't merit top-of-the-store display. The art section is for the most part very old, and tends toward the amateur, and the pre-color-printing type. The cookbook section is well-stocked, the science section less so, and the philosophy and history are always worth a look. The crowning jewel of the used section of the Harvard Bookstore is its fiction shelves, which make up the entire back (or really left-hand) wall, as well as a few shelves right to the other side of the purchasing counter (open at whimsically determined hours, and the site of such overheard caprice in buying decisions that I never tried them out with my own remaindered tomes.) The science fiction, fantasy, and mystery sections are also well-stocked, though seldom perused. There are solid sections of literary essays, literary criticism, biography, religion, sport, erotica, poetry, and drama. The film section is small and runs to Marilyn Monroe biographies and endless copies of John Irving's "My Movie Business" (John Irving's "My Bear Obsession", that's a book I'd rather read.) There is a second science section toward the back, with a fair selection for being serviced by students from two of the greatest research universities in the country, but the mathematics section is pitiful.

Prices are average for a used bookstore, being about half the cover price for a trade paperback, and sometimes alternating, for no good reason, among different issues and instances of the same title. From this description alone, the Harvard Bookstore is simply a good neighborhood used bookstore, which it is. The actual mythic power of the Harvard Bookstore stems from the shelves behind its buy counter, and the roped-off stacks of recent and as-yet-unshelved acquisitions. Off-limits to the mere patron and browser, these shelves and stacks nevertheless offer the tantalizing proposition that the volume you sought, though unavailable at the moment, is right there, buried behind yet more editions of The Lord of the Rings and Erica Jong's Fear of Flying, just sitting with its spine to the wall, waiting for another day shift, another week or two of turnover, to turn up on the shelves. (Pawing through these unreachable stacks, though physically possible and undertaken a few times, is basically useless because the prices haven't been written in on the top corners of the inside covers yet, and however simple the scheme and however basic the soft number 2 pencil script might seem, it is always somehow obvious that the ruse of attempting to add and then immediately subtract from the store's stock will be discovered to terrible consequence.) No, to the slightly compulsive bibliophile like myself, the best part of the Harvard Bookstore is the sense that there is always more, and always a reason, just out of sight, to come back.

That, and the spend-$100-get-10%-off deal, however they're phrasing it these days.