Highly Personal Bookstore Review - McIntyre & Moore's - Cambridge (and Somerville) MA

In my college days, McIntyre & Moore's was a large, well-lit store in Davis Square that specialized in history, academic monographs, and literature that was 20 years old and mostly unheard-of. The store layout was a simple rectangle, and it was rarely filled with enough people to have two browsers in one aisle. Their discount system was 10% off a one-foot stack and 20% off a two-foot stack, as well as some kind of discount card based on purchase price that I never really used. (Presumably the percentage discount stopped at some cutoff less than ten, although I never tried to buy a ten-foot stack of books, so maybe it really would have been free.) The owner gave off the appearance of being crotchety, but this was never tested.

Now, M&M's is a dimly-fluorescently-lit basement in Porter Square, below the stationer's, with a similar stock but not nearly the chipper sense of entering into an alternate, and highly-literate, dimension of history. M&M's was never the place you'd go to for a novel (nor a literary magazine, really, despite their collection of back issues of Granta), but if you wanted a treatise on Heidegger or communism, or you needed a volume on Richard Brautigan's poetry or one of the Springer series of math textbooks, it was fun to browse in. Now it's not quite so fun to browse, which as far as I can see will only exacerbate the financial concerns that occasioned the move in the first place. Alas.

As an example of its utility during the halcyon Davis Square days, I present the case of Baudrillard. During my junior year at MIT, I took a theatre class from an impossibly hip, soft-spoken theatre professor and enfant terrible, JS (for I don't doubt he googles himself regularly.) I often found my classmates hopeless rubes, and eager to impress with my humanities erudition, on some assignment or in some email I discussed Baudrillard at length, in relation to the theatre, and potentially DHALGREN (by Samuel Delany), which we were reading at the time. JS took the bait, and wrote back to me expressing his shared appreciation of Baudrillard, and wondering whether I had a copy of AMERIQUE. I forget whether it was out of print at the time--it certainly seems to be now--but I sure as hell knew two things: one, I didn't have a copy, and two, I wanted very much to have a copy by 7pm that night, when I would have class with JS again.

So, you need an out-of-print philosophical treatise by a French postmodernist, for venial but self-serving reasons. It is 1pm and you are in Boston. Where do you go? To McIntyre & Moore's. Obviously. Post-haste. Not only did they have it, they also had a copy of THE CONSPIRACY OF ART, with its gorgeous drapey cover.

Reader, I bought both. And you know what? JS didn't care a whit; apparently whatever idea he was pursuing had changed in the six hours between his email and delivery of the object, and then later in the year he refused to let me borrow his cap pistol in a skit. Good riddance to him; at least McIntyre & Moore's is still around, in whatever guise, elevating our readerly miens.