Nearly all of the secondhand bookstores in the vicinity of Harvard University are gone. Some have relocated or become online booksellers. Others are simply out of business. Either way, the decline of secondhand bookstores represents a sad diminishment of the academic community in Cambridge, Mass., and many other university towns.
I grew up in an urban neighborhood that had only a few bookstores. One was a national chain that had the usual selection of best sellers, self-help books, travel guides, and an assortment of remainders on politics and entertainment. The other store was a used-paperback exchange, where you could return a book and pick up a new one for a quarter. It mostly stocked romance novels, spy thrillers, and horror stories. Sometimes I might find something by Twain or Steinbeck, and — with supplements from neighborhood church sales — I accumulated a few hundred paperback classics by the time I was in my early teens.
I knew almost nothing about academic publishing until I arrived at college, and then I encountered scholarly books only in the library when I was writing research papers. Where were you supposed to buy them? Such books weren’t sold in regular stores. As an undergraduate, most of the literary criticism in my personal library consisted of dozens of Cliff’sNotes that I read in tandem with books like Madame Bovary and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I never thought about a scholarly book — say, an authoritative edition of a major author — as something I might purchase until I arrived at graduate school in the early 1990s.
On my way to and from classes, I walked past used-book shops such as McIntyre & Moore, Pangloss, and Starr Books, which was at the rear of the Harvard Lampoon building. At first I was lured in by the discount racks next to their doors. Later, I became enraptured by the volumes of serious books about which I knew almost nothing. It was as exciting and humbling as discovering an unknown continent.
Gradually, buying books — new as well as used — became a habit, as the local booksellers siphoned off a substantial portion of the money I made as a research and teaching assistant. I probably acquired more than 2,000 books — scholarly and antiquarian — by the time I finished graduate school seven years later.
Although I was a daily shopper in Cambridge, my favorite secondhand bookstore was the Brattle Book Shop of Boston. About once a month, I used to take a guilty break from my writing to ride the Red Line to Boston Common. Lodged in a 19th-century brick building, Brattle had, I recall, three stories, and a side lot with thousands of bargain titles (usually priced at $1 or $2) in rolling carts. I plucked so many gems from that slag heap that I suspect the famous proprietor, Ken Gloss, must have made a practice of inserting a few rarities. The arrival of new carts created the atmosphere of a special sale at Filene’s Basement.
Inside Brattle, on the first two floors, were tens of thousands of quality books, some of them dating back 150 years or more, most of them priced under $25. On the third floor, in those days, was the rare-book room, where I spent many hours coveting books I could not afford and selecting an occasional volume for which I could justify spending $50 — or even $100 — because it was important for my writing and only available with some inconvenience in the university rare-book room.
After a couple of years, like a predator that needs hundreds of square miles to sustain its eating habits, my secondhand-bookstore circuit began to cover all of New England. I was constantly in search of specialized books: complete sets of Riverside Press editions of the Fireside Poets, bound volumes of The Atlantic before 1900, Art-Nouveau and Craftsman bindings, and any of the chocolate-brown volumes published by Ticknor & Fields, to name just a few of my pursuits. I chased early editions of Melville as if I were Ahab searching for the White Whale — once, I found a first edition of Mardi in two volumes for $10.
Two or three times a year, my long-suffering wife and I would take to the road in a rented car, traveling north to Gloucester and Newburyport in Massachusetts, Exeter and Portsmouth in New Hampshire, and Portland in Maine (being sure not to miss the Douglas N. Harding rare-book warehouse on Route 1 near Wells). Along the way, I would find bibliophilic treasures on the back shelves of nearly derelict antique stores. And I discovered book barns on remote country roads that housed the assembled reading materials of two centuries, including numerous 19th-century books inscribed by the country cousins of the more famous New England literati.
I remember one of these book-barn proprietors was a former doctoral student who had been unable to find a tenure-track job. He bought an old farmstead and filled the outbuildings with so many books that the shop created itself almost unwittingly out of his desire to be part of a profession that could find no room for him.
I could easily have been that bookseller. And, who knows, I may yet share his fate.
There was a time when I seriously considered opening a secondhand bookshop. Such an occupation would make use of my education, and it would satisfy my bookish proclivities. I would still be part of the academic culture, only without the political pressure and the need to relocate. Most important, I would escape the seemingly hopeless search for a tenure-track position. It was a comforting dream like the one expressed by Paul Collins in Sixpence House, in which the author describes his relocation to Hay-on-Wye in Wales, the secondhand-book kingdom.
But, even in the mid-90s, the writing was already on the wall concerning secondhand bookshops. Rising real-estate prices and competition on the Internet combined to drive the brick-and-mortar booksellers out of business, particularly in expensive urban areas like Cambridge. Why have a brick-and-mortar shop in a place with exorbitant rents when you could create an online business with a warehouse near enough to a city to obtain inventory but far enough away to pay low rents?
Online bookstores are wonderfully convenient, particularly now that I live far from a major city. These days, I can obtain nearly any book I want, including rarities, on relatively short notice. Internet sites such as the Advanced Book Exchange, Amazon.com, Bookfinder.com, and Alibris have made many shops — and scholars — independent of location.
Paradoxically, that means I now buy fewer books because I don’t feel the need to buy in anticipation of future needs. I know I can almost always get exactly what I want online within 48 hours.
But what one wants is not always what one needs.
I miss being surprised by the joy of finding a rare volume, priced at a few dollars, in the back of an old bookstore. There was a kind of emotional connection between the search for unappreciated rarities and the making of unforeseen connections in my research.
Quite often, my scholarly interests have developed in response to a neglected but fascinating book that I acquired in a secondhand shop. Secondhand bookstores are as essential to higher education — in the humanities at least -- as the availability of open stacks.
Moreover, the world of secondhand books, beginning in the context of my university, made me feel like part of the continuum of material, scholarly culture stretching back at least to the early 19th century. Becoming the custodian of old and rare books cultivates a respect for the past, as well as a sense of perspective regarding the importance of one’s own work. To my mind, at least, humanities scholars should engage in the preservation of the past as well as the questioning of received wisdom.
Apart from their importance to the intellectual life of a university, bookshops add charm and character to a community. They are a crucial part of a constellation of cultural institutions that create what we think of as an “academic village.” Every secondhand bookstore is unique and potentially full of interesting discoveries, while nearly every corporate bookstore is identical, impersonal, and completely redundant in relation to what is available online. And yet the latter proliferate while the former vanish.
Something important in higher education is being lost with the departure of secondhand bookstores, but, from what I can gather, nothing is being done to prevent it.
If influential and wealthy people — perhaps the kind who collect books themselves — can be convinced of the importance of secondhand bookstores to an academic community, perhaps money could be found to subsidize their continuing existence in places such as Cambridge.
Perhaps universities could offer rental subsidies for secondhand dealers. Or, perhaps, an endowment could be created to provide vouchers — $500 a semester, maybe — for graduate students, and possibly undergraduates, to purchase secondhand books other than textbooks. Perhaps that money may only need to be provided for the first two years of study — just long enough to establish the book-buying habit that will eventually benefit the retail booksellers and university presses. A guaranteed infusion of money, amounting to several million dollars a year, ought to enable the survival of existing secondhand shops and encourage the opening of new ones in most university towns.
Of course, there are many complications inherent in this brief proposal, but what I want to emphasize, most of all, is that secondhand bookstores are an important part of higher education. They should be preserved, by one means or another, even if it means investing a little less in computers, landscaping, and exercise machines.