Bookstore Nostalgia

Over in the Favorite Bookstores topic, the idea came up of new topic for past favorites. This is it. Lament a passing or just reminisce about how things were before something changed, big or small.

There is no set time frame. Six months ago is as valid as five years or twenty-five.

Also, I'd like to specifically encourage partial recollections. Don't worry if you don't quite remember where something was or its name. Together we may be able to fill those details in.

I'm not going to enter my whole long list as a single post that'll bore everyone and kill the topic before it even gets started. And instead of most favorite, I'll start with the ones that seem the furthest away in time, even though there obviously have been older bookstores, a number of which continue today. Nostalgia time isn't real time.

I came to Boston in fall 1975 to go to school. The 60s didn't end 12/31/69, but they were pretty much over by mid-decade. The previous spring was the fall of Saigon and the end of Selective Service registration (a narrow escape if you just turned eighteen then).

But there were still a few bookstores.

Grateful Union on Putnam St. down from Harvard Square toward Western Ave. Hippie books and New Age ante litteram. "Bookstore equivalent of a head shop," I believe it was described someplace. (Memory is a tricky thing, but I think they were combined with the Earth Guild craft store before I showed up or soon after. Someone has a Earth Guild / Grateful Union catalog in LT.)

Red Book Store on River St. outside Central Square. Radical books. Not as factional as some: straight-line Marxist; Chinese publications from the tail-end of the Cultural Revolution (plus those cloth posters of Marx, Lenin and Mao that decorated student housing around this time); but also a decent selection of Anarchist and Situationist International material. In the early 80s they moved to Green St. in JP, but mainly just the Prison Book Program and not so much the retail store.

Interestingly, the bookstore I pimped on "Favorite Bookstores" topic, the Lucy Parsons Center, has this to say about its history:

Redbook (now the Lucy Parsons Center) began in 1969 in a small one-room basement shop in Central Square, Cambridge. It moved two or three times in the first couple of years, before settling into what would be its home until 1983 in a large space on the corner of River and Pleasant streets in Cambridge. In 1983 the project moved to Jamaica Plain, Boston. It stayed there until May 1994, returning to Central Square, where it stayed four years until it was evicted so the building could be demolished. In May 1998 it moved into a temporary space in Davis Square, Somerville. Finally, in May 1999, the Lucy Parsons Center moved into a big, breezy new space in the South End of Boston where we are today!

Now it seems to be mainly the retail store and not so much the Prison Book Program. Thought you might be interested. (If you are, there is a longer version of the history linked above.)

Since I came to Boston in the fall of 2006 to go to (grad) school, I don't know of any bookstores around here that have closed. There used to be a Raven in Amherst (MA) that closed not long ago, and there was a big old used book store outside Detroit that I used to haunt in my youth that closed about a dozen years ago, but that's all I can contribute to this topic.

Back in the Dark Days before the internet, Maggie and I would make pilgrimages to Boston and NYC in search of books.

AVH.
Brattle (before the fire).
WordsWorth.
WordWorth's outlet.

(What was the name of the store next to the Lampoon?)

I recall around 1991 or 1992, Waterstone's was about to open in Boston - but then we got so wrapped up in parenthood that our book pilgrimages were put on hiatus. Did Waterstone's ever actually open?

(And not to derail the thread: Raven is still in Northampton, yes? I never knew they had a branch in Amherst...)

Starr was the store on the back side of the Lampoon building on Plympton St. phillannee mentioned them back in the other thread. They were there for more than forty years until the Lampoon threw them out a few years ago.

Also mentioned was The Bookcase on Church St., which was stuffed with used paperbacks, mostly down in the basement, with a minimal ground floor. And as I recall there was a book-oriented mural on the outside. And they were briefly in the attic of the building across the street too.

And Schoenhof's. Remember when they were on Mass. Ave. and sold prints as well as books?

Starr!, right.

Schoenhof's was big on sheet music as well, right?

Arlington Books. It used to be on Mass. Ave. next to the Capitol Theater. The floor was concrete, the shelves were wood, and space was tight. Books crammed in every imaginable spot. People muttering apologies as they squeezed past. I spent many hours there. Later, it moved to a storefront at the corner of Mass. Ave. and Franklin St. (where Wild Child is now). I've heard since that they moved to somewhere in Boston, but I haven't been there.

(And not to derail the thread: Raven is still in Northampton, yes? I never knew they had a branch in Amherst...)

Yes, as far as I know, they're still in Northampton. The Amherst store was on the parking lot by the intersection of Pleasant and Main, a ways behind Amherst Books (formerly Atticus Books). It wasn't visible from the street, though there was a sign on Pleasant.

To answer someone's question, Waterstone's opened but then closed a few years later. Wordsworth closed a year ago or so. And my fave, Avenue Victor Hugo on Newbury Street, is also gone. Sad!

Early in the 1970s I was in a very small independent bookstore in downtown Nashville. I don't remember the name of the store nor the street but it very homey with an excellent selection of books. I'd go there most days on my lunch hour. One day I was in the store, just me and the owner when a young man and woman came into the store and wanted to cash a check for $9,000. The owner looked at them, looked at me and said she didn't have that much in the drawer but they could come back in 30 minutes and she'd probably have it. Of course they came back and the police took them off to jail.