Harvard Book Store is an independent and locally owned seller of used, new, and bargain books in Cambridge's Harvard Square.
Harvard Book Store was established in 1932 by Mark Kramer, father of longtime owner Frank Kramer, and originally sold used textbooks to students.
Family-owned for over seventy-five years, the store was sold in the fall of 2008 to Jeffrey Mayersohn and Linda Seamonson of Wellesley, Massachusetts, and remains an independent business.
Though often confused with the Harvard Coop, the store has no affiliation with Harvard University or the Harvard Coop bookstore, which is managed by Barnes & Noble. With a focus on an academic and intellectual audience, the store's selection and customer service is repeatedly honored by local publications and surveys.
Forbes named the book store as its top bookshop in its "World's Top Shops 2005" list.
In 2009, the store introduced an on-demand book printing service called the Espresso Book Machine, produced by New York firm On Demand Books, using books in the public domain available through Google Library.
In recent years, a well-attended author event series has hosted Al Gore, Salman Rushdie, Haruki Murakami, John Updike, Orhan Pamuk, and Stephen King, in addition to a number of local writers and academics.
Famous quotes containing the words harvard book, harvard, book and/or store:
“The slime pool that the dog drowned in . . .
A drunk vomiting up a teaspoon of bile . . .
Washing the polio off the grapes when I was ten . . .
A Harvard book bag in Rome . . .”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“And the Harvard students in the brick
hallowed houses studied Sappho in cement rooms.
And this Sappho danced on the grass
and danced and danced and danced.
It was a death dance.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“Ideas are like pizza dough, made to be tossed around, and nearly every book represents what my son’s third grade teacher refers to as a “teachable moment.””
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“In matters of the intellect follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration... and do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable. That I take to be the agnostic faith, which if a man keep whole and undefiled, he shall not be ashamed to look the universe in the face, whatever the future may have in store for him.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)