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)
“You don’t need a Harvard MBA to know that the bedroom and the boardroom are just two sides of the same ballgame.”
—Stephen Fry (b. 1957)
“... research is never completed ... Around the corner lurks another possibility of interview, another book to read, a courthouse to explore, a document to verify.”
—Catherine Drinker Bowen (1897–1973)
“What harm cause not those huge draughts or pictures which wanton youth with chalk or coals draw in each passage, wall or stairs of our great houses, whence a cruel contempt of our natural store is bred in them?”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)