A New Chapter for Harvard Book Store

Starting in the summer of 2023, for the first time in almost thirty years, Harvard Book Store will have two locations: their flagship store in Harvard Square, and a large new store in the Prudential Center in Boston.  For University Press Week, we wanted to show some bookseller love, so we reached out to Rachel Cass, General Manager of the Harvard Book Store to see what's planned for their exciting new location.  

Among the many challenges of opening a second location, a central question has been identifying what exactly makes us Harvard Book Store. In Cambridge, we sit directly across the street from Harvard’s Widener Library, with Harvard students and faculty walking by on their way to and from classes and tourists wandering in as part of their visit to one of the world’s most prestigious universities. While we are a general-interest, independent bookstore, unaffiliated with Harvard, the university is central to our neighborhood, our customer base, and our identity as booksellers.

In Boston, we will sit at the edge of the Prudential Center mall, at the base of one of the city’s most recognizable buildings and just up the escalator from the Prudential Center stop on the Green Line. It will see a different customer base than we have in Harvard Square. The readers who visit us in Boston will no doubt love books just as much, but from a perspective that is less directly academic: residents and office tenants of the Prudential Center Tower, tourists awaiting their scheduled Duck Boat tours, and shoppers exploring the mall and the surrounding Back Bay neighborhood. So what does it mean to be Harvard Book Store in that space?

What I have always loved about independent bookselling, and bookselling at Harvard Book Store in particular, is that it is the ultimate liberal arts profession, if we consider liberal arts to mean a commitment to well-roundedness and the pursuit of ideas. A bookseller gets to be interested in anything and everything, regularly giving recommendations for history books to one customer and romance novels to the next. It reminds me of my freshman year, when I took courses in mathematics, English, sociology, political science, French, and art history and danced at 80s Night to unwind. While trade publishers encompass much of that range, it is university presses that add the variety and rigor to truly capture the ideals of the liberal arts and run with them.

At Harvard Book Store, university presses are an important part of how we set ourselves apart and add depth to our shelves. We feature scholarly titles in our New Releases email each week, we have a display of Academic New Arrivals near the front of the store, our Publisher Focus window often features academic presses, and it’s not uncommon to find stacks of important Harvard, MIT, and Princeton University Press books on our featured displays. To be sure, the scope of our university press selection reflects the academic community around us, but it also speaks to the ways we strive to make our inventory well-rounded. Our Romance section, which has expanded significantly in recent years, sits in the same room as our large Philosophy and Cultural & Critical Theory sections. It is this juxtaposition that I keep coming back to when I think about what makes us Harvard Book Store.

In addition to the ways that university press books are featured in our store, they add nuance to nearly every section. For example, in our U.S. History section, we carry a wide selection of titles across all aspects of American history, but it is local university presses that bring us books on the history of innovation in Cambridge or a topographical history of the city of Boston. Beyond local interest, university presses are not afraid to explore the tiniest corners of a subject, or the big ideas that can change a person’s thinking. They unearth obscure history, ask about the implications of the latest technology, analyze political movements, and follow the threads of the most challenging questions. Even in our genre fiction sections, university presses add variety with once-forgotten backlist titles and works in translation.

In many ways, university presses embody what it means to be independent. Committed to intellectual freedom, they are also as varied as the universities that sponsor them. Much like independent bookstores, each university press has its own voice and perspective. That combination—booksellers and customers curating a selection from among highly refined and idiosyncratic catalogues—can be magic. You will not walk into any other bookstore and see the exact inventory of books that you will see at Harvard Book Store. And the books that we carry in Boston will not be identical to those we carry in Cambridge. But the method and philosophy and ideals that put them there will be the same.

Of course, a bookstore is much more than just the books within it. It is the booksellers and the customers and the conversations that happen over books and awards and current events. But the selection of books does tell a big part of our story, and this year’s University Press Week theme, #NextUP, is a fitting one for us, as we look toward the next chapter in Harvard Book Store’s story. It is my hope that, with the help of our university press partners, we will be able to find ways to continue our commitment to ideas and a spirit of constant learning, and make a home for Harvard Book Store and for readers at the Pru.