Grolier Poetry Bookshop

Outside Grolier Poetry Bookshop, August 2005

The Grolier Poetry Bookshop ("Grolier's") is an independent bookstore on Plympton Street near Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Although founded as a "fine-arts" bookstore, its focus today is solely poetry. A small (404 sq. ft.), one-room store with towering bookcases, it lays claim to being the "oldest continuous bookshop" devoted solely to the sale of poetry and poetry criticism. The only other for-profit store in the United States devoted solely to poetry is Open Books, in Seattle.

Over the years, Grolier's became a focus of poetic activity in the Cambridge area, which itself had, because of the influence of Harvard University, become a magnet for American poets. Grolier's became a point of call for visiting poets as well as a nexus of gossip, rumor and networking in the poetry community. Poets such as Donald Hall, Robert Creeley, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, and Robert Bly were regulars at the store during their time as undergraduates at Harvard; the poet Conrad Aiken lived upstairs from the store in its early days. Numerous other poets, including T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, E. E. Cummings and, later, David Ferry and Adrienne Rich, have also been noted as store regulars.

History of the shop

It was founded in 1927 by Adrian Gambet and Gordon Cairnie; the subsequent owner, Louisa Solano, a 1966 graduate of Boston University, took over operation of the store in 1974 after Cairnie's death. The original owners were independently wealthy and were able to run the business at a loss, giving away books to favoured customers without charge, falling behind with bills and turning a blind eye to theft. Much of the activity at Grolier's under Cairnie's management was of the social kind: visitors lounged on a red couch while sharing drinks with the owners.

Louisa Solano, owner of the store from 1974 to 2004. Portrait taken in 1986 by Elsa Dorfman.

Solano was unable to support the store with her own money and turned it into a self-sustaining business. She found innovative ways to promote poetry in the Cambridge community; for many years Grolier's has sponsored an annual, national poetry contest as well as a reading series in nearby Adams House, a dormitory at Harvard. Solano's knowledge of poetry was well known in the Cambridge and Harvard community, and in the era before internet bookselling, she was considered a valuable source for people seeking rare and unusual poetry titles. Under Solano's management, for example, the store was the first to stock Language Magazine, the periodical that launched the avant-garde L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry movement.

Despite Grolier's fame in poetry circles — a 75th anniversary celebration by the Poetry Society of America drew a crowd of over 800 people, and Grolier's is listed as a "poetry landmark" by the Academy of American Poets [1] — Solano announced in 2004 that, having lost money for the previous two years [2], Grolier's would be sold. The causes of Grolier's troubles are numerous: a rise in Internet bookselling that made it easier to find rare titles online, increasing store theft, rising rent from Grolier's landowner (Harvard University), a growth in university-centered, as opposed to community-centered, creative writing opportunities, and the rise of chain stores in the Harvard Square area that have reduced the area's attractiveness to Grolier's target market.

In March 2006, the store was officially sold, to Nigerian poet Ifeanyi Menkiti, a professor at Wellesley College; the official reason for the sale given by Publishers Weekly was Solano's ill-health. Menkiti plans to maintain the store's poetry-only focus while broadening its coverage of overseas poets. [3]

External links

• Store website
• Oct. 2002 Christian Science Monitor article on the store
• Harvard Crimson article on the store's imminent closure
• The (un)Spoken Word: reviewing Poets on Poetry Speaks ArtsEditor.com article