Happy Things: The platonic ideal of the bookstore

[jducoeur]

[Happy birthday to svava!]

Today's project was an inefficient and quixotic shopping trip -- just the kind we like best. Following lunch with hungrytiger, we set out (via T, to avoid the insane traffic) to check out a few used CD shops, to begin the process of replacing our LPs. The highlight of the trip, though, was an unplanned side-stop: since we were in Porter Square anyway, to check out Stereo Jack's, we decided to check out the new location of McIntyre and Moore.

It occurs to me to me that some members of my flist may be too new to Boston to have encountered Mc and Moore, or may simply have gone through life the poorer for never having found it. So let me sing its praises.

Mc and Moore is, for my money, the best bookstore on Earth. It is the used bookstore that reminds us of why used bookstores are, at their best, the finest bookstores. It is the only bookstore that I personally treat as a destination. It used to be in Harvard Square; then it moved to Davis Square; currently it sprawls across a maze of basements in Porter Square. Regardless, I'll always stop there when I'm nearby -- and sometimes I'll make an outing just for it, and maybe hit other things along the way.

It's by no stretch of the imagination the largest -- I have gotten lost in the Strand long enough that they had to send sherpas and St. Bernards out after me, and indeed, even many fairly crappy used bookstores are larger. I've come to find these gigantic used bookstores more annoying than anything else: more books does not mean *better* books, it just makes it hard to find the good ones. No, what sets Mc and Moore apart is the selection.

This is a bookstore run by scholars for scholars. It's not the place to go looking for fiction, new or old. It *is* the place to go for serious, hardcore SCAdian geekery, with a carefully chosen selection. One entire long wall is just the history section, starting with a couple of floor-to-ceiling bookcases of ancient history, then four or five of medieval, then a couple more of renaissance, and then breaking out country-by-country for the more modern stuff. It takes me an hour just to browse my way down that section, looking at the cool toys. And that's just history: it has a room for Art and Architecture, one for Archaeology, a big long Religion and Theology section, and ever so much more.

Today's haul was typical and illustrative. I got a history of 400 years of sports and games in North America (a glitzy limited-edition facsimile of a 1931 work); a history of croquet (OOP, but it comes up frequently enough that I should have the facts to hand); the EETS edition of Caxton's translation of Christine de Pisan's Booke of Fayttes of Armes; and The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha (I'm intrigued Theravada Buddhism, and this looks like one of the more interesting texts). We did *not* pick up the Anglo-Norman Dictionary, the old edition of Ibn Battuta, or the Glossary of Tudor and Stewart Terms, although all came close. Like I said: toys.

It's not much for atmosphere (like I said, it's currently sprawling across a basement), but really -- just go. If you have any interest in history, or indeed in most any non-fiction subjects, it's well worthwhile. This is the local bookseller that I support not merely out of principle, but because it damned well deserves it, because it's simply that much better than anywhere else I know...

Comments

[liamstliam.livejournal.com]

Surprisingly a decent sports selection including some good scholarly type stuff.

Excellent war collection, including ACW and 20th century. Far better on Napoleonic War than most.

Sailing stuff is really good, psychology is excellent, as is Black History. Media and education stuff very good, too.

[tashabear.livejournal.com]

Ooh. I've never been there. Never even heard of it. Maybe they'll have some of the textile books I've been looking for at a price that doesn't make me blanch. I'll have to visit with a bibliography. :-D

[redsquirrel.livejournal.com]

Hmm...since I currently have NO money (my body is proving expensive to maintain even with health insurance) it is a darned good thing I live in Florida on the other end of the East Coast. A pusher, that's what you are. :-)

[jenwrites.livejournal.com]

I didn't realize they'd moved out of Harvard Square, but it's been a while since I've been in that part of the Square anyway. I used to work right across the street from it, and they were the recipient of many of my hard-earned dollars.

[jducoeur]

Oh, yeah -- they've actually been out of Harvard for, I dunno, a good five years or so now. They had settled into Davis for a while (which originally led me to the now-common conclusion that Davis Square is the new Harvard Square), but I gather they lost their lease a little while ago. So over to Porter, where they have a space that isn't exactly pretty, but I suspect is cheap...

[laurion]

The only upside to Mc and Moore having moved a few times is that it keeps me from visiting too often and spending too much money. Harvard was a square I would frequent often, Davis and Porter much less so.

But as a book store they're an excellent example of the unix philosophy of 'do one thing, and do it well'. Or maybe just a firm starting point for a depth vs. breadth argument.

[jducoeur]

Harvard was a square I would frequent often, Davis and Porter much less so.

Used to be true for me, but less so now. Frankly, I think Harvard's become a *lot* less interesting over the years. It looks to me like a case of strangling the goose that laid the golden eggs. The Square *was* the place to be, full of hip, fun shops. But it then got Discovered, and big companies have steadily piled in, slowly turning it more and more into an ordinary shopping mall full of ordinary shops, and I find myself going there less and less often. It's just *blander* than it was 20 years ago.

By contrast, wandering around Porter last night was rather fun -- it has a bunch of quirky shops in those blocks up and down from it, making for good window shopping. It even seems to be gradually making up the restaurant deficit, with a lot of intriguing-looking options. So we might start getting there more.

Or maybe just a firm starting point for a depth vs. breadth argument.

The interesting thing is that they *do* have breadth, a surprising amount of it. They're not like some true specialist bookstores, that only have a couple of subjects.

I suppose it's more what they *don't* do, which is the usual scattergun approach. Most bookstores try to cover everything as much as they can, with the result that they don't do any of it well. Mc and Moore covers a lot, but it appears that they only cover subjects that they understand well enough to be able to select *good* books. So what they do have is mostly high-quality. (I kind of assume that the exceptions are leftovers that they got in lots with large collections of better stuff...)