place

Grolier Poetry Bookshop

Bookstores in MassachusettsCambridge, MassachusettsHarvard SquareIndependent bookstores of the United StatesTourist attractions in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Grolerpoetybookshopaug2005
Grolerpoetybookshopaug2005

The Grolier Poetry Book Shop ("the Grolier") is an independent bookstore on Plympton Street near Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Although founded as a "first edition" bookstore, its focus today is solely poetry. A small (404 sq ft (37.5 m2)), one-room store with towering bookcases, it claims to be the "oldest continuous bookshop" devoted solely to the sale of poetry and poetry criticism. Over the years, the Grolier became a focus of poetic activity in the Cambridge area, which had become a magnet for American poets because of the influence of Harvard University. Poets such as John Ashbery, Robert Bly, Robert Creeley, Donald Hall, and Frank O'Hara 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 and writers, including Russell Banks, Frank Bidart, William Corbett, E. E. Cummings, T. S. Eliot, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, David Ferry, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, Marianne Moore, Charles Olson, Robert Pinsky, Adrienne Rich, Ruth Stone, James Tate and Franz Wright, have been noted as "friends of the Grolier."

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Grolier Poetry Bookshop (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).

Grolier Poetry Bookshop
Plympton Street, Cambridge Cambridgeport

Geographical coordinates (GPS) Address Nearby Places
placeShow on map

Wikipedia: Grolier Poetry BookshopContinue reading on Wikipedia

Geographical coordinates (GPS)

Latitude Longitude
N 42.37232 ° E -71.11656 °
placeShow on map

Address

The Harvard Crimson

Plympton Street 14
02138 Cambridge, Cambridgeport
Massachusetts, United States
mapOpen on Google Maps

Grolerpoetybookshopaug2005
Grolerpoetybookshopaug2005
Share experience

Nearby Places

Widener Library
Widener Library

The Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library, housing some 3.5 million books in its "vast and cavernous"  stacks, is the center­piece of the Harvard College Libraries (the libraries of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences) and, more broadly, of the entire Harvard Library system. It honors 1907 Harvard College graduate and book collector Harry Elkins Widener, and was built by his mother Eleanor Elkins Widener after his death in the sinking of the RMS Titanic in 1912. The library's holdings, which include works in more than one hundred languages, comprise "one of the world's most comprehen­sive research collec­tions in the humanities and social sciences."  Its 57 miles (92 km) of shelves, along five miles (8 km) of aisles on ten levels, comprise a "labyrinth" which one student "could not enter without feeling that she ought to carry a compass, a sandwich, and a whistle." At the building's heart are the Widener Memorial Rooms, displaying papers and mementos recalling the life and death of Harry Widener, as well as the Harry Elkins Widener Collec­tion, "the precious group of rare and wonder­fully interesting books brought together by Mr. Widener", to which was later added one of the few perfect Gutenberg Bibles‍—‌the object of a 1969 burglary attempt conjectured by Harvard's police chief to have been inspired by the 1964 heist film Topkapi. Campus legends holding that Harry Widener's fate led to the institu­tion of an undergrad­uate swimming-proficiency requirement, and that an additional donation from his mother subsidizes ice cream at Harvard meals, are without foundation.