A Shop of Her Own

The sight of a small, somewhat bedraggled white dog named Jessica greets most students hurrying down Plympton Street towards the Yard. On sunny days Jessica often lays quietly on the steps of the Grolier Poetry Shop. It was from these steps that, years ago, a 15 year-old Louisa Solano first peered into the store, and was struck by the unshakable feeling that someday she would own the place.

She does now. Perhaps Adrian Gambet and Gordon Cairnie, who founded the Grolier in 1927, would scarcely recognize it today. The original shop was not a poetry shop, but rather a place for overseas books, fine printing and contemporary limited editions. By the 1950s, it had become an established gathering place for writers, poets and students. Members of the Harvard Advocate were especially frequent visitors. The Grolier wasn’t really a place to purchase books, for sales were almost nonexistent and Cairnie often failed to collect payments on the sales he made. Instead, it was a place to sit in the large back room and socialize. Over the years, notable poets like T.S. Eliot, e.e. cummings, Marianne Moore, Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg and Donald Hall frequented the store.

Not everyone was welcome, though, according to Solano. Cairnie excluded many from the store. This might have been nice for the writers and poets, but the general public felt abused. “Cairnie was quite high-handed for someone who had started out as a potato inspector in Quebec,” remembers Solano. The harsh tongue of Cairnie had lashed many, and he was known for only wanting to associate with individuals who were wealthy, famous or from Harvard. If the person was female, he preferred that she be attractive and the wife of one of the writers, as he subscribed to the prevailing idea that women didn’t write first-rate literature. With only a few exceptions, female poets were turned away from the Grolier, often enduring sexist comments from the male poets who made passes at them.

After working at the Grolier for many years, Solano assumed ownership on January 30, 1974, after Cairnie’s death. It took only two days as owner for her starry-eyed idealism for the endeavor to fade. Cairnie had lost the back room of the store to the Harvard Book Store, and torrent of visitors from Harvard had slowed to a trickle. The boards on the floor creaked “like a ship in full sail.” While it was immensely comforting to those who already knew and loved the place, it was an inescapable distraction to newcomers wishing to browse. Some people thought the store should have been closed after Cairnie’s death, while those who had been excluded before came back with threats. Solano’s feminist views also made things harder, especially because the literary industry was still run almost entirely by men. “It was a rocky but exciting road. I punched around a lot—it was good training,” said Solano.

A few years later, she made the decision to convert the store into one that specialized in poetry. From its original 300 volumes of poetry, the Grolier Poetry Shop now has over 19,000. Nearly 30 years after Solano took over, the Grolier has a large following of readers. It offers one of the highest-quality poetry series in the area, which last year cost $17,000 to orchestrate. A steady stream of customers flows in, many of them students looking for a Norton Anthology or for the textbook for Helen Vendler’s class. The store also arranges an annual poetry festival and the annual Grolier Poetry Prize; the latter has been co-sponsored for the last three years by the Ellen La Forge Memorial Poetry Foundation.

The Grolier has its own unique atmosphere. The room is a perfect square teeming with bookshelves, each filled nearly to capacity with volumes of poetry. Two hanging baskets of plants adorn the front of the store, and the highest reaches of the walls display black and white photographs of poets, donated by the poets themselves. The floor no longer creaks; during the mid-80s, Harvard University took ownership of the property. A Grolier customer who was involved in the selling of the property wrote a provision into the contract stipulating that Harvard had to redo the floor and paint the ceiling before it could purchase the property.

What, exactly, is the role of this unassuming shop in the community? Solano’s self-declared goal is to make poetry accessible to everyone. It is true that professionals and students of poetry patronize the shop, but so do laborers, MBTA workers, post office workers, guards and those who have never even considered going to college. Poetry evidently has a wider appeal than is sometimes obvious. Solano has an idea about that: “Once a person has found even one poet or poem that really touches him or her, eventually a love of poetry works away at the person.”