The Great Wizard of Books

The co-owner of Harvard Book store, Jeff Mayersohn ’73, has the kind of gentle, white-haired, bearded face you can easily imagine in a Macy’s Christmas commercial. Or, for that matter, in the slightly cluttered offices of a local indie bookstore.

Housed in a generic concrete building about a block away from the bookstore, Mayersohn’s office looks out onto Lowell House, although Mayersohn himself lived in Leverett during his time at Harvard. A print of a Thurgood Marshall quote hangs on the wall, sternly reminding that, “if the First Amendment means anything, it means that a State has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch.”

Not surprising, perhaps, for a man who served a year-long term as a Democratic Society student president back in his college days, while the Vietnam War stirred Harvard undergraduates into political action.

“I don’t regret it for a second,” Mayersohn says, “even if I don’t necessarily agree with all the things that I did or said at the time. I really felt like I was part of a very large movement of people who wanted to change the world for the good.” He notes wryly that he didn’t spend enough time studying, even though he went on to receive his master’s in physics at Yale.

“I thought I was going to be a physicist who read a lot and was interested in politics. And now I’m a bookseller who still loves physics and is interested in politics,” he says. “So on some fundamental level, I don’t think you really change that much.”

Mayersohn came to bookselling relatively late in life. After graduation, he spent 20 years at BBN Technologies, helping to invent the Internet.

“We got in at the very early stages,” says Mayersohn of his time at BBN. “In fact, one of the people I worked with when I was there was the fellow who basically put the @ sign in your email address, because he was sending the first Internet email. So those were very exciting times.”

He reminisces about plane rides between Cambridge and Washington, D.C., which he would spend reading, and about the “great” independent bookstores he visited on his business trips.You can tell he means “great” in the preeminent sense, beyond just very good.

“You can have a career which is not necessarily about books and literature and still love books and literature,” says Mayersohn. “My dream was always to own a bookstore, and I sort of viewed it as a retirement.”

“So when I retired from high tech,” he continues, “ I went to bookstore school.”

“There is such a thing,” he says after a pause.

Around May 2008, in what Mayersohn calls an “almost magical confluence of events,” Frank Kramer, who had inherited Harvard Book Store from his father, decided to put it up for sale.

Mayersohn recalls saying to himself, “‘Ok, now you have to act. You’ve been talking about this for decades. And for the last few years, you’ve said that this is what you’re going to do.’”

Luckily, Mayersohn’s wife, Linda Seamonson, the current co-owner of the store, was just as enthusiastic.“She was great,” Mayersohn says. “When I think back about it, it really is remarkable. We just said, ‘This is what we’re going to do,’ and then we went in and we did it.”

“Basically, as soon as I heard about it I called up Frank Kramer,” he adds.

Mayersohn signed the contract in September 2008, hardly the easiest time to buy a bookstore. Not only was the national economy falling apart, but the publishing industry was struggling to find its place in an Internet era (an era Mayersohn, ironically, helped usher in). Long gone were the days when nearly twenty independent bookstores had populated the Square, back when Mayersohn was attending Harvard.

“A lot of people had concluded that all these digital changes were going to kill the local bookstore,” Mayersohn says. “I had reached the opposite conclusion.”

He realized that if a local store could print its own books, and had the right to reproduce full texts, it could potentially get copies to customers faster than any online retailer.

“I really thought that technology actually provided us with a way to take on Amazon and win,” Mayersohn says. “Amazon is trying to destroy not only bookstores but small businesses everywhere,” he says, “by trapping you inside of their walled garden.”

“They understand that the print-on-demand technology in local bookstores is a threat to them, and so the way they can deal with that threat is to try to make all books go away,” through technologies like the Kindle, says Mayersohn.

Though he does acknowledge the convenience of e-readers, Mayersohn is confident that his own business model can allow physical books to survive. But he hasn’t quite declared victory—yet.

“I still believe in the future of bookselling as much as I did five years ago,” he says. “Even more so now, because now we actually have the same-day delivery service and we have the book machine and we have the website. What’s lagging is content and also awareness.”

According to an article published in Forbes last year, Harvard Book Store saw double-digit growth throughout 2012. But the bookstore is more than a business to Mayersohn: It’s also a mission, a visionary enterprise, and an undertaking with nearly-moral dimensions.

“Books and the telling of stories [are] so important to human culture,” he says. “A lot of people are very interested in it, because I think it goes so deep into who we are.”

But despite Mayersohn’s lifelong love of books, he’s found that owning a bookstore is so time-consuming that it leaves him little time to enjoy the merchandise itself. “It’s hard to get a lot of reading done, because you’re so busy,” he says.“It’s a great job,” he continues, laughing. “It’s not such a great retirement.”