Alex Meriwether of the Harvard Book Store Talks about Community and Running a Local Bookstore in a Pandemic

The Harvard Bookstore, a locally owned and operated independent bookstore just beyond the yard gates, has been open since 1932. Known for their author events, unique atmosphere, and enthralling book collection, the Harvard Bookstore is a beloved feature of Harvard Square. The Harvard Crimson interviewed the General Manager of the Harvard Bookstore, Alex Meriwether, about holiday shopping, author events, and running an independent bookstore in the midst of the pandemic.

The Harvard Crimson: What does your role at the Harvard Bookstore entail? And how has that changed with the COVID-19 pandemic?

Alex Meriwether: As a general manager, I work on all the aspects of running the business with the management team and our owners. [Responding to the pandemic] has involved a lot of decisions on where to change procedure, where to change job roles and functions in the store. As there's been so much change with how we serve our community of book lovers and shoppers, I do quite a bit with our marketing and outreach efforts, work with our events and marketing manager on our newsletters, and a little bit of our social media.

THC: How different are the operations of the bookstore now compared to when the pandemic first hit in March?

AM: We've definitely gone through different phases. Since things started to shift in March, we made the decision to close to the public. For a brief period, we were doing curbside pickup and then we were just doing mail out. When things were peaking in Massachusetts, we completely shut down on-site operations. Our staff was basically all remote and they were working on doing book recommendations. We had a forum set up on our website called “Ask a Bookseller” where customers would write in looking for a book recommendation, and book sellers would send them a bunch of suggestions which they could order on our website. Orders were coming through us [and] were getting shipped directly to customers from wholesaler warehouses. We upped our email marketing and our social media during that time. That was a very distinct time where we weren't an in-person bookstore.

Then [we] slowly phased back in June. We started fulfilling orders from the store again, setting up safe social distanced workspaces in the store and not having customers in just yet. Then at the beginning of July, we opened up again to the public, with limited hours and very limited capacity. We've continued curbside contactless pickup and mail out of books. We’re open with a lot of focus on safety: Plexiglass barriers at the register and information desk and air purifiers around the store. We’ve kind of settled into this phase since then. Mid-October, while our operations to the public largely haven't seemed to change, we've begun a big push to encourage folks to shop early for holidays. We put out an open letter from our owners, which is still posted on our website, harvard.com, just giving you a sense of the financial state of the business. I mean, revenue is way, way down.

Events are such a huge part of our identity as a bookstore. We hosted hundreds of author events a year, everything from 15 people gathered in the bookstore to see a debut author who may go on to win the Pulitzer Prize in a few years, to a local author in the store and then 100 people who come to see them, to hundreds of people at offsite events that are ticketed. We switched to the virtual Zoom events in March, and those have been greatly successful. It was an honor to be named the Best Virtual Author series by Boston Magazine. Our events team has done just a tremendous job with introducing authors from their homes rather than doing so in the bookstore from the front of the crowd. We've had great attendance to those events, but it's not the same experience as getting to meet an author and have them sign a book for you.

We kind of kicked off our holiday shop early for the holidays initiative with a bang and with our annual sale, which we also moved earlier, usually they would have been [in early November] but we did it mid-October this year instead. We were blown away by the response to the letter and to our sale. It's just the beginning of what we need to sustain sustain ourselves and the staff, so we're keeping the messaging going that we're not going to have a crowded, bustling bookstore in the week before the holidays in December this year, so we need to stretch that holiday shopping season over a couple months rather than a couple of weeks.

We've always had a pretty robust web presence, gave attention to our email newsletter and our website, making harvard.com a shopping experience [that reflects] shopping in the store as much as we can, but web sales become a much bigger part of the business than they were before. The other huge operational shift was in preparation for mid-October, pre-holiday push we closed our used book bargain basement to the public in order to spread out our workspace for staff to [have] socially distanced workstations to collect and prepare online orders, which has just been critical given the huge influx of online orders the last few weeks.

THC: Are there any kind of benefits or upsides to the programming you've made? Whether that be your approach to events, your approach to marketing and email lists that you can see the Harvard Bookstore implementing even after the pandemic is over and we're back to normal?

AM: The Virtual Author Series write-up in Boston Magazine noted, something that is kind of magical about doing the virtual events is: For event series we would often pair a speaker with a noted journalist or scholar or someone else working in that person's field, and that would almost always be someone local. But given the virtual nature of things, location is no longer a factor. It's really opened up the possibilities of who we can bring on to join authors in conversation, to give more of that kind of live event dynamism that we're missing out on not having an audience and speaker all gathered in the same space. For instance, critic Gail Caldwell, she was a long time book critic for The Boston Globe. She had a memoir this spring and it addressed in part how important the women's rights movement was to her and her life. We had Gloria Steinem as her interviewer, which was just amazing. The virtual interface opens up who can tune in to them. We have people from all over the world turning into our author events. We've heard from customers who have moved away years ago and missed our author events and who have been able to virtually attend them these last seven months, which has been great. So I think it certainly does point to perhaps combining the virtual event with the live event more in the future, when it's safe to have in person events.

THC: Can you speak a little bit to how the Harvard book store community has changed or adapted?

AM: It's just overall a shift away from in person shopping and to shopping at harvard.com, and that's affected both our customers and our staff. Before this, we had one main person dedicated to processing web orders and we would dedicate additional people when we would have our annual sale for instance. But we now have a whole team of staff both on-site and staff working remotely from home working on processing orders, doing the internal processing and so much paperwork for them, doing the on-site gathering of books, boxing them up. I will say everything feels so much less efficient than it once was.

When we redesigned our website many years ago, we did so with the idea that it mimicked some of the feel of shopping in the store. I'm so grateful that we took that approach because we don't want folks to forget what is so special about discovery and browsing the shelves since it is a limited number of people who are able to do so these days with our limited capacity and people's limited ability, in some cases, to go to stores.

I think just figuring out how to do what we do best, which is recommend books, serve our customers, [and] reflect the interests of our community with a selection of books on our shelves in a socially distant way. We're not leading customers through the aisles in the same way we used to, picking books off the shelf, putting them in their arms, so we're trying to find ways to do that in a more distanced way in the coming months, especially with the holidays coming up.

THC: We've talked about this kind of sporadically throughout the interview, but how can the community best support independent bookstores at this time?

AM: I think just continuing to shop with them regularly. And understanding that it's going to be a long haul. It's gonna be awhile before any stores are back to where it's safe and prudent to be the kind of community gathering places that made bookstores special.

I started as a bookseller in the store, 16 years ago, and certainly had my share of recommending a book to someone and they'll say, “Okay, thanks so much. I'm gonna go buy it on Amazon.” So the sign we've had up in the store was: “find it here, buy it here, keep us here” — just messaging that books you're discovering at your local bookstore, don't go buying [them] on Amazon because it's like a dollar cheaper, especially if you discovered it through the thoughtfulness of your local bookseller. Continued patronage best serves and supports bookstores. And allowing for some delays and being patient at times, when it's a struggle to be as efficient as we used to be. Expenses are up, despite revenue being down, and that's a struggle. But we're still the smart, passionate, people we've always been, ready to recommend books and put them in our customers hands, even if it is virtually putting them in their hands.