What’s this on the corner near the Harvard Graduate School of Education? A crowd of intrigued pedestrians poring over two tables of paperback books. There’s no one in sight to take cash of a potential buyer.
I thought I’d seen it all in Harvard Square - jugglers, magicians, folk singers, puppet shows, panhandlers, chess players, free spirits, story tellers, tight rope walkers (yep. on a twenty foot piece of rope about three feet off the sidewalk) but this is a new wrinkle in a locale known for its share of zaniness.
In the past month, the students in the Harvard Theatricals’ Hasty Pudding Society marched through nearby streets to honor Anne Hathaway as Woman of the Year and Justin Timberlake as Man of the Year. Dressed in drag, the boys had a grand time roasting celebrities and awarded them with the famed Pudding Pot.
Honor in the mercantile system. How quaint. Just what we need when every day brings a scandal about money managers and Wall Streeters, many of whom just might have graduated from the university next door.
Leave it to a small business entrepreneur in the middle of Harvard Square to try to right the ship.
I ask the fellow leaning against a street sign what he knows about the setup.
“It’s mine,” he replies.
“You have to have a permit to do this?”
“The way I set it up, it’s considered free speech,” he says. “as long as I’m not in the way and pick a good spot, I don’t have any trouble.”
“I usually shop for books after I set up the tables. It's such a beautiful day, I decided to stick around. My main business is reselling the more expensive textbooks. I look for them in auctions, thrift shops, and used bookstores. That’s also where I pick up the books for these tables.
They’ve been on the New York Times Best Seller list so I’m sure they’ll sell,” he says with an assured smile. “The money I make today, maybe two or three hundred dollars, pays for my trip and for the some of the books I buy.”
What better place to set up an “en plein air” bookstall, just like the ones on the Right Bank in Paris. Strollers are out in force on a day like today. This one-man Barnes and Noble sets up his tables summer through winter unless it rains.There are over a hundred thousand books for sale inside the walls of The Harvard Coop and The Harvard Bookstore nearby. The books on the tables on this sunny day in March are chirping to customers as sweetly as the early arriving songbirds overhead.
It’ll be beach time before you know it. Not too early to have some good lit on board for your first trip to the shore.
Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.
I can almost feel spring arriving in the Square...
Posted by: Susaan | March 13, 2010 at 11:50 AM