Where Are the Good Book Stores? Ask the Locals!

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We have already started a topic asking (and seeing a few answers) for recommendations of coffee shops near the conference venue in Cambridge. Something else of interest to many might be knowing where good bookstores are.

Book store with shelves loaded with books extending far back and hints of more around the corner
Book store with shelves loaded with books extending far back and hints of more around the corner1920×934 499 KB

Wikimedia Commons photo A Room Of One’s Own bookstore interior by Skvader shared under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Sure anyone can hit the Google and map their way, but maybe we can hear from people who live in the area or have visited before. What are some interesting, perhaps unique book stores worth visiting? Ones that are far from the usual Big Box Megamall bookstores.

Like All She Wrote Books, it looks amazing (at least from afar).

And if you are visiting Cambridge for the conference and are keen to find certain books, ask for recommendations for your own interests.

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I’m no local, but an obvious answer will be the famous MIT Press Bookstore easily a few minutes walk from the conference venue.

It’s literally “underground” as you walk down stairs to enter, and unique as a retail store operated by a university press, MIT Press

I made my way there way back in 2010! And left with two titles still on my shelf.

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Books Scooped at MIT Press Store flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license

New Media Art by Mark Tribe and Reena Jana was a gem featuring works of Net.Art that I used for some projects teaching new/web media, I had students in revisit the works and try to locate what came of them. For some time, the entire book was shared by Mark Tribe on a wiki at Brown University, found now in the Internet Archive

With good intentions I bought Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists by Casey Reas and Ben Fry but admit I barely cracked it open! A second edition is available at the MIT Press bookstore.

If I were at the conference I would definitely spend some time at this store, it felt magical in 2010! If you are there, how about sharing some photos?

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For another incentive to visit the MIT Press Bookstore, in our conference planning meeting today, our MIT colleagues let us know about a unique employee in the store, Barry Duncan, who is also a “master palindromist”.

In a few links from the MIT news story on Barry Duncan, I found a 2011 NPR article on him that referenced to a palindrome her wrote that was over 400 words in length (!) for an “eco-boutique” store that was once in Cambridge called Greenward.

It seems appropriate for the conference as it was a story about climate change (you can find the Greenward palindrome in the internet Archive)