Saturday, March 31, 2007

I was pleased to find The Age of Huts (compleat) at Harvard Books in Cambridge the other day. Behind Harvard Books, at 9 Plympton, Grolier Books did not have a copy yet, tho the young man in the bow tie at the cash register (not the new proprietor, Ifeanyi Menkiti) indicated that they had one on order because someone had asked for it the other day. He also explained to another customer while I was there that Grolier was one of two poetry bookstores in the United States. He was not referring to Woodland Pattern, of which he admitted he’d never heard. Nor the store front at Small Press Distribution. Nor Kingdom Books in Vermont. He had heard of Open Books in Seattle. I’ve never been to Kingdom Books, but of the other three, Grolier is the smallest and least well stocked (since you can prowl the stacks of the warehouse at SPD, a process that I’ve found to be an expensive habit to get into). The Grolier website is currently advertising a reading that is scheduled for 2005. Obviously, they take the School of Quietude very seriously in Cambridge. I did buy a copy of Cole Swensen’s The Glass Age while I was there.