Harvard Book Store owner Jeff Mayersohn told GBH News that he was excited by the opportunity to expand to the Prudential Center, a marquee downtown shopping location. With an expected 29,000 square feet, the former Barnes and Noble store also would have provided a much larger footprint than the 5,500 square feet of the original Cambridge location.
“It was a very ambitious project to begin with, and certainly much bigger than anything the bookstore itself has ever done,” he said.
The project started during the pandemic and costs started rising due to supply chain issues, labor shortages and inflation. Mayersohn said they tried multiple times to make the store happen by revising the design and staffing needs. Construction had already begun, but the escalating price eventually reached a point that it was no longer viable to continue with the new location.
Despite the recent cancellation of Harvard Book Store's planned second location at the Prudential Center, independent booksellers say business is going well and they are hopeful about the future for bookstores in Boston.
Mayersohn said the Cambridge location continues to thrive — revenue is up, author events are popular and customers are coming back again and again. He said his focus now is investing further in that location.
He said the store could use some refurbishment. Things like new flooring, lighting, a new break room for staff and a better audio-video system for events can now be prioritized without the distraction of a second location.
“One of the things that is really important to us is further engagement with the community,” Mayersohn said. “My own personal vision is to continue to provide great books and great writers. There are lots of opportunities to do good old fashioned bookselling.”
That positive sentiment was echoed by other local operators, including Somerville’s Porter Square Books, which opened a second location in Boston's Seaport in 2021.
Katherine Nazzaro is manager of the Seaport location, which is called Porter Square Books: Boston Edition. She said the store is learning to adapt to the new community it's serving and that customers in the Seaport are motivated to support independent businesses.
Sales are growing, and people are turning up at in-store events. One thing that made the opening of a second location more viable is the need for less staff than a new business would normally require, Nazzaro said. Most employees who work at the Cambridge location also do double-duty at the Boston one.
“I think this business itself has already started to thrive and started to create a name for itself, separate from Porter Square Books in Cambridge, which is what we want,” Nazzaro said. “We want the two to be connected, but also that one is not a drain on the other. And I think we've already seen that it's not a drain on our main location, and I think that it will continue to stand on its own like that.”
East End Books of Provincetown also opened up a location in Boston's Seaport in December — and owner Jeff Peters said the new store, their third, has thrived.
“It's been really great,” he said. “We've got wonderful comments about the selection of books. it's already become a community space. We have a lot of people come and just hang out, you know, meeting people, buying books, talking about books. It's just been very exciting.”
Expanding in place has also served well for Brookline Booksmith, which nearly doubled its space in 2020 and grew again in 2022, when the store took over adjacent space to bring their total footprint to 12,500 square feet.
“It's been amazing to have more space," said Peter Win, co-owner of Brookline Booksmith. "We've added more space for both books and the other products that we sell. We are able to have our author events upstairs in the middle of the store, which is not something that we did before. That's been a great benefit. It's really hard to imagine going back to the original space at this point.”
Win said while retail businesses always have their challenges — rent is higher than before, expenses are greater than ever — their growth has been a success.
The growth is happening outside of existing bookstores too, with new shops coming to the Boston area: Narrative is planning to open in Somerville’s Davis Square, a cat lounge and bookstore called A Sanctuary Cafe is slated to open soon in Beacon Hill, and Book-ish is in the planning stages in Dorchester.
Win said the growing number of bookstores in the Boston area is a positive thing.
“I think it just shows that customers do value having independent bookstores and independent businesses in their communities. I think people have learned how important that is for communities," he said.
And Mayersohn said he isn't ruling out trying to open a new location down the road.
“I think there are a lot of communities that need bookstores,” he said. “So, at some point in the future, I'd like to see whether or not we can, you know, provide other instances of Harvard Book Store. But I don't want to mislead anybody here. Right now, our focus is on the Cambridge store, but I'm a strong believer in the fact that every community should have a bookstore.”
