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| ( Left to Right: Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti with the late owner of the Grolier Gordon Carinie) |
Remembering The Grolier
before 2006
by Richard Dey
The sign “No Law books, No Text Books” was taped to the
door, the long couch to the left of the door and beneath the big window stretched
invitingly, and above the shelves of books, out of reach and not easy to see,
hung the framed black-and-white photographs of poets you found in anthologies
of twentieth century poetry. Proprietor Gordon Carinie, by then an old man, was
in the shop, standing around. I first went up the two or three high, unlevel
steps and into the shop in the fall of 1970 and continued to buy books there
for some 35 years. It was the shop everyone at The Harvard Advocate went to, and I was on the Advocate board, eventually as poetry editor.
While Cairnie seemed aloof, Louisa Solano, who took over the
shop in 1974, was always friendly and helpful even as she was always busy
running the business. Her loyal dog lay somewhere close by, a kind of medic in
case she who had epilepsy had a seizure. Louisa replaced the couch with a table
for book and magazine displays. You could do nothing but stand and circle
slowly the big middle table, and open and sample and close more books and
chapbooks of poetry than you could imagine. There was hardly room to turn
between the table and the wall shelves, and pull a book down from a shelf. The
little bookshop, crammed as a mussel bed, was in its pleasant, redolent way
overwhelming.
Louisa carried and sold my first chapbook, Bequia Poems, in 1979. She did the same
with my first book, The Bequia Poems,
in 1988. At that time, I was publishing what could be called “boat poems” in
various journals and magazines including SAIL. In the April 1987 issue, as a
main illustrated feature, appeared a dramatic narrative of mine, “The Loss of
the Schooner Kestrel.” I gave a copy
to Louisa and she passed it on the Andreas Tauber, then the artistic director
of The Poets’ Theater. A month later, on May 8, in the Cambridge home of Molly
Adams, he produced a staged reading of the poem.
Just as Louisa was more than a bookseller, the Grolier was
more than a bookshop. I went to book signings there, and to readings it
sponsored in the common room of nearby Adams House. In my collection of
chapbooks is Nightfire by Gail Mazur
who on the title page inscribed “To Richard Dey at the Grolier 9/16/87” and
signed it. Louisa herself gave creditable introductions to the poets reading. The
big store window in those days before the Internet was, with its posters and announcements,
a main source of information for upcoming readings in the greater Cambridge
area.
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| Richard Dey |
I graduated from Harvard College in 1973 and after a year living
near Porter Square moved out of Cambridge. For years I returned to go to
readings and the Out of Town newsstand, and to buy supplies at Bob Slate’s
Stationary, and various things at The Coop. For sentimental reasons I continued
to eat at the Wursthaus or get a turkey sandwich at Elsie’s for as long as
those places lasted. On these forays into Cambridge I parked on or near
Plympton Street. While I may have stopped in at the Star Book Store in search
of used treasure, it was the Grolier that I passed by first and last on my
errands, and often enough went into to buy something that I really couldn’t
afford—but could not afford not to
have. And Louisa, ready in the rear corner at the cash register, was of course
glad to look up and smile and ring up the sale.
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Dey graduated from Tabor Academy and, after two years at St. Lawrence University and three in the U.S. Army, from Harvard College in 1973. He has worked as a commercial fisherman in the offshore lobster and swordfish fisheries off New England. As freelance journalist, he has contributed to Yachting, Sail, Offshore, The Boston Globe, and Harvard Magazine, among other publications. Currently, he is an instructor of maritime history and literature in the SEAmester program of Southhampton College, Long Island University. The father of two boys, he lives on the south shore of Massachusetts and visits Bequia in the West Indies frequently.
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