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November-December 2006
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Grolier Reincarnated
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| Poet and Wellesley philosophy professor Ifeanyi Menkiti, a native Nigerian, holds court in his new bookstore. |
| Photograph by Stu Rosner |
Menkiti, a longtime Cantabrigian, has taught moral philosophy at Wellesley since 1973. The general imperatives he feels as a college professor—broadening his students’ perspectives and taking advantage of cultural proximity—shape his priorities for the Grolier, too. Although his professorial responsibilities keep him from managing the store’s day-to-day business, he plans to build up its collection of international poetry with as much intermingling as possible. “I wasn’t thinking of, ‘Let’s say today we’ll have our little Indian enclave or little Chinese enclave, tomorrow our little African enclave,’” he explains. “I think there’s something wonderful about it all happening together.” He hopes to extend the shop’s outreach programs by this same standard. “It would be nice to see the poets of the world joining hands to do some things,” he says—like multinational readings or evenings of poetry with related ethnic food.
A large man with a rumbling voice and a quick laugh, Menkiti seems to find friends everywhere. His conversation is brisk and errant, and he likes to fill silences by reading or reciting a poem from memory. (“I have to show you this,” he says at one point, scrawling out a couple of lines from Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos. “I get excited like a little kid.”) Menkiti, a native Nigerian, came to the United States to attend Pomona College, where he wrote a prizewinning senior thesis on Pound. (“That has always intimidated me,” Solano says, laughing.) Hoping to become a magazine journalist, Menkiti graduated from Columbia’s journalism school and then changed course, earning a master’s degree in philosophy at New York University before heading to Harvard to study with John Rawls. In 1971, he published Affirmations, his first book of poetry; Of Altair, the Bright Light, his third collection, appeared last year. Poetry and political philosophy, both reaching toward aesthetic harmony of some sort, have never seemed contradictory, he says.
When Menkiti first walked into the Grolier as a graduate student in 1969, it was owned and run by Gordon Cairnie, a Canadian by birth, whose name overshadows the shop’s first half-century. Yet the Grolier wasn’t his brainchild. Initially a sort of fine-edition bookstore, it was launched by Adrien Gambet ’25, an avid and wealthy book collector; Cairnie soon joined to share in its management. Their partnership lasted only one awkward year, however: Gambet was something of a playboy, according to Solano, and liked to use the store for trysts, while Cairnie was a monogamous married Cantabrigian. When Gambet threw in the towel, Cairnie stayed on. And it was his conception that both future owners of the shop fell in love with.
“There were books all around and there was an old couch,” Menkiti remembers. (T.S. Eliot reportedly had a penchant for dozing on its cushions.) “It was very laid-back in the old days, and it wasn’t as organized.” It wasn’t financially stable, either. Cairnie ran the store more as a public service than as a business venture, sustaining it with his own funds as necessary. Over time, he changed the flavor of its stock as well. Moving away from fine editions, the Grolier began to offer both avant-garde literature—it was reportedly the first bookstore in Cambridge to carry James Joyce’s Ulysses—and the poetry selection for which it slowly became famous. By the middle of the century, the shop was an oasis of literary bohemianism in Harvard Square, often attracting customers more interested in hanging out than buying books. “It was very much the place where poets met,” says Frank Bi dart, A.M. ’67, one of Robert Lowell’s students. According to the new U.S. poet laureate, Donald Hall ’51, JF ’57, its ambiance suited the creatively inclined. “The Grolier provides the best elements of a literary café,” he wrote in a 1971 Antioch Review tribute to Cairnie, “a place where writers can hang around, talk, or be silent, and remain unharassed.”
Louisa Solano, a local resident who had fallen in love with the Grolier as a young customer, took over the shop when Cairnie died, in 1974, and ran it for the next three decades. Unable to subsidize an unprofitable store, she tried to turn the tiny venue into a commercially viable business. She kept better track of its stock, which eventually encompassed 15,000 titles, and made the decision to devote its shelves exclusively to poetry. She also worked to attract a broader range of clientele. “I had customers coming in who were from different classes—and I don’t mean academic ones. There were poor people, people who had no education,” she says. “It was gratifying when somebody came in who didn’t know anything about poetry….By talking with them, we could come up with something, and they really enjoyed it. They came back. That was the major success, as far as I was concerned.”
Solano describes her halcyon years as the mid 1970s, when an assortment of small presses flooded her shelves with exciting new poets. Meanwhile, she says, the local literary community blossomed. Yet that energy was short-lived. A simultaneous proliferation of M.F.A. programs, she says, soon caused a sea change in the culture of American poetry. The M.F.A. curricula, based mainly on workshop courses, served as training grounds for many of the most prominent poets who followed. Solano thinks a spark of authenticity was lost along the way. “Suddenly, everybody seemed to be writing like their instructor,” she says. “It made it quite clear that a poet has to have really good connections to get somewhere. It started getting kind of ugly, as people’s ambitions turned more toward—ambition.”
This changed sensibility affected the Grolier’s customers, with more people seeking the same short list of poets and, these days, fewer buying. “There’s more interest in hearing a poet read than in actually reading the book,” Solano says. This is especially a problem for an all-poetry shop, which, unlike conventional bookstores, cannot count on bestselling novels or how-to guides to keep revenue flowing. “Unsaleable inventory is exactly that,” she explains.
An ever-thinning stream of visitors—sometimes only 20 a day—and a mail-order business trumped by websites like Amazon.com finally caught up with the Grolier about two years ago. Solano, who suffers from epilepsy, also found that her health forced her to cut back the shop’s business hours. After announcing her intention to sell, she waded through 19 buyout offers but couldn’t take any in good conscience. Some prospective owners backed off as soon as they saw the store’s financial history. Others planned to change the name or mission of the shop—an unattractive possibility to both Solano and Harvard Real Estate Services, which has set the Grolier’s rent below market rate. Only days before her lease expired, she says, she was planning to declare both personal and business bankruptcy. That was when Menkiti phoned with an offer. “My reaction was, ‘Oh God, you are the perfect person,’” Solano says. “If there’s any man who knows anything about international poetry—and not just the kind that’s the flavor of the year—it’s Professor Menkiti.” The potential, she says, is huge; if Menkiti successfully harnesses his knowledge of world poetry, he could create “a revolution in taste.”
Revolution or not, the tiny shop was packed with well-wishers at the Grolier’s reopening party in May. Readings by both unpublished and well-known poets carried forward the day, which Menkiti emceed in a flowing African-print shirt. Bidart, now his Wellesley colleague, read a few new poems before Menkiti himself intoned some work by the Nigerian poet Christopher Okigbo. And the cash register, recently moved against the wall to make for a roomier browsing space, rang throughout the afternoon.
