“I’ll wait outside,” said my sixteen-year-old son after a brief glance inside the entryway of Curious George and Friends Bookstore in the heart of Harvard Square. I thought about arguing with him, but I knew I didn’t have a shot of getting him in there.
The problem was, it was a kids’ paradise and Max refuses to have anything to do with childish pursuits. Meanwhile, the other seven “kids” with me (ranging in age from 8 to 46) had happily raced inside.
If it weren’t so wonderful, the store might send you into sensory overload. They really commit to the jungle theme upstairs, where, if memory serves me correctly (which it never does, but let’s hope we get lucky here), toys, games and books for the younger generation were sprawled amid spreading fake trees, bamboo accents, and a general sense that the man in the yellow hat was going to come wandering over and throw a net over you. This was the place to nab that stuffed parrot you always wanted or an Eloise doll or a copy of And Tango Makes Three by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson. (I didn’t actually check to see if they had that book, but it was the most “challenged” book for several years running in public libraries because it’s a tender, sweet, lovable picture book that dares to suggest two males might be able to raise a child successfully, so I figured I’d plug it. Plus I know the authors.)
But if you’ve learned anything about me and my family and our summer vacation, you know that my daughter was on a quest to make Meg Cabot a part of our daily lives, and so, within a matter of seconds, she had dismissed the upstairs part of the store as being too young for her needs, and led the whole big group of us (minus Max, of course, who was still waiting patiently out on the sidewalk) down to the enormous middle reader and YA section below.
There she was suitably delighted to find a huge selection of books by The Princess Diaries author and pored through them while my 20-year-old niece sighed because she owned almost all of Meg Cabot’s oeuvre back home in Scarsdale and had no way of transferring them to us easily. The other kids were busily checking out the books around them and Rob was just as busy, since he had promised Will a book about the Greek gods but didn’t want to spend 20 dollars on the beautifully illustrated one they’d found upstairs with the picture books and so was searching for a cheaper alternative, which he quickly found and bought.
We would have stayed longer, but we had that teenager waiting upstairs and only the one night in Harvard Square. So back out we went, but at least I remembered the name of this store, as opposed to so many others on our vacation–but how could I not?–and also in the course of writing this discovered they have a great bookstore blog that has a lot of info about new kids’ books, so take a look at it if you have a new kid.
If we had had world enough and time, which sadly we didn’t, I would have insisted we swing by the Harvard Bookstore where I used to spend countless hours a couple of decades ago searching row by row and spine by spine through every used book down on their lower level, nabbing Penguin classics for a buck or two and using the promise of getting to read them as a reward for getting through my homework. Their swank website suggest they may have gotten spiffier and more elegant since the days when I ignored the whole main floor of new books for the fun of the hunt through the old, but I suspect it’s still the kind of store you can get lost in for hours, especially when you should be studying for your Science core class final.
Plus you’ve got to admire a place that nabbed the website www.harvard.com. They HAD to have figured out the ‘net was going to be a big deal before anyone else, don’t you think?
Curious George & Friends (email)
1 JFK Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: 617-498-0062
Harvard Book Store
1256 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: (617) 661-1515
Tel: (800) 542-READ
Tags: Cambridge, Cambridge bookstore, Harvard Square, kids, Massachusetts, Massachusetts bookstore
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