Harvard Book Store : An Interview with Jeffrey Mayersohn
Running the Harvard Book Store is literally a dream come true for Jeff Mayersohn and his wife Linda Seamonson.
Running the Harvard Book Store is literally a dream come true for Jeff Mayersohn and his wife Linda Seamonson.
Though a major in Physics from Harvard University and Yale University and an innovator in technology throughout his career, Jeff has always been passionate about books and the bookselling business. He always aspired to own and operate a bookstore with his wife. So, a few years later he decided to semi-retire and looked into pursuing his dream. He joined the American Booksellers Association, went to bookselling school, and attended his first booksellers’ convention, Book Expo America.
“I thought I was going to be a physicist who read a lot — Jeffrey Mayersohn
Upon hearing the sale of Harvard Book Store, a Cambridge icon since 1932, and being a loyal customer there for almost four decades, his decision to move forward was “immediate.” He says that though his “retirement model was a nice, quiet bookstore where I had a lot of time to read and the Harvard Book Store is the opposite of that, I couldn’t believe my luck. It is one of the fascinating independent book stores in the country, if not the world.”
“You can have a career which is not necessarily about books and literature and still love books and literature,” says Mayersohn. “It was my deepest desire to own a bookstore, and it was a perfect retirement plan.”
In October of 2008, the financial industry was crumbling and the national economy was falling apart due to Subprime Mortgage Crisis or The Global Financial Crisis.
The publishing industry was struggling to find its place in an Internet era.
Jeff and Linda bought a Harvard Book Store. This might seem like an irrational decision to few that buying up the world’s supply of phone booths or carbon paper, and at the worst possible time at that. But it wasn’t insanity or some bizarre craziness that made them take this decision. It was their passion and faith that local bookstores are central to the life of their communities.
Excerpts from the Interview: —
Q1) Hi Jeff Sir , thank you for doing this interview or Q&A session with me. I am really thrilled and honored to have you here for this collaboration. Can you tell us about the history of the Harvard Book Store and your role in it?
Harvard Book Store - Harvard Square
The Harvard Book Store has been operating in Harvard Square for almost 80 years. It was founded in 1932 by a Dorchester…www.harvardsquare.com
Jeff: Harvard Book Store was founded in 1932 by Mark Kramer, who borrowed $300 from his parents to start the business. In 1950, the store moved to its current location on Massachusetts Avenue across the street from Harvard Yard, subsequently expanding into adjacent storefronts. In 1962, Mark died and ownership moved to his son, Frank. I was a loyal customer from my days as a Harvard undergraduate (class of 1973). My wife and I bought the store from Frank Kramer (who had inherited Harvard Book Store from his father), decided to put it up for sale. in 2008.
History - About - Harvard Book Store
Harvard Book Store was founded in 1932 by Mark S. Kramer, a native of Boston. With $300 borrowed from his parents, he…www.harvard.com
Q2) Jeff, tell us about your background. You are a Harvard and Yale alumni. From baccalaureate degrees in Physics from Harvard University and M.Phil. in Physics from Yale University to be in the Bookselling Business, what was your journey? When did you decide that you want to be in the bookselling business? Was there a ‘defining moment’ in your life when you knew you loved books and wanted to point your career in that direction?
Jeff: As you say, I was originally trained as a physicist at Harvard (one baccalaureate) and then Yale. In the late seventies, I got involved in the development of the Internet. I went to work for Bolt Beranek and Newman, which ten years earlier had received the contract to build the Arpanet, the prototype for the Internet. For most of the twenty years I spent at BBN, I focused on R&D, at one point serving as Senior Vice President for Engineering in the communications division. After BBN, I joined a technology start-up called Sonus Networks, which was developing hardware and software to enable internet telephony.
Since early childhood, I was an avid reader. No matter where I lived, the space was too small for the books I was acquiring. And throughout my quite busy career in technology, I dreamed of owning a bookstore. In fact, even before I left my start-up, I attended Paz & Associates’ “bookstore school.” It was a small miracle that, shortly after leaving the tech world, I learned that my favorite bookstore, Harvard Book Store, was up for sale.
Q3) How did you meet Linda? Did you work together before the purchase of the Bookstore?
Jeff: I met Linda at Bolt Beranek and Newman. We didn’t work directly with each other, but we were both parts of the communications division at the company. She also was an avid reader. We met in 1980 and began dating a few months after that. Her first gift to me was a book and our second date was in a bookstore. We bought the Harvard Book Store long after we were married.
Q4) What do you love most about being a bookseller? What’s your bookselling philosophy?
Jeff: Bookselling is the perfect job for me. In fact, I hardly consider it to be work. I loved my life in technology, but books were something I only had time to read on long plane flights. Conversations about books were for lunch breaks. As a bookseller “work” is completely about books. There are so many other aspects of bookselling that I love. First and foremost is being part of a community dedicated to ideas and the written word. This community includes our wonderful staff and the customers and authors that I’ve gotten to know. It’s an amazing life.
I’m not sure I have a “philosophy” of bookselling, other than a real commitment to having our store focus on books, with a strong emphasis on academic titles. This may seem obvious, but these days it really isn’t. In fact, tourists often come into the store, look around for a few minutes, and ask where the “real” Harvard bookstore is. What confuses them is that they believe that academic bookstores sell sweatshirts and souvenirs, with a secondary emphasis on books. We do sell non-book items, but our primary emphasis is on the sale of books.
Another aspect of our “philosophy” is a commitment to the community. Pre-pandemic, we participated in 450 author talks a year. These range from smaller events for debut novelists to gatherings with more than a thousand people for celebrity writers. I am also personally active in several literary-themed non-profits and our store partners with many community organizations on various events.
Q5) What other services and products does the bookstore offer? Tell us about Virtual Book Recommendation and print-on-demand services which bookstore offers.
Jeff : We offer a number of services in addition to the traditional sale of books to customers. Print-on-demand is one of the reasons I wanted to get into the book business at the time I did. I thought that, if we could reach into “the cloud” and produce books in our shop, we could have as large an inventory as our bigger competitors, and customers could view us as a place where they could quickly obtain any book ever written. So, soon after purchasing the store, we installed an Espresso Book Machine, a device that produces paperback books in just a few minutes.
Espresso Book Machine
The Espresso Book Machine (EBM) is a print on demand (POD) machine created by On Demand Books. It prints, collates…en.wikipedia.org
The reality turned out to be a little different from the dream, however. Publishers have been reluctant to give us the right to print copyrighted works so most of our printing is focused on self-published works by local authors and works that are in the public domain. The demand for these services remains quite high, and in any given month, we print hundreds of books. Our book-making machine, which we’ve named Paige M. Gutenborg is on the sales floor; it never fails to amaze customers who haven’t seen it before.
One of the great successes of our print-on-demand service was the Mueller Report. There was a period of several weeks, after the release of the report, before publishers were able to provide printed copies to bookstores. We were able to provide printed copies within an hour of its release. The subsequent demand was overwhelming.
The Mueller Report
The Mueller Report was released on April 18, 2019 by the United States Department of Justice. This 454-page edition was…www.harvard.com
There are many other services that we offer. We provide signed first editions of recently published works through two subscription services. In addition, we support corporate sales where companies and other institutions offer books as gifts to their clients or patrons. And, yes, one of the services offered by any independent bookstore is the ability to recommend books to customers, based upon their interests.
Q6) Tell us about your weekly newsletters and events which happen at the bookstore in collaboration with authors. Any memorable incident from any author’s event you can recall.
Weekly Newsletter Archives - About - Harvard Book Store
New This Week! Akwaeke Emezi, Jeffrey Toobin, Jeff Kinneywww.harvard.com
Events Calendar - Harvard Book Store
Harvard Book Store's award-winning event series continues online! See our listings for our upcoming virtual events.www.harvard.com
Jeff: Our weekly newsletter, right now published twice a week, is our primary vehicle for communicating with our customers. The publishing industry delivers a new “product” every week, so a focus of the newsletter is to inform our customers of newly published books. In addition, we use newsletters to discuss promotions and news about the store and the book industry.
Prior to the pandemic, we participated in around 450 author readings a year. Some of these were smaller events, held in our store, which has a capacity of around seventy attendees. Others were much larger events, featuring celebrity authors, taking advantage of local churches, auditoriums, and theatre spaces. One very memorable event was with Patti Smith, before an audience of around 1100 people. She was feeling very much under the weather that evening so, when she took the stage, she announced that she really wasn’t able to do a conventional reading but would instead sing for us. The result was a marvelous, riveting, impromptu concert. I told her afterward that it was the best “reading” I’d ever attended. She laughed.
Patti Smith
Harvard Book Store welcomes award-winning performer, visual artist, and musician PATTI SMITH for a discussion and…www.harvard.com
Since the pandemic, we have moved our author readings to Zoom. If anything, attendance has increased as it’s much easier to tune into an event at home rather than travel to a remote venue.
Events are such a huge part of our identity as a bookstore. We hosted hundreds of author events a year, everything from 15 people gathered in the bookstore to see a debut author who may go on to win the Pulitzer Prize in a few years, to a local author in the store and then 100 people who come to see them, to hundreds of people at offsite events that are ticketed. We switched to the virtual Zoom events in March, and those have been greatly successful. It was an honor to be named the Best Virtual Author series by Boston Magazine. Our events team has done just a tremendous job with introducing authors from their homes rather than doing so in the bookstore from the front of the crowd. We’ve had great attendance to those events, but it’s not the same experience as getting to meet an author and have them sign a book for you.
Q7) What considerations do you keep in mind while curating the bookstore? Do you always prefer to have Best Seller on the shelves? Or does Harvard Bookstore provide a platform to aspiring/underrated writers as well?
All Staff Suggestions - Staff Recommended - Harvard Book Store
Edit descriptionwww.harvard.com
Jeff: Of course, we cater to the interests of our customers. Thus we stock most of the best-selling titles that all bookstores carry. However, as an academic bookstore, adjacent to Harvard University, our inventory contains a higher percentage of academic titles and literary fiction.
Jeff M. - Staff Recommended - Harvard Book Store
Jeff M. owns Harvard Book Store. He and his wife, Linda Seamonson, bought the store on October 1, 2008. A Harvard…www.harvard.com
One of the joys of going to a bookstore is the browsing experience. Thus, we pride ourselves on carrying books that customers might not have otherwise known about. And we do focus on introducing new writers to readers. In fact, we have an event series called “New Voices in Fiction” whose purpose is to provide a platform for first-time authors. In addition, we have a subscription service that provides signed, first editions of debut works.
Signed New Voices in Fiction Club - Clubs & Services - Harvard Book Store
The Signed New Voices in Fiction First Edition Club brings you some of the finest and most important debut novels of…www.harvard.com
Q8) According to the Research Study — The Novel Resurgence of Independent Bookstores by Ryan Raffaelli, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School. He observed that one of the essential ingredients to the independent bookseller is the notion of community. Independent bookstores have found success by fashioning spaces where like-minded readers can visit and mingle meaningfully with authors on tour. Community connects customers with content in the store to build truly meaningful relationships.
Ryan L. Raffaelli
Ryan Raffaelli is an Associate Professor in the Organizational Behavior Unit at Harvard Business School. He created and…www.hbs.edu
Do you happen to agree with his study and observation? How does Harvard Book Store maintain a special blend of community flavor?
Jeff: As I said above, we are very focused on the community. In fact, our participation in so many author events is a way of supporting the community of readers, providing them with a venue for the exchange of ideas. Many of our author readings are jointly sponsored with community organizations, whether they be Harvard academic departments or local non-profits. We also provide a “private event” service through which we supply books and to community groups that host writers at their meetings. Part of my job is community outreach. So, I serve on the boards of a number of literary-oriented non-profits including the Boston Book Festival and 826 Boston. The latter is a wonderful organization that helps young people in the Boston public schools express themselves through the written word.
Q9) Book-buying behavior is a function not just of book prices and stock size but also the experience of discovering and purchasing itself. Do you think Harvard Bookstore has benefitted from this broad trend? Do you feel that there will be an analog backlash in the future again when it comes to books?
Jeff: I strongly agree that the browsing experience leading to the discovery of works of literature is the primary attraction of being in a bookstore. One of the things that I love about the Harvard Book Store is that, no matter how often I’m in the store, I discover books about whose existence I was previously unaware of but which seem to have been written for me. This experience is testimony to the quality of our buying group.
So, yes, it is precisely this experience that brings people to browse in bookstores. I don’t know about the analog backlash. When we bought the Harvard Book Store, the emerging Kindle was all the rage and it was conventional wisdom that digital reading was going to eclipse the traditional book. The fact of the matter is that eleven years later, just prior to the pandemic, store sales were the highest in our store’s history, so that predicted demise never happened. I was a technologist and I am not anti-digital. In fact, I am in favor of any medium that engages readers. So, e-books certainly have their place and I often read digitally, while much preferring books in their traditional form.
Q10) In a time when we sleep with our smartphones next to us, what you share on social media tells a story about who you are. And many can’t resist telling a story about themselves as smart, worldly, and well-read. It is actually very brave that if you read a book and don’t share it on social media. But none of us really are brave. #Bookstagram is creating a thriving space — and community — for bibliophiles on Instagram and that’s been a good thing for independent bookstores too I guess — because it plays to their key strength: creating community.
Do you think Instagram is acting as a catalyst in boosting the presence of bookstores? How has this hashtag helped Harvard Bookstore?
Jeff: We make extensive use of Instagram. For us, its primary purpose is to visually portray the experience of being in the bookstore. Our hope is that the images will be compelling enough to motivate customers to visit us. So, we view it as a very effective vehicle to promote services and activities, through images rather than words.
Q11) What are the challenges usually faced by an independent bookstore in Cambridge? Could you tell us about the virtual or digital opportunities during the lockdown, and how far the Harvard Bookstore team efforts have been successful?
Jeff: The pandemic is an existential threat to most brick and mortar establishments, affecting us in numerous ways. The fact that we allow only 15 customers in the store at a time and that our hours are significantly reduced means that revenue is a fraction of what it was prior to the pandemic. While increased web sales compensate for some of this reduced revenue, the fact is that overall sales have substantially decreased. Another challenge is the fact that, although attendance at our virtual events is strong, book sales are weak. The reality is that the inability of customers to interact with authors at readings and to receive signed copies of books has a substantial and negative effect on book sales.
Costs have not decreased, despite reduced sales. There are new roles mandated by the pandemic. These include the need for gatekeepers to control the flow of customers into the store; the continual need to disinfect work areas; the need to have a staff member dedicated to curbside pickup. Finally, we need additional staff to process the increased volume of web orders.
In a situation where sales are noticeably down, managing cash is critical. Thus, our inventory buying decisions, hard enough in the best of times, are very challenging during the pandemic. Determining how many copies of an expected bestseller to purchase from publishers is a very difficult decision.
Events are such a huge part of our identity as a bookstore. We hosted hundreds of author events a year, everything from 15 people gathered in the bookstore to see a debut author who may go on to win the Pulitzer Prize in a few years, to a local author in the store and then 100 people who come to see them, to hundreds of people at offsite events that are ticketed. We switched to the virtual Zoom events in March, and those have been greatly successful. It was an honor to be named the Best Virtual Author series by Boston Magazine. Our events team has done just a tremendous job with introducing authors from their homes rather than doing so in the bookstore from the front of the crowd. We’ve had great attendance to those events, but it’s not the same experience as getting to meet an author and have them sign a book for you.
Q12) Do you have any advice for independent bookshop owners on surviving after Covid?
Jeff: Given how uncertain the future is, it’s very hard to contemplate life after COVID. We sometimes joke that our horizon for strategic planning is about three days. How can we contemplate the future when we don’t know if the predicted second wave of infections will occur in the Fall, forcing us to shut down again?
Q13) And, lastly what are your future plans for the bookstore?
Jeff: Right now, we are completely focused on surviving in the worst climate for small businesses in our collective lifetimes. Anything beyond that is, at best, wishful thinking, and likely delusional. At the same time, we are a mission-driven organization, so our goals are fundamentally unchanged. We continue to exist to introduce readers to great written works and to provide an open forum for the exchange of ideas.
At last, the bookstore exists to serve a community, and Jeff came up with the way and strategy to safeguard that mission. While individuals will consistently take the path of least resistance to purchase a book, they will still value the experience of browsing and spending time in a bookstore that ignites their creativity and imagination. That’s the position that Harvard Book Store has protected.
A Letter from the Owners
As the owners of Harvard Book Store, we are often asked these days how the store is doing. The truth is it's been a…mailchi.mp
Thank you all for reading and a big thanks to Jeffrey Mayersohn for collaborating in today’s post!
It’s a pleasure!
If any of my readers here, wish to know more about this fascinating independent bookstore and its undying spirit with respect to the books. Do open the links mentioned below. They have a wonderfully informative, articulated, and well-curated website. It has all the essential details about the upcoming author events as well as their latest book subscription offerings!
Website: https://www.harvard.com/
Harvard Book Store - Harvard Square
Harvard Book Store is a unique and special place to shop-a locally owned, independently run Cambridge landmark since…www.harvardsquare.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/harvardbookstore/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/harvardbookstore/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarvardBooks
Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/HarvardBookStore
