400 square feet of poetic punch

Those legends may take a bit of poetic license, but there's no doubt the shop has a storied past. Shortly after Cairnie and Adrian Gambet founded the Grolier in 1927, Conrad Aiken moved in upstairs. In the 1940s, the shop was the favored stomping grounds of Donald Hall, Robert Creeley, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, and Robert Bly, all Harvard undergraduates. At a time when Cambridge was the center for American literature, the Grolier was the center for Cambridge poets.

The store was almost more a club than a shop in those days. Cairnie funded it in part with his wife's money, so he could afford to give away books and ignore such trivialities as business operations. "You never even saw money," Solano remembers. "He kept the change in his pockets. So you were led to believe that yes, books could sustain you physically. Of course," she adds ruefully, "they can't, however much we'd like them to."

She quickly discovered that when she took over the store in 1974, after Cairnie's death. Its books and records were a shambles, and Cairnie had no credit with anyone. "I realized I had bought something I loved, but there was no means to survive in it," Solano says.

Up till that point, the Grolier had been a general bookstore, with more first editions and collectors items than most. But Solano decided she needed a niche.

"I thought, well, I know two things. One is Victorian literature. And the other is poetry. And I like the poetic mind better."

For a few years, she tried to maintain the store's legendary atmosphere – the relaxed literary club where someone could borrow a book as soon as buy it and business was never an outward concern. But after years of working grueling hours, Solano says, it finally sank in that "while I was eating cheese sandwiches once a day to maintain this, all these people I was making these sacrifices for were going to writing workshops, were going off on vacations, lived in homes that were secure, and I wasn't. So I sat down and said, I have to run it like a business."

That hasn't been easy. Poetry has never been profitable, and in recent years other stores have encroached on the Grolier's territory. Barnes & Noble now carries volumes of Sharon Olds and Pablo Neruda along with standard fare like Wordsworth and Yeats. The few people interested in new or little-known poets can find many of the titles they want on Amazon.com.

Yet in some ways, the Grolier is more vibrant than ever. Solano sponsors an impressive reading series, gives an annual poetry prize, and founded the Inter- collegiate Undergraduate Poetry Reading 11 years ago. "I had noticed that any student who came in here from other schools thought they were the only poets alive," she says. "I thought they'd better begin talking to each other."

And along with her ability to locate obscure and out-of-print titles, Solano offers one thing that none of her competitors do: intimate knowledge of and opinions about poetry.

When customers come in and tell her, as many do, that they need to find a poem to read at a wedding, she doesn't just rattle off old standbys. She sits them down, asks about the bride and groom, finds out what the service is like, how well they know poetry, and what sort of poems they like. She rarely repeats a recommendation.

The Grolier, says former US poet laureate Robert Pinsky, "is valuable for the same reason poetry is so terribly important: human scale.... [Its] intimacy has a power, an appeal that cannot be matched by any mass medium or any mass marketing."

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