400 square feet of poetic punch

Far from being a relic whose golden age has passed, he adds, it is "a much more vital place than in the old days of Gordon Cairnie, when the stock was smaller and the atmosphere was more of a private club. The store is more welcoming, and serves more needs."

Sometimes, Solano is wary of being too welcoming. Visitors copy down titles or get recommendations, only to go and buy them through Amazon. Theft is also a problem, and one of the reasons that Solano is often brusque with newcomers. The people who come and browse for an hour, she says, are most often the ones who steal.

Frequently, her visitors are tourists, elated to have at last found the erudite Harvard Square they imagined – walls of obscure books, a whole store devoted to one type of literature. To them, says Solano. "It's a landmark. It's a monument. It's a symbol of what intellectual Harvard Square should be. But they don't buy anything here."

Interest in poetry, she says sadly, may be dying.

You wouldn't guess that from the recent Poetry Society of America event to celebrate the Grolier's 75th anniversary. Nearly 800 people packed Harvard's Sanders Theatre to hear some of the most celebrated contemporary poets read verse and reminisce about the shop.

Donald Hall remembers his first visit to the Grolier in the 1940s as a Harvard freshman excited to find a volume by the new poet Richard Wilbur reviewed in the latest New Yorker. He still has the book, he shows the crowd, now worn and much-read. Robert Creeley later reads from a first-edition Ezra Pound he bought there for $4.50.

Eamon Grennan recalls Conrad Aiken sitting on the sofa, "telling salacious stories of Eliot and Frost," Frank Bidart speaks of seeing Elizabeth Bishop there just before she died, and James Tate admits he found the Grolier more than a little intimidating – it took two months of scurrying silently in and out of the store before he mustered up the courage to tell Cairnie he was that year's Yale Younger Poet.

Philip Levine, meanwhile, treasures a more recent memory. He came to the Grolier hoping to replace a favorite anthology of Spanish poetry. It was out of print, but Solano asked him to watch the store for a few minutes. She returned with her own copy and gave it to him.

For Solano, the tribute is a bit overwhelming. But the idealized image these poets paint of her shop is simply what she has always seen.

From that first day she arrived at the Grolier as a teenager, she says, she "had fallen in love with it."

As discouraging as her job has sometimes been, that love affair with the Grolier – and with poetry – never waned.

"I don't travel much," says Solano. "So I depend upon what I read. And poems are a great way to travel beyond your own limits."

• Send e-mail comments to paulsona@csps.com

Philip Levine, "What Work Is," Knopf, 1992

Sharon Olds, "The Dead and the Living," Random House, 1985

Rainer Maria Rilke, "The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke," Translated by Stephen Mitchell, Vintage Books, 1989

David Ferry, "The Odes of Horace" (translation), Noonday Press, 1998

Seamus Heaney, "Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1968-1978," Noonday Press, 1981

Marilyn Chin, "The Phoenix Gone, the Terrace Empty," Milkweed Editions, 1994

James Tate, "Memoir of the Hawk," Ecco Press, 2002

Martín Espada, "City of Coughing and Dead Radiators," W.W. Norton & Company, 1994

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