15 bookstores in the Boston area!

In the vein of Keats: Oh ye! who have your eye-balls vex'd and tir'd, feast them upon the light o' literacy.

Thought I'd post a list of bookstores in the Boston area I've been blowing my money on or need to check out. Once home to those lovely people who believed themselves to be transparent eyeballs and probably the rest of the giants in 1800's American lit and Susan freaking Cooper and the like, Boston & Cambridge definitely has all sorts of charming bookstores for those needing a literary fix. Feed that wandering eye of yours.

All of these are easy to get to by the T Red line. I've organized the list by T stop in the inbound direction, from Alewife to Braintree. Asterisk means it carries used books.

1. Porter Square Books (Porter Square)--Convenient location, right in the middle of the Porter Square shopping center. Just the one floor of new books, but they have a great selection and it's a spacious space to read and relax. The staff are definitely the most interesting that I've met, always up for a chat about books. They are very helpful and will help order anything not in stock, to be picked up within days.

2. Harvard Book Store* (Harvard Square)--Not the Harvard Coop! First floor is your standard bookstore, with rich green and mahogany colored furnishings and nice window seat nooks. Downstairs in the more dingy basement are used books. Lots of author tours and events, nice to browse and pick up new readings.

3. Harvard Coop (Harvard Square)--Three floors of a huge Barnes and Noble with a gorgeous spiral staircase. Not the place for the best bargains, but it definitely takes the card for most breadth out of all the places in Boston I've been so far. Don't forget your coop #, if you're a Harvard or MIT student. Just a quick note: anything you've ever dreamed of or yearned for that is capable of having "Harvard" stamped on it is thankfully in a separate building but with the same COOP sign, so don't get lost!

4. Schoenhof's Foreign Books (Harvard Square)--Never been there, but apparently it has a great selection of foreign language books. Must go there to brush up and try to become the next Jacek Lerych (kidding!).

5. Raven Used Books* (Harvard Square)--Never been there, but it looks like the perfect stop for dwellers, visitors, and friends of the ivory tower.

6. The Globe Corner Bookstores (Harvard Square)--Never been there, but I'm already in love with it because it supplies travel literature and maps for the globetrotter and armchair traveler alike, in pursuit of adventure.

7. New England Comics (Harvard Square)--There are seven other stores dispersed through Massachusetts, so it seems to be a pretty big business. I don't really have much of a lasting impression of it because when I went there last year to pick up Watchmen, it wasn't in stock (what kind of comic book store are they?! and that was right before the full force of the Hollywood hype hit). I haven't been back since, but one of these days I'll go and explore more.

8. Rodney's Bookstore* (Central Square)--Two floors of used books. Eclectic but strong mix of classics, nonfiction, and recently published books. Everything's very...wooden, that is, in cute modular bookcases of different shapes and sizes. They have wooden chairs for you to sit down and enjoy a nice read and even wooden cubes for you to buy to stuff some books/miscellaneous in.

9. MIT Coop (Kendall Square)--Definitely a weaker shadow of its sister at Harvard. It combines the cheesy college memorabilia, grossly overpriced textbooks and office supplies, and smatterings of New York Times best sellers all in one. It's cool to hang out by the windows in the comfy 1700s-esque windsor chairs on a sunny day though.

10. MIT Press (Kendall Square)--Cozy little shop full of technical books, many of which are written by MIT professors. Thank god that it's still here, given that Quantum Books closed down last week for good; sometimes you just need to a place to feed the mind with science and engineering. The biannual loading dock sales are amazing because you can get books up to 90% off the original price.

11. Brattle Book Shop* (Park Street)--What happens when you make the outside of the bookstore look like the inside, but the inside look like the street? This bookstore definitely stands out a la Night at the Roxbury. Or it's just that the outside alley is full of cheap books, and the inside has even more books. Wheeeee.

12. Commonwealth Books* (Park Street)--Crammed with humanities books and art prints. The definite smell of old books is a dead give away that much is pre '70s.

13. Borders (Downtown Crossing)--There's at least three Borders in Boston and Cambridge, but this one is the biggest, located right in the middle of the shopping district. First floor is where most of the books are, second floor has the kids and help guides sections and audio/visual collection. Best national chain for sure, definitely sign up for their free Borders rewards membership to get steep in-store discounts (Barnes and Noble is kind of pretentious, and you have to pay for the 10% discount).

14. Barnes and Noble @ the Prudential Center (Green line, Boylston)--If you're ever stuck or bored in this high end mall chockfull of designer clothing boutiques, this Barnes and Noble is a nice place to browse and kill some time. Otherwise, I wouldn't recommend this bookstore as the first place to go to, unless you really must go to a B&N or already are on Boylston Street (you could always walk a couple of blocks down to get to the more impressive Boston Public Library, too).

15. Comicopia (Green line, Kenmore Square)--The best comic book store I've yet to encounter. It's tiny, but the shelves were groaning with the complete trades of everything I was looking for (come on, Mike Carey's Lucifer published by Vertigo is semi-obscure).

Just for the record, Newbury Comics (Greenline, Boylston) does not carry comic books, or anything resembling literature! They do have a fine selection of music, however, if that's what you're looking for.

However, nothing beats Powell's Books* in Portland, Oregon. That is the Mecca of used bookstores and so worth a pilgrimage out there to browse through the five or so floors of amazingness. They carry a lot of out-of-print stuff too. Their online website selection is really good too, comparable to, if not often better than, Amazon's.