The Spring Store, which replaced Sage's grocery, is part of a wave of cell phone stores that swarmed teh Square in the last four years.

The bookcase is bare, except for a thin volume called An Introduction to Logic, as Andrew A. Jantz leans his arm on one of the empty shelves.

“I’m disappointed,” says the manager of A Scholar’s Bookshop. “We opened it with high hopes....But we didn’t sell nearly enough books. We were losing money from day one and just couldn’t carry it anymore.”

Less than a year after it opened, the bookstore has become the latest in more than two dozen stores that have closed during the four years that the Class of 2003 spent in Harvard Square.

While movers hoist box after box of used books up the stairs and out of the store’s basement location across the street from the Charles Hotel, Jantz reminisces about a golden age of independent booksellers in the Square.

“There used to be a day when you could visit Harvard Square and you could pick up a map that showed 20 bookstores,” he says. “You could come here...and go from bookstore to bookstore.”

Even with high rents in the Square, the proprietors figured that the area’s thousands of professors and students would support their store, which specialized in out-of-print academic titles. The classics sold well, as did philosophy texts, but overall sales figures were only a third to a half of what was needed to break even.

A Scholar’s Bookshop is just one of many tenants of Harvard Square that have succumbed to financial pressures in the last four years.

Sage’s grocery store, formerly located at the corner Brattle and Church Streets, shut down during the spring of the class’ first year in Cambridge. Billings & Stover Apothecary, an old-fashioned Brattle Street soda fountain and pharmacy, closed its doors during the class’ junior year. And the Harvard Provision Company, the only liquor store in the Square, left its Mt. Auburn Street location in March.

Those three stores combined had been in Harvard Square for more than three centuries.

The Class of 2003 watched Good Will Hunting in high school, in which Matt Damon, Class of 1992, frequented Harvard Square’s Tasty restaurant and the Bow and Arrow Pub, while one-upping a romantic rival at a Dunkin’ Donuts and Baskin-Robbins shop.

As the class leaves, none of the three Square locations survives.

But in addition to the closings, the Class of 2003 has witnessed the expansion of a number of Square mainstays and the advent of cell phone stores such as Cingular, Sprint PCS and T-Mobile.

Several businesses with prime Mass. Ave. storefronts such as C’est Bon and CVS have expanded their locations, along with Bob Slate, Cambridgeport Bank and Fleet Bank.

But despite all the changes, the Square continues to have a distinctive mix.

“We’ve got new chains. We’ve got mom-and-pops,” says John DiGiovanni, president of the Harvard Square Business Association. “Let’s see how they do.”