But Solano says her favorite customers are the true poetry readers, old and new. One of her favorite parts of her job is “getting someone who’s never read poetry to start.”

Solano was a 15-year-old high school student when she first entered Grolier, but she was already a poetry lover. Now she helps customers locate specific anthologies and tries to find concrete solutions to their often abstract questions.

She remembers getting a request for a book of poems that a groom could use at a wedding ceremony.

She quickly responded to the request for “something rye but not insulting, light but serious,” by thumbing through works by Ogden Nash and Dorothy Parker.

“I know how to suit poems to people,” she says.

Solano, who is characteristically over-protective of her books, prohibits customers from bringing coffee near them and winces when they chew gum in the store. She has become such a celebrity in poetry circles that she says some people come into the store with obscure requests just to engage her in debate or conversation about poetry.

She pauses in her reminiscences when a couple of young customers wanders into the Grolier, “just browsing.” Though hoping they would actually make purchases at the end of the visit, Solano invites them to help themselves to a pile of old literary magazines.

Solano sees the Grolier’s financial trouble as indicative of an overall change in Harvard Square. She says that the “imaginative atmosphere” of the old Harvard Square has been pushed out by chain stores. And she complains that things like poetry workshops have almost all been transferred from the community to the university.

Solano works to contribute to the literary community by promoting poetry through regular readings in the Adams House Senior Common Room and by awarding an annual Grolier Poetry Prize.

But good poetry does not always make for good business. And Solano seems to realize this as a page turns on her store.

She acknowledges the support she received from friends and patrons. “But moral support unfortunately doesn’t pay the bills,” she says.

Solano hopes that the Grolier’s location will soon receive a blue marker from the Cambridge Historical Society, dedicating it as a historical landmark.

“I also want my name on the street,” she adds as a joke.

—Staff writer Claire Provost can be reached at jprovost@fas.harvard.edu.