“This relationship was like a gentlemen’s agreement. Because we were a niche, the University decided that we would be the one who provided foreign language course books,” says Store Manager Eleni Sacre.

Schoenof’s opened in 1856 and has remained a small, family-owned business that provides coursebooks based on professors’ requests. The store caters to students by offering a 20 percent discount on European publications and 10 percent discount on domestic publications.

While the number of bookstores in the Square has decreased from 26 to 3 in the most recent decades, the Harvard Book Store is another milestone bookstore, founded in 1932. Although the store does not keep many textbooks in stock, it will order any book that a student requests.

“We don’t in a classical sense provides textbooks to students. We’ve always viewed the Coop as that place,” says Harvard Book Store Owner Jeffrey Mayersohn ’73.

The bookstore sells standard literature, which can often be seen as the coursebooks for English classes. As a humanities concentrator, Brinkley can purchase the majority of her coursebooks at the Harvard Book Store to support local business.

While the Coop sells tradebooks too, Mayersohn sees it as a friendly competition. The Harvard Book Store also does custom printing through their bookmaking machine dubbed Paige M. Gutenborg.

Mayersohn says some professors use the machine to print coursepacks and students have printed their theses or their own novels.

Professor of Armenian Culture James R. Russell uses the machine to print specialized Armenian materials that are not longer copywrited for his courses. The Harvard Book Store also has access to all the scanned books from Widener for print.

Brinkley noted that the Harvard Book Store could never replace the Coop in textbook sales since it could not handle the volume as a small independent store.

“Problems are inherent in big university bookstores. The alternative to the Coop is Amazon. There just isn’t a viable independent,” Brinkley says.

Regardless of the changes the Coop makes, students and professors see a purpose in having the Coop and other bookstores.

While libraries also offer some course books, Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology Jeff W. Lichtman says he sees an advantage to having a bookstore.

“In a library, not all the textbooks in the same fields are in the same place. There’s an advantage to seeing that and being able to purchase new editions,” Lichtman says.

“The Coop serves multiple purposes. It provides a place of social gathering with an academic focus and scholarly atmosphere,” says Russell, who often does work at the Coop Café.

The Coop’s board will meet again in December to discuss a plan of action.

—Staff writer Kerry M. Flynn can be reached at kflynn@college.harvard.edu.