At the Co-op

80.

Part of the fun of Reunion Weekend is dragging the kids around to all of your old haunts. This campus bookstore is legendary -- and it's not the one where you can buy sweatshirts and coffee mugs adorned with the school crest. It's the one where you buy books. Serious books.

You enter the basement-level store through the arched stone doorway of a neo-gothic seminary building. Street noise falls away as you descend the stairs into a rabbit warren of rooms, each wall covered in bookshelves from floor to ceiling. It would be easy to get disoriented and lost down here, among the narrow passages and cramped spaces. On the cement floor, different colored lines are painted, leading the way into and out of different corners of the store.

Not much has changed here in 20 years. They have even held on where many other independent bookstores have failed, since the arrival of internet booksellers... But, there are rumors going around that they might have to move to another space, since the University has bought the building and plans to renovate. A bigger, more open, less claustrophobic and less maze-like space wouldn't be a bad thing, I suppose. Still, I'm glad the kids got to see how we did it back in the day.