Bargain Basement Books

Hunting for an inexpensive copy of Thoreau, de Beauvoir, or Austen, or a lightly used textbook? Try the Book Co-op, Mount Holyoke's student-run used bookshop in the basement of Wilder Hall. Open from 7 to 10 pm Sunday through Thursday, the Book Co-op provides students, faculty, and staff with an opportunity to sell their books on consignment and find bargain titles, many priced at a dollar or less. The Co-op collects only 10 percent of the selling price.

Comanagers Dil Kapadia '97 and Meher Dalal '99 enjoy the chance to browse the store's rotating stock. "I like to run down and do some reading when I have free time," commented Kapadia. She estimates that the number of titles currently on the shelves is between 4,000 and 5,000.

Dalal finds herself drawn to the older-looking books, and enjoys coming across artifacts--"small treasures," in her words--left by long gone students, such as an inscription on a book's flyleaf, or old class notes tucked inside a textbook. She also finds herself looking at books she might not see elsewhere, such as the co-op's collection of MHC yearbooks. Aside from the pleasures of serendipitous book browsing, Dalal points out that "the co-op is a good resource for inexpensive books, especially in the areas of humanities and light fiction."

But absent consigners beware: so many previous generations of MHC students have abandoned their books upon graduation that the managers are (reluctantly) thinking about pruning the stock. Kapadia points out that, "It would be a lot of effort to find people who graduated years ago just to tell them they left a couple of books here." Watch for the co-op's bargain basement book giveaway later this semester.