When I have bookish guests coming to Boston, one natural destination is the Harvard Book Store over in Cambridge, a great shop lavishly stocked with both new and used books. Since I haven’t worked in Cambridge in decades, I tend not to make my way out there in the normal course of my week – for comics-related shopping, after all, I’ve got Comicopia right there in Kenmore Square, and for a restaurant lunch there’s of course my hole-in-the-wall Chinese food place in Chinatown, where I’ve been going for lunch ever so long. And when it comes to used books, I don’t exactly have much motivation to strike out for pastures new, now do I? With my beloved Brattle Bookshop right there?

But guests call for happy changes in routine, so when Giselle & Chris (of the delightful Rhodes Vlog, plus their own separate channels – go thee hence and subscribe, like, and comment!) came to Boston for another visit, we all went out to Cambridge to take in the store.

The appeal of the company was enormous – Giselle and Chris are endlessly friendly and chattery young people, and the time flies when I’m with them. The appeal of the bookstore itself was a bit trickier. The main floor of the place houses its new hardcovers and paperbacks, and the basement houses the shop’s used books. But the used book selection and price pale when compared with the never-ending bounty at the Brattle, and I certainly have no reason to buy (*shudder*) a new book, since a quite healthy selection of them show up on the front porch every day. So these days, getting the most out of the Harvard Book Store requires some picking and choosing.

Fortunately, one constant of the place has been its extremely rich selection of remainders, so I zeroed in on that. You wouldn’t think it would hold much appeal for me; after all, Open Letters Monthly has been in operation for nine years now – it stands to reason that I will have received all these books before they were remaindered, right? But ah, that assumes I would have kept them, and that in turn assumes a far wiser Steve than I apparently am. In reality, books – even very good books – disappear from my personal library all the time, for reasons that surpass my understanding. Of the four books I bought at the Harvard Book Store with Chris & Giselle, three fall into the category of these Lost Books.

One doesn’t, however: I gladly bought a hardcover copy of Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel (which I reviewed for the Wall Street Journal back when it first came out) because both the bound galley and the trade paperback I already own aren’t really congenial for re-reading (and this is very much a book to re-read). I’m slowly and somewhat dubiously amassing a more-or-less permanent fiction section in my library, and I definitely want this book to be in it.

But the other three? All really, really good books that I mysteriously discarded along the way.

Or thought I did! One of the three – G. J. Meyer’s fantastic 2013 history of the Borgias – was bought in simple error: Against all odds, I had indeed managed to hold onto my original copy from 2013, so this new copy I bought is a double. I shall make quick work of finding a recipient.

But the other two are classic examples of books I bought or got originally, read, loved, swore I’d always own, and then mysteriously stopped owning. I bought Mary Beth Norton’s great In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 back in 2002 when it first appeared, read it, loved it, re-read it the following year, loved it even more (no reviewing in the mix at the time, sadly), and then … poof! Disappeared! It’s good to have it back again – although who knows how long it’ll stick around?

The second book is Michael Hirst’s Michelangelo: The Achievement of Fame from 2011, the intensely good first volume in his projected two-volume life of the great Florentine painter and sculptor. I read it back when it first came out, raved about it at Open Letters Weekly, included it among the Best Biographies of the Year on Stevereads, and then … lost it, discarded it, dumped it. Madness. Now I have it again, and I’ll shelve it with the rest of my biographies and hope it sticks around.

Of course, while I was in the Harvard Book Store, I couldn’t exactly ignore all those used books! And for a certain kind of reader, one of the gems of that section is the store’s enormous collection of graphic novels. I crept through them title by title in search of gems I might not already have (the creeping was rendered a trifle problematic this time around by the young blockhead who just couldn’t seem to foresee any problem with sitting in front of the shelves and just settling in to do some reading; out of deference to the finer sensibilities of Giselle & Chris, I refrained from peremptorily kicking the blockhead obstacle out of the way). And boy oh boy, did I find one! It was a “Marvel Premiere” hardcover volume called If Asgard Should Perish, and I was amazed to see the issues it collected and reprinted in glorious color. One run of those issues, from the 1970s, is the four-part story I years ago dubbed “The Temple at the End of Time” and wrote about at length on Stevereads. In that long-ago Stevereads post, I lamented that these issues would probably never be collected in a full-color hardcover – and here it was!

I’d have enjoyed this trip to the Harvard Book Store even if I’d found no goodies for myself, since I was in delightful company – but the store came through with goodies even so, which is always nice. In a few years, when all of these books have once again disappeared from my collection, I’ll have to go back and hope for similar luck.