Harvard University - Red Book Yearbook (Cambridge, MA)

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And we will drink when we like, listen to music and draw when we like, study when we like, sleep when we like, and it's none of your damned business, thank you. Most of us are still sniffing the neighborhood, back doors and front. 0 ur curiosity made us easy catches for the merchants at first. The vendeurs for high class cleansing and pressing joints caught us with our pens out after Registration. We don't want just anybody fooling around with our pants and shirts, but then somebody has to keep the creases going the right way. Sign and be brave. It won't hurt much. Besides, Benny wants to be your friend, a regular Iohnny I. Anthony and Polonius rolled into one. Hardly had we run this gauntlet than the get-rich-quick-on-the-discounts boys were fan- ning our weary brows with coupon books, shiny, deluxe membership cards and an I-love- you line of chatter. Spend enough, grab off enough bargains, and we would most assuredly be rich on these millions of saved pennies. This would seem to involve some rather subtle economic theory, but then who are we to go around spitting in the faces of our benefactors. Who of us could work up even a good slobber for that matter, after the withering ordeal of Registration. So, we have made money al- ready, and our anemic wallets are some sort of complicated proof of it. Luckily, the oafish grin of the high-pressure salseman is not the typical expression around Harvard Square. Across that traffic jam called Mass Avenue, around the corner from the Kiosk melee, there are some refined and relaxed per- sonalities called here Bill, there the Greek, and around the corner the tome or 1e tailleur. 7116 Square spate of book stores generates lofty atmosphere and low-pressure salesman- ship. The atmosphere can be smelled or weighed or felt or seen. It is veritably atmos- phere: it resists fumigation and the onslaught of the Procters, the Gambles, and the Lever 5 Lu,- 1 brothers. We have stalked the cavernous laby- rinths of these book stores recently, and will re-arrange the anciet dust on their tomes many times again in the next four years. The Harvard Law Book Exchange is the un- disputed heavy-weight champion of the book stores. Schoenhof's, on Mass Avenue, has a fund of foreign books and special editions, banned and unbanned, read and unread, secreted in the confusion of its dusty shelves. The Harvard Book Store boasts an unsurpassed collection of Hymarx, the College Outline Series and other scholarly contributions to the world of knowledge. The Phillips Book Store, just down the street, merchandises on a differ- ent level than these. Where the latter deal with a bulk of second hand bargains and serve our vain attempts to make September an inexpen- 'wmv ' ' f 1v-A--.r

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who of us have asked ourselves if this year be great or not. Few, if any, have asked the question at all. A minority of those few have looked gap-eyed at the long 'aching prospect and the two months in retrospect and thought that it could not possibly be great: another handful have wearily turned from the question, nauseated by the lacey excetras that embroider such a question. Generalities, pungent with anecdotes, polute our evaluation of the year's greatness or lack of it. Histrionics would have us say, we are couched in the fairness of Fair Harvard. We go out with the boys and with the girls. We drink tall drinks and talk of many things with many words. We are exposed to courses and the railings of erudite men. What more can greatness ask of us? Histrionics would have us swill this down with a satisfied and philo- sophical belch. Yet when we think on it we know that our year must live on a more sub- stantial diet than this. We have come to this, our year, from the little worlds of families and of preparatory high schools. We will wander from this year into other little worlds, into distilled and intense upper-class associations and activities, and from there into the little societies of job, neigh- borhood, and family. But now, in this our year, we stir around in an amorphous muddle of infinite possibilities. This, our year, is a year in which to choose, and perhaps to think on that choosing. We owe University Hall three C's and a D, approximately twelve hundred dollars, our swimming test, and three afternoons of athletics a week. These debts paid, it is catch-as-catch- can and keep-your-dirty-hands-off-my-handle bar-mustache-which-I'll-wear-if-I-choose. After two months, we are only a little embroiled in any special extra-curricular activities. Our buy- ing habits aren't formed, and we can drop a buck where and when we like. It is still to be proved that the lay of the land at Radcliffe is preferable to that at Wellesley, or visa versa.

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ml TwenfY'0 e' Na furallY State of the Union: As USUHI sixe month, Phillips carries a large stock of new books. The Coop handles nothing but. Groliers and the Mandrake are not bathed in the frantic confusion that is so distinctive of the other second hand book stores. They stand aloof from the text book competition and cater only to the browser and buyer interested in books as books. Selling their heavy literature by the pound or by the page, by the name or by the age, all these houses of learning stand with their mows open, watching and awaiting the yearly procession of the classes. 8 ut we can't live solely on the pure food of learning, even if we would. We need clothes, food, entertainment, and sometimes, its been whispered, a drink or six. Our warm hearted Square would not have us go craving, and so, for a stipend, services are rendered by each friendly yard of store-front. August, Bolters, Chipp, the Coop, the Crim- son Men's Shop, Haig, Keezer, Kent, Morse, Press, and Sills elbow each other courteously for hanging room in our closets. Their ties advertise themselves in the Yard, and their white bucks and cordovans prat proudly of themselves on the Cambridge sidewalks. They would keep us from the Boston clothiers, and are successful. Pete has strangled many of us with a skinney and mottled strand of tie without moving from his Dunster street lair. We are Collegiate and would let the world know. The clothiers know. j t has been noted by astute Cambridge observers that the Union plagued stomach occasionally rebels. To minister to this angry organ, a cordon of food venders have estab- lished themselves in the Square. For the two to seven a. m. shift the Bick stands alone in impressive ignobility. In spite of an insidious and as yet unproved rumor that another all- night outfit lurks just around the next corner, the Bick is host to our early morning search for provender, especially during the recent hour exam press. After a cram session, a poker game, or a late bout with phosphorescent bev-