Mariam Keita ’24
Managing Editor of Web & News Editor
Today, the Odyssey Bookshop is located in the Village Commons across the street from Mount Holyoke College. Photo by Rosemary Geib ‘23.
The relationship between Mount Holyoke College and The Odyssey Bookshop dates back to 1963 and has survived many trials — economic recessions, global health crises and arson, to name a few. At least that’s how Joan Grenier, the Odyssey’s current owner, tells it.
However, last academic year, one aspect of the relationship between the two entities changed. In years past, The Odyssey stocked all textbooks listed on the College’s course rosters. Now, students may not be able to find all the textbooks they need for class conveniently located across the street.
“We still have a relationship [with Mount Holyoke]. We’re just not selling textbooks, and that was part of the relationship,” Grenier said.
According to Grenier, after several conversations with the College’s Vice President for Finance and Administration and Treasurer Shannon Gurek, she decided to terminate the textbook contract with the College.
“I had been talking with [Gurek] for a number of years that our textbook sales declined, every semester for ten years,” Grenier said.
The decision came just before the global health crisis that hit the U.S. in March 2020. She stated that there were a variety of contributing factors that weighed heavily on her choice to discontinue the contract — the proliferation of cheap used textbooks entering the market, publishers selling directly to students and the shipping costs associated with delivering heavy books to and from her South Hadley location.
“It got to the point where we were either losing a little money, making a little money or just kind of breaking even,” Grenier said. “It just didn’t make sense to do the textbooks anymore, and you know [Gurek] understood that, and the professors did too. The business model changed.”
Despite the fact that textbooks will no longer be made widely available at The Odyssey, Grenier emphasized that the partnership between the College and the bookshop will persist in other ways.
“We do sell the [Mount Holyoke College] merchandise back in the corner [of the store]. Our relationship is very good with [the] college,” Grenier said.
Grenier also described the multiple ways in which the relationship between the two has been somewhat symbiotic over the years.
“Our relationship with the College has always been good for a long time, going back to my father, who started this store,” Grenier said.
Romeo Grenier, Joan’s father, a French-Canadian immigrant, first moved to Western Massachusetts at the age of 13, when he settled in Holyoke. Later in life, after becoming a pharmacist, he went on to establish a drugstore right across the street from the College that supported a small book department with 500 titles from the publisher Penguin Books.
Later, Grenier claims that the College approached her father, asking him to expand the book department into what is today, the Odyssey Bookshop. For more than two decades, the partnership between the store and the school continued to develop, and the store continued to grow.
Then, it all burned down.
More than 30 years later, Grenier still remembers the phone call that she received. It was the ’80s. Her father was now 75 years old, and Grenier, who attended University of Massachusetts Amherst, was studying for her GREs. She was helping him out around the store in the aftermath of his knee replacement surgery.
“In May of ’86, my dad called me in the middle of the night and said, ‘Joan, The Odyssey is burning,’ and I said, ‘Dad, go back to bed, you’re having a bad dream,’” Grenier recalled.
She would soon discover that Romeo had not been dreaming after all. According to a 1986 article from the United Press International archives, it was the second fire to strike The Odyssey in a five-month span. This one, though, was caused by an arsonist.
According to Grenier, her father, disheartened by the back-to-back fires, told her that he was ready to give up on the bookshop.
“My dad said, ‘I don’t know if I’m giving you anything more than headaches but, I can’t do it again.’ So I said I would [run the shop] for a little while. That was 1986,” Grenier reflected.
Grenier would later take over as The Odyssey’s owner in 1991 after her father’s passing, and has been running it ever since. While the store has not seen any more fires, it has faced other challenges over the years — most recently, a global pandemic.
“On March 17, I cried. I had a lot of bills, and I brought in a lot of stuff for graduation and reunions. May is our biggest month, but we did make it through,” Grenier said. “A lot of our customers, including the ones around the country, supported us during the first part of [the pandemic]. They always have supported us, but during the pandemic, our website went wild.”
To help offset losses due to the store’s closure at the start of the pandemic, Joan launched a GoFundMe, which ultimately raised a total of $63,929. Many of its contributors were Mount Holyoke alums and other members of the College community.
While the pandemic is still ongoing, Grenier says that vaccinations have reintroduced the opportunity for in-person events, which The Odyssey has recently begun hosting again.
“Our first event was actually with a Mount Holyoke alum who teaches in the MFA program at UMass [Amherst], Sabina Murray,” Grenier said. “We had about 20 people for that, and, you know, we just don’t know what to expect right now.”
In the meantime, Grenier and The Odyssey have continued to roll with the punches, amping up their technological capabilities.
“We’ll continue with the hybrid [model],” Grenier said. “Some Zoom, some in-person, and hopefully, you know, pretty much get back to in-person [events] as soon as people get vaccinated.”