Brown Bookstore

This is your typical school bookstore with lots of apparel options to choose from. The prices are high as usual at any school bookstore. There’s small items like key chains, decals, and water bottles. There’s a café and a textbook section to the bookstore as well. The staff was friendly and helpful in helping me find items.
Overall I’d not buy from here but just to look around or buy memorabilia for family.

When I was in college, I worked in the campus bookstore. This campus bookstore is so much better. I love the layout and how they have incorporated a café, bookstore, and Brown gift store all in one.
Since I am not a Brown student, I pretty much keep to the 1^st floor, but I have ventured upstairs and both the 1^st and 2^nd floor have multiple places to sit and relax with a book.
They are also very friendly and sometimes have some amazing finds. I remember that they had some signed first additions of Maus in the past, and I’m so mad at myself for not jumping on the offer.

Lots of Brown apparel, which I’m guessing is the draw here (besides the students who need to buy their textbooks).

I forgot Brown had a bookstore/​campus store. Great to have another bookstore on Thayer Street.

Nice large bookstore with prices too high to consider a purchase. Hang out and get some reading done.

I’ve shopped brown bookstore on a couple of occasions. The 2 most notable assets you’ll find here are, in my experience, the friendly & very helpful employees. I say this because one day I came in to buy a gift for a friend. I was VERY uncertain of what to buy and at one point, I had 2 employees asking questions, making suggestions & trying to help.

Right smack dab center of Thayer street in between restaurants and stores in this college town. They are a relatively large bookstore with both your books and your college paraphernalia. Nice coffee place in the back and it’s a great place to just sit down chat and read a book. Run across the street and you can find Indian food and froyo! Parking can be found on the side streets and you can enjoy a nice walk to the Brown bookstore =) Instead of coming here to shop, you can shop online and pick up in the store for a quick get away!

Writing this as someone who is not a future, current, or former Brown student or faculty member.
We went into the bookstore hoping to find maps of the area. They had several kinds of maps for both the campus and the Providence area. Success!
Bonus: clean, large single-​stall public restroom near the register.

If you are visiting Brown — go here. Everything «brown» is here. Really. You can even bring home a sweatshirt from the Brown Equestrian Team.
Students seem to like to come here to study, get caffeinated and have some free wifi. One student was loudly snoring (it was quite funny).
Best part is the ACTUAL bookstore — remember those? Before Amazon? This one has great treasures, and is fun to browse and get lost in the ‘paper’ (remember paper) pages of these mighty books. I even reviewed a book titled «Goodnight iPad». What is this world coming to?

Here’s a story of a Brown Alumni:
1. Go to graduate school.
2. Have an awesome time.
3. Learn a lot.
4. Secure a job.
5. Visit the Bookstore a year or two later for some alumni gear.
6. Realize you cant afford any of the nice Brooks Brother’s insignia cashmere sweaters… or even the Ralph Lauren polo shirts.
7. Bother your ancient father to buy you an on sale fleece with a «B» on it.
8. Realize your life isn’t full of the treasures the graduation speaker promised you with.

Seriously, what is this bookstore’s deal? It is so incredibly counterintuitive.
I already realize that the textbook section has its own section for payment. I went to get some tea at the Blue State Coffee section, and I brought a magazine from nearby, asking if I could pay for it there. Nope. I had to purchase it at the main cash register. Now, I don’t want to sound lazy, since this was mere feet away. I still have an issue with THREE separate cash register operations for one small-​ish bookstore. One for textbooks. One for coffee. One for everything else. Really? Is it that hard to make your bookstore a seamless operation? Seriously, this bookstore is the opposite of seamless, from the technology section that takes FOREVER to ring you up (2^nd floor), to the «make sure to show your bag if you get textbooks you hoodlum!!!1», to three separate methods of payment on the first floor alone. It is clear that this bookstore treats its patrons like total crap, especially because it can.

Quaint bookstore on the corner of Angell and Thayer. Lots of unique books by Brown authors, general great reads, and a little satellite Blue State Coffee location inside, too!

Of course this store has a great selection, amazing staff who are always willing to assist, and very clean restrooms! On street parking and close proximity to other shops make this well worth the trip.

I like the brown bookstore a lot. you can almost guarantee to find something that you never knew you wanted. it takes a lot of self control to not stack up all my ‘want’ books and spend half my rent here. (thanks, amazon!)
it also helps that they’ve got blue state coffee in there. atmosphere is comfortable, and the staff are so friendly!

First off, I don’t know what the first reviewer is talking about with the hours here being erratic. Dude, go in the day time. It is always open. If you’re trying to get your read on at eight at night you’re gonna have to go to Borders or Barnes and Noble. Screw that. Nothing but conservative literature and bestsellers– the reason behind best selling part completely escaping me.
I love the selection here. Interesting titles, and if I feel like getting technical on some psychiatry texts I can sit and do that too. Also, the prices are not any worse than a major corporate bookstore. OH AND ALL OF THE COUCHES. It is very cozy in there. I haven’t been to the café but I know Blue State owns it, so I’ll stick with bringing my Tealuxe with me from across the street.

If you are still buying your books at the bookstore and not online, you deserve all of the bookstore-​imposed restrictions and regulations.
With that being said I only stop at the bookstore now for two things: pens and cinnamon rolls.
Pens here are cheaper than any local place and there is variety. This is tailor made for me because I go through a pen about every two weeks now. One week is Gelly Roll, another week is G2.
The cinnamon roll at the café is available on and off, but it is the most amazing thing I ever did have. Croissant pastry with cinnamon and sugar, rolled up. It results in a soft bottom and a crispy top that shatters with cinnamon and sugar when you first bite into it. $ 3 feeds a terrible addiction.

Bookstore heaven. Does not appear to have been taken over yet by the corporate bookstore conglomerates — no bestsellers in your face on every display. I found a number of fantastic books through browsing. I usually browse on Amazon — but that requires the book to have been out a while to get user feedback. I read enough that I can tell very quickly from reading a few pages of a book whether I will like it or not and the general quality of writing and content, which in generally empirically has correlated well with Amazon ratings.
I found some really interesting books here that had no Amazon ratings yet, due to the obscurity of subject matter and recent publication date.
That to me speaks very highly of any bookstore. I have absolutely no interest in 99.9% of current bestsellers, so an academic bookstore like this is heaven for me. I found some great philosophy books and unusual novels and nonfiction. Prices were not unreasonable, but as I already have more than I can carry back to CA I didn’t buy anything — though I easily found five or more books I wanted. (At Borders I find usually 0 and nothing not already well covered by Amazon).
The little café inside is also fantastic — I got a cup of fresh blueberries for something like $ 1 or $ 2. Fresh blueberries and fresh books. I could live here forever.

Even if I set aside the fact that I spent almost a thousand dollars on textbooks here during my first semester of graduate school (a mistake that shall not be repeated, thanks to the wonders of the Internet), this bookstore, which offers popular and academic titles, cards, gifts, novelties, computer equipment and Brown University gear for the public in addition to textbooks for students, is still pretty mediocre. Sure, you can find interesting titles here and there, and it’s hard to get a Brown University license plate frame or the Encyclopedia Brunonia anywhere else. Still, this is a place for textbooks and last-​minute gifts, not serious book shopping. Erratic hours and a staff of college students who would rather talk to their friends than help you out do not make matters any better.