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Romance bookstore Lovestruck is now open in Harvard Square
Opening the bookstore was "a dream come true," owner Rachel Kanter said.
Harvard Square’s new romance bookstore, Lovestruck Books, opened to the public on Thursday after much anticipation.
The store is located at 44 Brattle St. and is more than 5,000 square feet of dedicated space for all romance sub-genres, according to the Boston Globe. The bookstore will also host a George Howell coffee spot and wine bar, set to open by the end of January.
Rachel Kanter, the owner of the bookstore, hails from Keene, N.H. and came to the indie book world from education where she taught high school English and worked in education nonprofits. Opening the bookstore is “a dream come true,” she said.
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“I have always loved romance. It was sort of my guilty secret, and I would sort of slip my friends my favorite romance books growing up, and then as I’ve gotten older, I’ve just become more and more overt about it. And that kind of coincided with this moment in the literary world where romance has just exploded,” Kanter said in an interview with Boston.com in July.
Indeed, the bookstore’s conception and opening coincides with a boom in romance in the book industry. Kanter attributes the current romance frenzy to the pandemic, when millions of people were stuck at home, and looked to reading – and romance, specifically – for escapism, for a happy ending.
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“Romance really exploded during the pandemic. People wanted happy stories. They wanted something hopeful and optimistic. I know I certainly was reading a ton of romance during the pandemic,” she said.
Romance readers have since kept up their pandemic-era habit. Print sales of romance books more than doubled in the last few years, from 18 million copies in 2020 to 39 million in 2023, according to the New York Times. In October, Publisher’s Weekly reported that romance titles represented seven of the top 10 books of the year so far.
Kanter said the opening of the second location of The Ripped Bodice (a romance-only bookstore in New York) affirmed her confidence about Lovestruck and the permanence of romance spaces in the book industry.
“It just kind of felt like kismet. It was a real endorsement of the fact that there is a market for this and that there is an appetite for these spaces where people can get together and really celebrate romance,” she said.
Kanter said the bookstore aims to appeal to the novice romance reader who is newer to the genre, as well as veteran readers who “are coming in knowing exactly what kind of book they want.”
“I’m excited to hopefully provide a place where people can come and celebrate their interests,” she said.
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Lovestruck Books is open every day from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. The store will be open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Christmas Eve and New Years Eve.
After the holidays, the store hours will be 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. until the cafe opens (mid-January), then the hours will be 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. from Sunday through Wednesday and 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. from Thursday through Saturday.
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