Page & Leaf serves Porter Square denizens and Lesley University and is within Porter Square Books, but on the day I visited the sound was laptops clicking, not pages turning. And yet coffee and books are a natural combo.
The coffee’s excellent – like the coffee at the other Tiny Engine Collective establishments, whose other local coffee haunts (Diesel, Bloc and Forge) I’ve visited. All serve Intelligentsia and sell the beans of Ruby Coffee, from Wisconsin. The pastries are from Forge, the baking center of the family of shops. I had a very good, enormous flaky, buttery croissant and, if I’d been outside, I’d have been fighting sparrows swooping down to devour the crumbs.
The café is often filled; it certainly was when I was there around noon. There are two old theater chairs and a Forge side table, as well as a window counter, outdoor seating and a bench on Massachusetts Avenue. Shelves of poetry books and colorful abstract paintings by David Moriarty, the general manager, brighten the walls. As I sipped, the midday light caught the turmeric-yellow smoothie on the window counter in front of a young woman who was pulling the yarn from a rapidly diminishing knit garment. It could have been a Vermeer painting.
I spoke with one of the owners, Court Verhaalen, and Moriarty about their ideas behind a “bookstore café.” Customers are diverse: Many are Lesley University students working between classes, others are bookstore browsers. Then there are neighborhood visitors, often there for a social moment over coffee.
Court says their mission is “community first” – the shop offers a welcome to visitors, bookstore and neighborhood, and wants to provide “an inspiring way to start your day or to take a break.” She said, “we are one space – the bookstore and café,” and they hope the room reflects that. Of course, coffee and pastries don’t make it into the bookshop, but people do. There is an old typewriter, letterpress and bookbinding materials on shelves to make a connection to books. “We were lucky to be asked,” Court said, of the invitation to use the new Porter Square Bookstore space.
Moriarty mentioned the phrase “body doubling,” which psychologists have theorized is a strategy for productivity. You share a space with another person, both working – reading, writing, thinking. You don’t even need to know the other person or communicate in any way. The passive presence of another person turns out to increase your focus, even when you think it would distract you, and you work more deeply. Nursery school teachers refer to it as parallel play, where toddlers, without interaction, build with blocks or draw with crayons next to each other and stay more focused than they would if alone.
But it’s the space itself that gives “noninteractive” productivity a home with color and personality, enhancing the experience of a café. The colors, the smell of the coffee, the music, the arrangement of the furniture here give incentive both to work and to socializing. Here there appear to be two “zones” – one in the back, in the interior of the shop, where there are several small tables and less traffic. It’s calm. Toward the front, where the café abuts the bookstore, there is more movement and more interaction, at the counter with customers ordering and chatting, in the bookstore as people discuss what they want to read and at the few forward tables. Of course there are no rules, no “shushing” of talkers: It’s quiet without imposed silence.
Of course these scenarios are time-and-day dependent. Weekends are far more social, far more about the bookstore. Late afternoons and early evenings are also more social, appealing to people who’ve judged they’ve done enough work or are stopping off on their way home. Page & Leaf ‘s hours include those of the hours of the bookstore, so coffee is available when the books are.
Learning more about body-doubling, I am far more sympathetic to the uses of café spaces to enhance productivity: The only thing that is a bit confusing is that there was no one, in a bookstore café, actually reading a book.
Page & Leaf, 1815 Massachusetts Ave., Porter Square, Cambridge (7 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday to Friday; 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays)