The Old Symposium and its books
Organization.
Our books are organized and selected for discovery. This means there are broad general categories (like environment or history) within which books are organized by author last name with very few subsections. If you are looking for a book on the French Revolution, you'll also run into books about the history of India or Medieval Europe. Our hope is that you find new and unexpected things while you follow your own browsing instincts.
Curation.
The Old Symposium offers a fine selection of interesting and important titles. The word curation has Latin roots that mean 'to take care of' (the object of care traditionally being souls, such that "cura" is still a word for priest in Spanish). We're not sure whether we have reached the level of curators in this higher sense, but we have tried to avoid with all our might the "curation" we see more commonly today which is digitally and algorithmically driven for pure commercial gain. When you step into our bookstore, it is a personalized experience in the old way. We have selected these titles based on our own interests, conversations with friends, long days and nights of browsing our favorite publishers selections by subject (not sales). We have selected based on our desire to challenge, welcome and invite our community's readers into further expansions of world and mind that all reading is. Whether or not we have achieved an event of curation, in the older sense, will be up to you all to decide.
The Wood Between
the Worlds
(a.k.a. the kid's room)
"So please, oh please,
we beg, we pray,
Go throw your TV set away,
And in its place you can install
A lovely bookshelf on the wall."
-excerpt from the poem Television by Roald Dahl
Kids who read are magical creatures in a magical world. Keep their imagination and vitality alive through our collection of books in The Wood Between the Worlds, our kid's room here at The Old Symposium. Reading allows children (and all of us) to learn empathy by transporting ourselves into various universes and realities through different characters' lives and experiences.
StoryTime:
Starting August 7th, 2026
Friday's @ 10:30am
(all ages welcome)