We love the Brown Bookstore. Over the past few years, we believe it has tailored its selections to our needs and has become creative with its apparel offerings, both in terms of brands (read: Polo) and items (read: those badass blue sweaters with the large “B” on them).

We are very happy to help out the Bookstore evolve even further to meet the ever-changing needs of the Brown community through our First Annual Bookstore Poll!  Responding to this incredibly short survey will help the Bookstore supply you with the Brown swag, gear, and essentials you need as a Brown student… and if that isn’t convincing enough, one lucky respondent will receive a $50 gift certificate to the Bookstore!

Think of this as your opportunity to let the Bookstore tailor its apparel and goodies to your needs. Fill out this survey to help the Bookstore make all of your apparel-filled dreams come true.

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Alright, alright, Grandma, we get it — you want tangible, wearable evidence to prove that your grandchild goes to Brown so you can brag to all your friends in book club. You’re being annoying, but we totally understand…we’re kind of a big deal.

The pressure’s on from all angles to return home from school with tons of Brown apparel for everyone: friends, parents, grandparents, cousins, siblings, etc. In purchasing a gift from any college bookstore, three criteria must be met: The gift must 1) boast name of college (the bigger the better), 2) be practical and 3) tasteful. Although everyone (predictably) will want you to buy them a T-shirt or sweatshirt with BROWN plastered obnoxiously across the front, you should consider purchasing something a little more unconventional… because now you can. The Brown Bookstore has stepped up its game this semester and has a lot of new (and bizarre) merchandise for us to choose from. Here are some gifts that will render the recipient speechless and still satisfy our three criteria for purchasing college swag:

Because everyone wants a Brown student’s nuts… especially if they’re gourmet.
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Last October, Jeffrey Eugenides ’83, author of Middlesex and The Virgin Suicides, published The Marriage Plot, a novel that follows Brown students from their 1982 Commencement through their following year in the harsh real world. Although the ensuing literary hoopla has subsided, I still haven’t forgotten the relatively extreme existential crisis the book triggered in me.

I’d picked up a copy at the Brown Bookstore and settled into a Blue Room sofa. As I flipped through the pages, moving through the Commencement-day flashbacks, it slowly began to dawn on me that I was messing with the fabric of time and space. I WAS A CHARACTER IN THE MARRIAGE PLOT EVEN AS I PERUSED IT. How did Jeffrey Eugenides know my life?

“Ok, calm down,” I reminded myself. “First of all, it’s set in the 1980s. Secondly, Eugenides went to Brown, so obviously he’d know the day-to-day existence of an average student.” But I still couldn’t shake the feeling he was writing about me. Consider the evidence:

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You know that tiny piece of pastel yellow paper stapled to the back of your long receipt from the Brown Bookstore? You might actually want to read it.

This semester marks a significant departure from the more lenient policies of the past — under which you could return a book at any time during the first two weeks of the semester.

Here are the highlights of the new policy:

• Until Feb. 8, you can only return a book for a class you are enrolled in for three days after purchase.
• After those three days, you must prove that you have dropped the class.
• Between Feb. 9 and 23, you may return books for dropped classes within three days of the drop date.
• No returns after Feb. 23.

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