As you may well have noticed, the Barnes and Noble bookstore on Campus, the official bookstore, the one where you went to get that nifty sweatshirt that you’ll only wear when you go back home and maybe on the weekends – yeah, that one – does not seem large enough to hold all the books that your professors are going to ask you to pick up. This is true. That’s not where you should go if you’re looking for textbooks – unless, of course, you are taking the perennially popular class, Gaudily Large, Coffee-table Books comprised of Charming Kitty Photos: An Investigation.Instead, head over to the Seminary Co-op Bookstore, in the basement of the Chicago Theological Seminary building at 58th and University. As you wend your way into that beautiful, subterranean book-burrow, follow the crowd around the first left and, no more than fifteen paces ahead, you’ll find every book for any class laid out on shelves ordered alphabetically by division and in ascending order by class listing. The Co-op is open from 8:30 am to 8:00 pm every weekday, 10:00 am to 6:00 pm on Saturdays and noon to 6:00 pm on Sundays. A buy in of three ten-dollar shares ($30 (I mean, none of us are in the program because we’re math geniuses, really)) gets you a 10% discount for as long as you hold onto them.
The Co-op is pretty renowned within academic circles, and provides countless hours of drool inducing desire for any budding scholar. A word of caution, however: the place is packed during the first week and a half of every quarter, and, often, overeager peers will pillage the class shelves even if they are not enrolled in the specific course for which those books are intended. Do not expect to walk in the store to pick up your books in the ten minutes you have between classes on that first week – the line alone can take forty five minutes. Also, if you know from the first meeting that you love the class you’re in and will stay there for the quarter, make time to head over to the Co-op at your earliest convenience. Amazon is not going to get you those first couple of texts in time, and lamenting that the bookstore ran out of A Critique of Pure Reason, no matter how loudly, will not get you up to speed for seminar discussion.