News
HMS Is Facing a Deficit. Under Trump, Some Fear It May Get Worse.
News
Cambridge Police Respond to Three Armed Robberies Over Holiday Weekend
News
What’s Next for Harvard’s Legacy of Slavery Initiative?
News
MassDOT Adds Unpopular Train Layover to Allston I-90 Project in Sudden Reversal
News
Denied Winter Campus Housing, International Students Scramble to Find Alternative Options
The University has anounced that students may now surprise their younger brothers and sisters with either a strombus canarium or a guildfordia triumphans.
Harvard is in the gift business, but is offering no competition to local merchants. A gift shop in the Museum of Comparative Zoology deals in materials that most stores don't handle.
The shop specializes both in gifts for younger children and in novelty science, items, such as prehistoric shark teeth and porcupine fish (the real thing).
The shop's objects include quill penn, porcupine quills, preserved sea horses, and items like polished dinosaur bones which can be made into jewelry. According to Mrs. Max Hall, who runs the shop with Mrs. Don K. Price, this year has been marked particularly by a "craze for dinosaurs."
Because the Museum shop is especially geared to young customers, it has built up a steady clientele of day-after-allowance purchasers, who find they can pick up material for projects or curiosity at bargain rates. It was difficult to find an exact answer as to what constitutes a bargain for a porcupine fish, however.
Perhaps it is the distinctive nature of the gift shop which enables the sales girl to say with a straight face: "Yensir, one gorilla. Shall I gift-wrap it?"
Want to keep up with breaking news? Subscribe to our email newsletter.