Alum, Cartoonist Seusses Up the Square

It’s the new bedtime story for Harvard-bound babies: “Regroup at the Coop out in front by the stoop to munch lunch at a neighboring store.”

Sage Stossel ’93 just penned her first book We’re Off to Harvard Square, a 50-page, light-hearted walk through the heart of Cambridge.

The 212-word children’s book includes an array of Square scenes, from chess players outside Au Bon Pain to diners at Cafe Pamplona to a street performer on Brattle Street.

Stossel, who was an English concentrator and Crimson cartoonist during her time at Harvard, wrote a nostalgic poem—the text of the book—about the Square in 1995.

“Pretty soon after I graduated...I decided to do something in a Dr. Seuss style,” said Stossel, now an editor and cartoonist at The Atlantic Monthly. “I had recently moved to Brookline and I was missing Harvard Square so [I wrote] a reminiscing ode to Harvard Square type poem.”

Stossel said she revisited the poem last year and drew a series of sketches to accompany it last Fall.

“I had a sketch pad with a pen and [would] plant myself somewhere and draw...It would usually take me an hour give and take to do each one,” she said.

But Stossel said that because she had to match the drawings to the text of her poem, she wasn’t able to include all of her favorite Square spots in the book.

“There were some things I would have liked to get in there like Leavitt and Pierce and Cardullo’s which I hope don’t get taken over by some chain store,” she said.

As she sketched, Stossel said she encountered an interesting cast of characters, including an MIT professor who wanted to analyze the way she drew lines and a man soliciting for money who accused her of being an undercover police officer.

But to keep the book child-friendly, Stossel left those characters out of her story.

She said she tried to include a scene with a couple “all tangled up” on a bench, but her editors thought it was “too suggestive.”

In her drawing of the exterior of the Harvard Coop, Stossel said she did not include two homeless people fighting in the background, “although it would have been more like the flavor of the Square.”

Two days after she submitted the manuscript to her publisher at Commonwealth Editions, he decided to publish it.

“I was charmed by it immediately,” said publisher Webster Bull.

Peter Lee, the owner of the Yenching restaurant—which is drawn on a page of the book opposite the words “or sushi or moo shi or chicken stir-fry?”—said yesterday that he had not heard about the book.

But an employee at The Harvard Bookstore, which is also drawn next to the words “see jumbles and heaps...” said that the store had already sold 130 copies of the book.

Indeed, Bull said that sales were “very strong.”

He said that Commonwealth had printed 3,000 copies and was planning a second press run.

And he said that he is encouraging Stossel to write children’s books about other locales, such as Central Park in New York City.

—Staff writer Joseph M. Tartakoff can be reached at tartakof@fas.harvard.edu.