RoadTrip N. via Yelp
Gnomon Copy is closing in Harvard Square after more than 50 years.
After more than 50 years in business, Gnomon Copy closes its doors for good on Friday. A short walk from Gnomon Copy’s Harvard Square location is FlashPrint, which is acquiring the closing copy center.
Two MIT graduate students established Gnomon Copy in their dormitory in 1966, according to a 2006 profile in The Harvard Crimson, and went on to open nearly a dozen locations in college towns across New England and New York..
Gnomon Copy originally had two locations in Harvard Square: the location in operation until its closing this week at 1308 Massachusetts Ave. – for a time, it was at 1304 Massachusetts Ave., behind a storefront of large plate glass set into elaborately swirling art nouveau wood frames – and a second location at 99 Mount Auburn St. that was sold in the 1980s to Alan Shapiro.
Shapiro kept the space as a copy center and eventually renamed it FlashPrint.
“There were many copy centers in the area and as they went away, we acquired their business,” Shapiro said.
The owners of the final Gnomon Copy in Cambridge approached FlashPrint to see if Shapiro was interested in buying it too. Shapiro was not looking to buy – but made a deal to pay the Gnomon owners a commission for the business FlashPrint acquired from Gnomon clients over the next few years.
Beginning next week, the Gnomon Copy website, email, and phone number will forward to FlashPrint, and two employees will relocate there. Cambridge Day was unable to contact Gnomon Copy owners.
Gnomon Copy also has a location in Medford, which will shut at the end of the week.
Gnomon Copy played “an important role” in the community, but Harvard Square has “evolved and changed” a lot since the copy center was starting out, said Denise Jillson, executive director of the Harvard Square Business Association. “Copy centers are still relevant, but [without] the demand that [they] used to have.”
The Gnomon Copy storefront on Massachusetts Avenue is owned by Harvard University. It’s not known what business opens in the space next.