Founded in 1856, Schoenhof’s claims to have the “largest collection of foreign books in North America.” As a student at Harvard, I used to shop at their main store in Harvard Square for my language and literature course materials. I loved going there and loved returning to my dorm room with piles of books filled with foreign words.

The web didn’t exist when I was in college, but now Schoenhof’s has a significant online presence, making its offerings more readily available to people far, far away from Massachusetts. They have language-learning materials for more than 700 languages and dialects (!), as well as foreign literature, non-fiction, and children’s books.

Schoenhof’s most extensive resources, not surprisingly, are in French, German, Italian, and Spanish, but I also see products for Tajiki (a variety of modern Persian), Kinnauri (Tibeto-Burman dialect), Old Icelandic, Phoenician, Yoruba, and many other languages I have never even heard of.