Old Corner Book Store

This little brick building sits at the Corner of School and Washington Streets, Old Corner Bookstore was a flourishing literary center in the mid-1800s. The original building was destroyed by the Great Fire of 1711, and was replaced by the current gambrel-roofed structure built in 1718 by Dr. Thomas Crease.

The original building on this site was owned by Anne Hutchinson.  Feisty and outspoken, Anne Hutchinson expressed her views openly about religion and about women’s rights.  She was banished from Massachusetts in 1638 for her audacious views. 

The street level of this house was used as a pharmacy, the upper stories as a residence. The transition from medicine shop to marketplace for ideas began in 1829 when the house was leased to Timothy Harrington Carter, a bookseller. The first bookseller's business, Carter & Hendlee, was followed by nine similar companies over a 75-year period, the most famous being Ticknor & Fields. The windows of this lovely old building once gave natural light to editors who pored over the galleys of Walden, The Scarlet Letter, Hiawatha and the Atlantic Monthly.  Ticknor & Fields, the nation’s leading publisher from 1833-1864 made its home here, publishing the works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Harriet Beecher Stow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Charles Dickens and Louisa May Alcott.

“Such guests! What famous names its record boasts, Whose owners wander in the mob of ghosts! …would I could steal its echoes! You should find such store of vanished pleasures brought to mind.”

From Oliver Wendell Holmes’ At the Saturday Club where many famous Ticknor & Fields authors gathered to exchange ideas and enjoy each others’ company.

Old Corner Book Store
3 School Street
www.historicboston.org