Old Corner Bookstore

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The Old Corner Bookstore in 2008, occupied by Ultra Diamonds.

The Old Corner Bookstore is a historic building in the center of Boston, Massachusetts. It is located at the corner of Washington and School Streets, along the Freedom Trail of revolutionary and early American historic sites.

The site was formerly home of Anne Hutchinson, who was expelled from Massachusetts in 1638 for heresy.^[1]

The building itself was constructed in 1718 by Thomas Crease as a residence and apothecary shop. From 1832 to 1865, it was home to the Ticknor and Fields, a publishing company founded by James Thomas Fields and William Ticknor. For part of the nineteenth century, the firm was one of the most important publishing companies in the United States and the Old Corner Bookstore became the meeting-place of such authors as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Dickens, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.^[2] A succession of other publishing houses and booksellers followed Ticknor and Fields in the space.

In danger of demolition by 1960, the building was purchased by Historic Boston for the sum of $100,000.^[3] In recent times, its retail space has held a branch of the Globe Corner Bookstore (a division of the Old Corner Bookstore Inc.), which operated there from 1982 to 1997 and specializes in travel books & maps. A Boston Globe company store operated in the building from 1998 through 2002, selling Boston Globe products and tourist memorabilia. Today, a national discount jewelry chain, Ultra Diamonds, occupies the retail space.

Preceded by Site of the first public school, Boston Latin School	Locations along Boston's Freedom Trail Old Corner Bookstore	Succeeded by Old South Meeting House