This oldest street of Boston, the Cheapside of New England, once an important center of city trade, gave Boston its literary charm. In the dilapidated old-time queer buildings, half a dozen book stores invited the lovers of literature. Here was the favorite haunt of the men who gave Boston a literary reputation. It was here in Cornhill that Thomas Burnham founded the first second-hand book shop in the United States in 1825. Young Burnham went from here day after day, with a basket of books on his arm, to the wharves to trade with sea-faring people. Almost one hundred years have elapsed and the shop is still there. Oliver Wendell Holmes had his chair and desk in “The Old Corner Book Shop,” and in Colesworthy’s was a hidden nook where Whittier used to hide for an hour or two, reading newly arrived books, but only rarely buying. “Littlefield’s” was next door, where Lowell, Longfellow and Emerson used to congregate, talk and occasionally buy additions to their libraries.
But alas! Boston is no more the Athens of America. The book stores on Cornhill have shrunk to the number of four. New buildings have invited modern business to invade the neighborhood. The remaining book dealers, still following the traditions of half a century, are very old men. Their days are counted and soon Cornhill will be remembered as one of the landmarks that have been swept away by the modern spirit and are gone forever.
Burnham’s Antique Book Store
Richard C. Lichtenstein, fifty-five years ago an apprentice to old Mr. Burnham, is now the proprietor of the shop. He has many memories of great book days in Boston.
“The most interesting of all my ‘finds’ since I entered the second-hand book trade in the late sixties,” he said (he’s a good and entertaining talker), “was the copy of Poe’s ‘Tamerlaine,’ which created a great sensation among collectors. This small pamphlet of forty pages, published by Collin F. Thomas in Boston in 1827, had escaped the searches of the keenest of book collectors. I usually spent my noon hour in other second-hand stores, and one day I found this small pamphlet which I purchased for 25 cents. I had a good many opportunities to dispose of it, but didn’t sell it before 1892, in auction. It was knocked down to Dodd, Meade & Co. for $1,850. ‘Tamerlaine’ has remained unique among all the books, being today the most costly American book known. I understand a New York bookseller is holding a copy at $15,000.
“One day, I was offered a small volume which lacked the title and two leaves. There was nothing specially attractive about the book, but the same intuition for which I never could account and that guided me through my whole life as a bookseller, urged me to offer the owner $2.00, which was readily accepted. Later, I found out that the book was a copy of the Bay Psalm Book, the first book printed in New England, Cambridge, 1640. Bishop Hurst bought the book for $1,000, and after his death, it fetched $2,500 in the auction of his library. But I have also met with great disappointments. The greatest one was on a visit to an old Boston family residing on Beacon Hill. An elderly lady, the only surviving member of this family, wished to dispose of her library, and I found her seated between two piles of books busily engaged in tearing out the fly leaves wherever they contained any inscriptions. Nothing could induce her to stop this barbaric atrocity. I begged of her to let me examine the fly leaves and titles before she threw them in the open grate. I saw to my grief, John Hancock’s inscriptions, and George Washington’s presentation to some lady contemporary, revolutionary persons of the first importance. Another opportunity I missed was years ago when Mr. James J. Blaine happened to drop in our shop, selecting a copy of Count Grammont’s “Memoirs,” asking to have the volume laid aside for him. He wrote his name on the title page and was to call and pay for it on his return to the hotel. The incident must have slipped his memory, for he never returned for the book, and I was foolish enough to erase his signature from the fly leaf. Especially in our days, where “Association books” were so very much in demand, Blaine’s name in the “Memoirs” would have been a sought after curiosity.”
Lauriat’s
A sort of Brentano’s in Boston. The gathering place of society, of students and of scholars. They carry everything from the rarest book to some new Parisian magazine, whose first number appeared four weeks ago. Mr. Weber, the head of the firm, looks like Napoleon III, and has the most splendid contempt for everything new in book lore. Mr. Braithwaite was in his shop during my visit and it was astonishing to hear the anthologist of six volumes of new poetry talking a sensible everyday language.
A New and Evil Spirit
Boylston street faces the big park, is a lively promenade, a good deal of shopping is done in its neighborhood, a street always densely populated. The Garden Side Book Shop hung out its shingle here, which consists of a huge garden gate.