Records of the Corner Book Shop, 1940-1980

Eleanor Lowenstein was born in New York City in 1909 and was graduated from Cornell University with a degree in psychology in 1929. For several years she was a social worker, first at a state hospital, then at a reform school for boys in Warwick, New York, in Westchester County, and at the Hudson School for Girls. As she found much of this work unsuitable, she left social work and went to work at the University Place Bookshop, which belonged to her friend, Walter Goldwater. She enjoyed the book business; when in 1940 a flag store at 102 Fourth Avenue (the street known as Book Row) was going out of business, she leased it and opened the Corner Book Shop that June. Although she intended to specialize in psychology, her love of old books made this difficult, as people in the field wanted the latest books. She was offered her first cookbook collection in about 1946 and from then on specialized primarily in books on food, cookery, and wine; other specialties were theater, radio, television, puppetry, crime, and psychology. She and Walter Goldwater were married in 1954, and lived upstairs from the shop, as the terms of the lease required that she take the entire four-story building. Besides carrying on her business and becoming an internationally renowned expert on cookbooks, Lowenstein edited two revised editions (1954 and 1972) of Waldo Lincoln's bibliography, American Cookery Books, both published by the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts. She died on December 1, 1980.