General Info

O’Gara and Wilson traces its lineage back to 1882, when Mr. Hewitt founded the original bookshop in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago. Hewitt ran the store until the 1890’s, when it became Woodworth’s, a well-known establishment where generations of University of Chicago professors and students did their book buying. Woodworth's was eventually purchased by long-time Chicago bookseller Joseph O’Gara, who had served his apprenticeship with Jerry Nedwick. A true bookman, Mr. O’Gara, along with his pipe and his cat, Lady Jane Grey, and his apprentice Doug Wilson, made the store into what Saul Bellow once called the best bookstore in America. We are proud to be the current chapter of an ongoing story as we move the shop to Chesterton, Indiana, a small town near the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore with a long history of its own, including having been the home of an O'Gara & Wilson bookshop back in the 1990s.