Quirky Gift Shop Opens in Square

Black Ink, a quirky new gift store on Brattle Street between the Greenhouse Coffee Shop and Cardullo’s, opened quietly last month in the space left vacant when Wordsworth Gifts closed this winter.

The store’s huge glass windows make the store and its eclectic wares—which its proprietors call “unexpected necessities”—visible from the middle of the Square.

“We are looking [to offer] odd things that no one expects to need,” said Tim Corcoran, who owns the store with his wife, Susan.

The store’s inventory ranges from unusual postcards, cookbooks, toys, travel kits, household knickknacks and fun furniture—all products that the Corcorans said are meant to spice up customers’ homes.

“There are a lot of beautiful things in the world and we put them together,” Tim Corcoran said.

The name “Black Ink” came from a collection of art stamps and stationary the store carries. It is the latest in a family of stores in the greater Boston area, including one on Boston’s Charles Street with the same name and the “Museum of Useful Things”—called MUT for short—on Broadway Street in Cambridge.

The owners of the new Brattle Street location described their Harvard Square shop as a “second cousin” of the other stores. And they insist that, together, the stores are a family—not a chain.

“[The stores] are more different than similar,” he said. “If it is a chain, there is certainly a missing link.”

Corcoran said he believes his stores take on different personalities as the business goes on.

According to Scarlet McCarthy, the assistant manager of the Harvard Square store, each store has maintained its unique culture and inventory—a six-inch-tall Big Boy coin bank is one of few overlapping products in the Black Ink stores.

The Corcorans said they have been exploring the possibility of opening a store in the Square since New Year’s Eve—a dream that became reality when Black Ink first opened its doors on March 15, roughly ten weeks after Wordsworth Gifts closed down when the owner decided that the store could not survive the weakened economy that followed Sept. 11.

But Corcoran said his new store will occupy a different niche from the establishment it replaced.

The modestly priced “unexpected” gifts and decorations that Black Ink offers will attract people regardless of the state of the national economy, he said.

“We don’t set out for goals,” he said. “We just open the door and see what happens.”

Even though the Square offers a wide variety of gift stores, Corcoran said he sees the new store not as more competition but as a complement to existing Square stores like Urban Outfitters and Curious George Goes to Wordsworth. It will help diversify offerings and allow customers a wider choice or goods, he said.

“People don’t know what they want,” he said. “Everyone seems to benefit from our opening.”

So far, he said the response to the new store has been positive. Most of the customers are tourists, but there are also customers who are familiar with the other stores.

“I was disappointed when Wordsworth closed,” said customer Carmen Christy, a former resident of Cambridge. But she is happy to see the opening of Blank Ink.

Now living in Cape Cod, Christy browsed through the card section with her mother, who is visiting from South Dakota.

“We have nothing like this in the town we’re from,” her mother remarked. “This is a new experience.”