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150-foot, 12-story Romanesque-revival office building completed in 1890 as the Methodist Book Concern Building. Designed by Edward Hale Kendall as a store-and-loft building for the Methodist Book Concern, it is faced in contrasting white stone and red brick. The building is distinguished by a heavily rusticated base, 4-story arcades, and the texture of its ornament. A smaller 3-story attic section was added to the rear of the 20th Street facade in 1909. In 1941, alterations were made which featured tiling by Rafael Guastavino.

The Fifth Avenue facade, organized in a tripartite scheme, is five bays in width. The first two floors are heavily rusticated stone. In a typical alteration, the two northern windows on the ground floor have been replaced by plate glass with aluminum sash and a new entrance cut into each bay. The center bay has a round-arched main entrance. The window to the south has been replaced with plate glass framed by bronze-tinted aluminum panels, while the southernmost bay retains its wood-frame projecting display window. At the 2nd floor are deeply recessed tripartite windows in arched openings. The central bay is flanked by a pair of engaged Ionic pilasters on each side. These support an entablature crowned by a frieze containing roundels.

Floors 3-6 have red brick facing, with stone window surrounds. The three central bays are united by an arcade encompassing all four floors. Projecting tripartite window bays are set in the arcades on the 3rd, 4th and 5th floors. The outer bays contain paired windows with stone surrounds and mullions, with the exception of the 6th floor, which contains Venetian windows.

Floors 7-9 are faced with stone. The outer bays of the 7th floor are flanked by simple rectilinear rustication, while the panels flanking the central bay are low-relief sculpture framed by smooth stone. Engaged Tuscan columns on plinths separate the windows, which rest on a finely dentiled cornice. A much heavier bracketed cornice with copper cresting surmounts the 7th floor. The spandrel panels and dividing pilasters of the three arched central bays of the 8th floor are also faced in brick. The engaged pilasters that divide the bays on the 8th floor, terminated by a balustrade and globes, are continued in the 9th floor. The slightly later attic story is clad in copper. The larger central bay is framed by huge Jacobethan chimneys with relief sculpture and a bracketed segmental-arch with "MBC" sculpted over the windows, surrounded by sinuous foliate ornament.

The 20th Street facade is nine bays wide, including an additional bay at the west end of the building. The facade replicates the pattern of the central bays in the Fifth Avenue facade in six bays rather than three. The flanking bays are like those on Fifth Avenue. A full stone portico with paired columns and wood doors surmounted by a balustrade marks the center bay of the ground floor. The display windows of the ground floor have been modernized in a similar fashion to the eastern windows of the Fifth Avenue facade, with remnants of original cast-iron detail adjacent to the recent metal doors and windows of the 2nd and 3rd bays from the west. The entrance at 2 West 20th Street contains two pairs of new doors recessed in a wood-paneled opening. A tripartite window set in an arch marks the center bay on the 2nd floor, flanked by circular windows.

A 3-story attic was added over the western bays of this facade. The penthouse is divided into three bays by giant Corinthian half-columns. The corners are articulated by thick piers decorated in the style of the Jacobethan dormer on the Fifth Avenue facade. This addition is crowned by a heavy copper cornice.

The westernmost bay of the West 20th Street facade, used as a service entrance and completed in 1900, is a simplified version of the building's other bays. The two lower stories are rusticated, with the 2nd-floor windows divided into three narrow openings. This window treatment is continued with floors 3 through 6. The 7th floor, though including the heavy cornice, does not include the rectilinear rustication seen elsewhere on the building. The 8th floor continues the motifs of the neighboring bays. The entire bay is slightly recessed.

The Methodist Book Concern erected this building to house offices for its board of education and a printing press for the "Christian Advocate," the official organ of the Methodist Episcopal Church. A chapel on the third floor housed religious services. The building's architect had his office here, and other tenants included F. Schumacher & Co. Upholsterers, noted architect Bruce Price, and several publishers including the Abingdon Press. The ground floor is occupied by New Balance shoes. HLW International underwent a $6 million restoration and renovation in 2001 which restored the entrance (the granite had been painted gray and the arched entrance had been boxed over), and the lobby which was redesigned with a vaulted ceiling and stone floors. It is now Mastercard's New York City corporate office.

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