On the south side of East 59th Street, between Park and Lexington Avenues, a six-story townhouse stands quietly against the glass towers of midtown Manhattan. Its red awning reads, simply, Argosy Book Store. Inside, on a Monday morning in the year the shop turns 101, the air smells faintly of paper and old leather, and the wooden floors still creak in the exact places they did when Franklin Roosevelt ordered from an early catalogue, when Jackie Kennedy came in to help stock the White House library, and when a young clerk named Patti Smith pulled a few shifts in 1967 before she became Patti Smith.

This is New York City’s oldest independent bookstore. It has outlived Book Row, Hurricane Sandy, the e-book panic, and three generations of its own family. For the literary pilgrim — the traveler who measures Manhattan in shelves rather than skyline — Argosy is the cathedral.

A 1925 Foundation on Book Row

Louis Cohen founded Argosy in 1925. He picked the name in part because it began with the letter “A,” which would land the shop near the top of telephone directories — a practical instinct from a man who, having grown up reading aloud on the Lower East Side to his blind father, understood that a bookshop’s life depended on being found. The original Argosy occupied the old Bible House on Fourth Avenue, then the spine of what New Yorkers called Book Row — a six-block stretch from Astor Place down to Union Square that, at its mid-century peak, held nearly four dozen secondhand and antiquarian bookstores. Today only one Book Row survivor remains in any form, and Argosy is it.

In the 1930s Cohen moved the store to 114 East 59th Street, and in 1964, when the adjacent building was torn down to make way for a skyscraper, he relocated next door to 116 East 59th Street — the address Argosy still occupies. He had purchased the six-story townhouse in the 1950s, which is the single decision that has allowed an independent rare-book seller to survive in midtown Manhattan for the last six decades while every comparable shop in the neighborhood has been pushed out by rent.

The Three Sisters

Louis Cohen died in January 1991. His obituary in The New York Times called him a “rarities expert and founder of Argosy Book Shop.” He left the store to his three daughters: Judith Lowry, Naomi Hample, and Adina Cohen. They had grown up around it. Their mother Ruth Shevin managed the store’s art gallery into her nineties. The three sisters divided the building’s specialties along the natural lines of their own expertise: Judith took modern first editions, Naomi took autographs, Adina took antique maps and prints. Judith’s son Ben Lowry is now part of the operation, making Argosy a third-generation family business with a fourth quietly entering the frame.

In June 2014, The New Yorker published Janet Malcolm’s portrait of the shop and the sisters under the title “The Book Refuge: Three sisters keep a family business going.” If you want to understand Argosy as a cultural object rather than a retail one, that essay is the way in. Malcolm captured what a visitor still notices on a first walk through: the building is not a store performing the role of an old bookshop. It is an old bookshop that has simply continued.

Walking the Six Floors

The pilgrim’s first move at Argosy is to stop trying to be efficient. The ground floor sets the tone — long oak tables of bargain books, the rolling carts pushed out under the awning when the weather allows, the framed prints and antique maps on the walls. Most casual visitors do not realize there are five more floors above them.

The upper floors hold the specialties Argosy is known for: Americana (the category that brought Jackie Kennedy in to outfit the White House), modern first editions, autographs and manuscripts, art and photography monographs, leather-bound sets, and the deep history of science and medicine collection that has long been a quiet point of pride. The print gallery — atlases, antique maps, botanicals, vintage caricatures, historical engravings — occupies its own room and is one of the best places in Manhattan to buy a framed piece of paper that is older than your grandparents. The shop has its own framing department on premises, and a Brooklyn warehouse that holds the overflow stock the townhouse cannot.

Argosy is a founding member of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America (ABAA) and belongs to the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers (ILAB) and the Appraisers Association of America. In practical terms for the visitor, this means the appraisals are real, the descriptions are real, and items “may be returned if not as described, within 5 days of receipt” — the ILAB guarantee in plain language.

The Customers Who Walked Through the Door

The roster of Argosy regulars over the past century reads like a misfiled cultural history of America. Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered books from an early catalogue. Jacqueline Kennedy, planning the restoration of the White House library, came to Louis Cohen for help finding the right Americana. President Bill Clinton became a regular customer after the Argosy team restored a flood-damaged portion of his book collection at his home in Chappaqua, New York — a story the family has confirmed in print on multiple occasions. Michael Jackson shopped here. So did Stephen Sondheim, Princess Grace, Sally Field (who spent weeks at Argosy preparing to play Mary Todd Lincoln in Lincoln), Donatella Versace, the journalist Oriana Fallaci, and former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.

And then there is Patti Smith. In a 2010 PEN American Center conversation with Jonathan Lethem, Smith mentioned, almost in passing, that she had worked briefly at Argosy in 1967, before Horses, before the Chelsea Hotel years had fully begun, when she was simply a young woman in New York trying to find a job near books. That detail — that the future poet laureate of American rock-and-roll once clocked in at this address — is the kind of small fact a pilgrim collects and keeps.

Hurricane Sandy and a Quiet Resurrection

On the night of October 29, 2012, Hurricane Sandy hit New York. The damage at Argosy was not from the storm surge — midtown is not waterfront — but from above. Bricks dislodged from the 32nd floor of the adjacent skyscraper and punched through the bookstore’s roof. The top two floors flooded. Among the casualties were historical artifacts the shop had been holding for years, including, according to The New York Times, acts of Congress signed by Thomas Jefferson. The family did not announce the disaster loudly. They cleaned, restored what could be restored, mourned what could not, and reopened. By the fall of 2013 the store had made a full recovery. A pilgrim browsing the upper floors today walks rooms that were, eleven years ago, ankle-deep in water and broken plaster.

Argosy on Screen

The interior is so unrepeatable that filmmakers have been borrowing it for decades. Argosy appears in The Front (1976) with Woody Allen, in episodes of Law and Order and Person of Interest, and — most famously to a new generation — in the 2018 film Can You Ever Forgive Me?, in which Melissa McCarthy plays Lee Israel, the real writer who, in the early 1990s, tried to sell her literary forgeries to several New York bookshops, including Argosy itself. The shop also appears in the 2019 adaptation of The Goldfinch. And in the 2019 documentary The Booksellers, narrated by Parker Posey, Argosy and the three sisters are one of the central subjects — possibly the best single piece of filmed primary-source material about the shop’s interior life ever made.

(A small piece of trivia for the literary pilgrim: Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 Vertigo features a bookshop called “the Argosy” — but that one is in San Francisco. The shared name is a coincidence. The Argosy that matters is on East 59th.)

Plan the Visit

Address: 116 East 59th Street (between Park and Lexington Avenues), New York, NY 10022
Phone: (212) 753-4455
Email: argosy@argosybooks.com
Hours: Monday–Friday, 10:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m.; Saturday, 10:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.; closed Sunday. The shop is closed Saturdays in summer (June through August); call ahead if you are planning a summer Saturday trip.

Transit: The closest stop is Lexington Avenue/59th Street on the 4, 5, 6, N, R, and W trains — a one-block walk. The F train at Lexington Avenue/63rd Street is a five-minute walk north.

What to Pair It With

Argosy sits in a slice of midtown that rewards a slow walk in any direction. Three blocks west is the Plaza Hotel, where Truman Capote threw the Black and White Ball — useful pilgrim context for anyone reading Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Three blocks east, on First Avenue between 56th and 57th, is the apartment building where Capote lived in the late 1950s. Walk south on Lexington and you are within ten minutes of Bloomingdale’s and the cafés and coffee shops of the East 50s — useful for the long sit you will need after carrying three or four hardcovers down six flights of stairs.

For the literary pilgrim doing a multi-stop day, Argosy pairs naturally with a morning at the Morgan Library & Museum (225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, roughly 20 minutes south on foot or two stops on the 6 train) and an afternoon at the New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue. That trio — Morgan, NYPL, Argosy — is the spine of a single perfect literary day in Manhattan.

What to Buy

Argosy’s range runs from $5 sidewalk bargain hardcovers on the carts under the awning to five-figure signed first editions and historical autographs upstairs. For the pilgrim who is visiting once and wants something to take home, three categories are worth considering:

• Antique maps and prints. The print gallery has botanical prints, antique New York City maps, vintage caricatures, and historical engravings in a price range that runs from manageable to museum-grade. Argosy has its own framing shop on site, so a piece bought today can be framed and shipped.
• A signed modern first edition. Judith Lowry’s department covers most of the canonical 20th- and 21st-century American and British writers. Ask. Many of the best pieces are not on the open floor.
• A small piece of historical autograph material. Naomi Hample’s department holds an enormous range, and entry-level signed letters and signed photographs are more obtainable than first-time visitors expect.

Why It Matters

Independent bookstores in Manhattan have been closing for forty years. Book Row is gone. The Eighth Street Bookshop is gone. Coliseum is gone. Gotham Book Mart, where W. H. Auden and J. D. Salinger once browsed, closed in 2007. The continued existence of Argosy at 116 East 59th Street is partly a story about real estate — Louis Cohen bought the building — and partly a story about a family that decided, three times in three generations, to keep going.

The pilgrim instinct is not nostalgia. It is recognition. Argosy is not a museum of bookselling; it is an active rare-book business with a working framing department, a Brooklyn warehouse, and 17 employees as of recent count. Books are bought, books are sold, appraisals are written, estates are evaluated. On a Monday morning in May 2026, the door opens at 10:00 a.m., the carts come out, the bell at the desk rings now and then, and someone — almost always someone — is being walked upstairs to look at a first edition. That is the thing the pilgrim came to see.

If you go

Bring cash for the sidewalk carts. Allow at least 90 minutes — two hours if you intend to make it to the upper floors. Do not arrive 15 minutes before closing; the staff are generous but the building deserves time. Ask questions. The Argosy floor staff have been answering them for, in some cases, four decades.

Further reading

• Janet Malcolm, “The Book Refuge,” The New Yorker, June 23, 2014.
• “A Shrine to Books Past Clings to Independence,” The New York Times, October 13, 1997.
• “Louis Cohen, 87, Rarities Expert and Founder of Argosy Book Shop” (obituary), The New York Times, January 6, 1991.
• The Booksellers (2019), directed by D. W. Young — a feature documentary on the New York rare-book trade in which Argosy is a central subject.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Argosy Book Store really the oldest bookstore in New York City?

Argosy is New York City’s oldest independent bookstore, founded in 1925 by Louis Cohen. It is the last survivor of Manhattan’s historic “Book Row” on Fourth Avenue, and it has been continuously operated by the Cohen family for three generations.

Do I need an appointment to visit Argosy Book Store?

No appointment is needed for general browsing during open hours — Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. (Saturdays closed June through August). For appraisals, estate evaluations, or serious rare-book inquiries, calling ahead at (212) 753-4455 is recommended.

What is Argosy Book Store known for?

Argosy specializes in Americana, modern first editions, autographs and manuscripts, antique maps and prints, art and photography monographs, leather-bound sets, and the history of science and medicine. The store also has a large bargain-book inventory on the ground floor and street-level carts.

Where exactly is Argosy Book Store located?

Argosy is at 116 East 59th Street, between Park and Lexington Avenues, in Midtown Manhattan. The nearest subway is the Lexington Avenue/59th Street station, served by the 4, 5, 6, N, R, and W trains — about a one-block walk.

Has Argosy Book Store appeared in any movies?

Yes. Argosy has been featured in The Front (1976) with Woody Allen, the 2018 film Can You Ever Forgive Me?, the 2019 adaptation of The Goldfinch, and the 2019 documentary The Booksellers. It has also appeared on television in episodes of Law and Order and Person of Interest.

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