Tucked between the glass towers of Midtown East, two blocks from Bloomingdale’s and a long stone’s throw from the Plaza, sits a six-story building that smells like leather, cedar, and a hundred years of paper. The block is otherwise unremarkable. The building is otherwise unremarkable. But pull open the door of 116 East 59th Street and you walk into the oldest independent bookstore in New York City, into a family business that has refused — politely, persistently, for one full century — to die.
This is Argosy Book Store. It opened in 1925. It is still open. And the only reason it survived the Midtown real estate apocalypse that ate every other shop on the block is that the family bought the building.
The Bookshop That Owns Its Own Sidewalk
Louis Cohen opened Argosy in 1925 on Fourth Avenue, in the old Bible House, on the stretch then known as Book Row — where as many as 48 used and antiquarian bookstores once jostled for the same browsing customers. Today, only the Strand survives downtown. Argosy survived by moving uptown to East 59th Street in the 1930s, and then, in 1964, sliding next door to its current six-story home at 116 East 59th when its previous building was demolished for a skyscraper. The Cohens secured the building they are in now, and that single fact of long-term tenancy, repeated nowhere else in the New York book trade, is a major reason the store still exists. Rent did not push them out. Landlords did not flip them out. The books stayed.
Louis Cohen passed in 1991. The store is now run by his three daughters — Judith Lowry, Naomi Hample, and Adina Cohen — who grew up shelving stock as kids and now run the place into its third generation. They are sisters. They are co-owners. They sit at three desks on the ground floor and have a kind of gentle, knowing rapport with one another that takes about thirty seconds to fall in love with. Ask any one of them a question about a book and you will get an answer that includes provenance, edition, condition, and probably a personal anecdote about the customer who last asked for it.
What Lives Inside
The ground floor is the showroom — glass cases of autographs, leather-bound first editions, signed photographs of presidents, framed letters from Mark Twain, antique maps of cities that no longer exist. Climb the narrow elevator (or the stairs, if you want the full pilgrimage) and the building opens up into specialty floors. Americana. Art and photography. Modern firsts. Medical history. Travel. Antique prints. Sheet music. There is a floor that is essentially nothing but old maps. There is another that is nothing but autographs. The total stock runs into the hundreds of thousands of items, and what does not fit at 59th Street lives in a Brooklyn warehouse the size of a small grocery store.
Prices range absurdly wide. There are bargain carts on the sidewalk where you can buy a perfectly readable hardcover for a few dollars. There are also signed first editions of Hemingway in the upstairs cases priced at numbers that will make you do a small involuntary inhale. The point of Argosy is that both ends of that range coexist on the same block — that a teenager hunting for a cheap paperback and a private collector hunting for a Lincoln signature can both walk in on the same afternoon and both walk out happy.
The Atmosphere
It is quiet inside. Not library-quiet — book-quiet. The kind of hush that comes from the soft, padded weight of tens of thousands of bound volumes pressing in from every wall. The lighting is warm. The carpet is old. The shelves are wood. A small pug used to greet customers at the front desk; new staff dogs come and go. There is no café. There is no merch wall. There are no sticker stations or tote bags with cute slogans. Argosy is not interested in being a “lifestyle” bookstore. It is interested in books, and in the people who care about books, and in introducing the two to one another at a fair price.
That makes it the closest thing New York has to the bookshops of the 1930s and 1940s — back when the West Village and Fourth Avenue were thick with them, back when a good antiquarian dealer was a fixture of intellectual life in the city. Walk around inside Argosy for half an hour and you will catch a glimpse of what that whole lost world used to feel like.
How to Visit
Argosy Book Store is at 116 East 59th Street, between Park and Lexington Avenues. The closest subways are the 4, 5, 6 at 59th Street/Lexington Avenue and the N, R, W at Lexington/59th — about a one-minute walk. Hours run Monday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. The store is closed on Sundays. Entry is free. Browsing is encouraged. There is no obligation to buy.
If you are hunting for something specific, call first — (212) 753-4455 — and one of the sisters will tell you whether it is in the building or in the Brooklyn warehouse. If it is in Brooklyn, they can usually have it brought over within a day or two. The store also maintains a website at argosybooks.com, but the online catalog only scratches the surface of what is physically on the shelves.
Insider Tip: The sidewalk carts in front of the store, weather permitting, are where the deals live. Hardcover review copies, slightly damaged firsts, end-of-run gallery catalogs — all priced to move. Locals know to circle the carts first before going inside, because the best one-dollar finds in Manhattan are often sitting in a wooden bin on East 59th waiting for someone to bend down and pick them up.
Why It Matters
Every other bookstore on Book Row is gone. Every other family-owned antiquarian dealer of Argosy’s vintage in Manhattan is gone. Most of the shops the Cohen family knew in their early years — the Pageant, the Gotham, Schulte’s, Biblo and Tannen, the Strand’s old neighbors — closed or moved or simply faded. Argosy did not, and that is not luck. It is one family, three generations deep, who decided that the most radical thing you could do in modern New York was to keep showing up, every morning at eleven, and open a door.
Walk in. Talk to a sister. Climb a floor. Find a book you did not know you wanted. This is the kind of place that makes you remember why you fell for the city in the first place.
For more of New York’s literary landmarks, see our pilgrim’s guide to The Strand Bookstore — Argosy’s spiritual sibling and the only other survivor of New York’s old antiquarian trade.
