Louis Cohen had a sly way of getting his daughters to work at his shop, the Argosy Book Store, when each graduated from college beginning in the 1950s.
“He was very clever and purposely let it be our idea,” recalled his eldest daughter, Judith Lowry. “When people asked over the years how he got all three of his daughters to work for him, he’d say, ‘I guess I’m just lucky.’”
Mr. Cohen, who opened the Argosy in 1925 on a section of Fourth Avenue known as Book Row, was also clever enough in the 1950s to ensure the shop’s longevity by buying the six-story building on East 59th Street that the business moved to in the 1930s and occupies today.
His daughters — Ms. Lowry, 90, Naomi Hample, 88, Adina Cohen, 84 — still run the Argosy, New York City’s oldest independent bookstore, which is marking its 100th anniversary this year.
Among them, the sisters have two centuries of service at the Argosy, an anomalous haven of Old World elegance. They have withstood the superstores, rising rents and online retailers that forced many of their competitors to close. But as property values climb in a neighborhood where mom-and-pop shops have all but disappeared, some devoted customers worry how long the Argosy can survive.
The sisters say they are committed to keeping the store going. They reject what they say are almost daily offers to buy the building, which is surrounded by skyscrapers in one of the city’s priciest areas and, according to real estate experts, worth well over $10 million.
“It would mean going out of business, and we like being here,” Ms. Lowry once told an interviewer. “So in essence, we’re paying for the privilege of working here.”
The sisters took over the business after their father died in 1991. By then, they had spent decades working for him and their mother, Ruth Shevin, who ran the prints and maps gallery on the second floor.
Around 2000, Ms. Lowry’s son, Ben Lowry, 55, became the fourth partner. He now handles many of the day-to-day operations but the sisters remain a constant presence in the shop. Over the years, they have matched books to countless customers, from celebrities to bargain-hunting bibliophiles.
The sisters still go on book-buying trips around the city by cab, sometimes several times a day. Back at the shop, they spread the books over a broad, green table in the middle of the main browsing area on the first floor, just as their father taught them to do. They assess, catalog and shelve their finds, in between assisting customers.
The shop is full of personal touches, including a carefully curated “Select Reading” shelves on the first floor, the Argosy’s version of a “Staff Picks” section.
The reserved and elegant Ms. Lowry is the family historian and den mother. She handles the shop’s large collection of American and British first editions, which are kept on the fifth floor.
Ms. Hampel, the gregarious one, established the store’s department of autographed items in the early 1980s, on the sixth floor.
The youngest sister, the ever stylish Ms. Cohen, specializes in rare books, as well as the prints and maps, and is deft at handling more eccentric customers.
“It’s fun to be somewhere where every subject in the world can come up, and any type of person in the world might walk in,” Ms. Cohen said.
The sisters often finish each other’s sentences, and their running disagreements have become part of their conversation style.
“You might get an argument where someone storms off and two hours later comes back and says, ‘OK, what are we going to get for lunch,” Mr. Lowry said.
The sisters regard their parents as models of longevity. Mr. Cohen worked until the day he died, from a stroke after work at 87. Ms. Shevin worked into her 90s, sometimes napping on a small bed on the second floor that is still there. She retired at 96 in 2005 and died two years later.
As to what Mr. Cohen paid for the 59th Street building, recollections differed. Ms. Lowry put the price at $100,000, but there was some disagreement among her sisters.
Ms. Lowry declared firmly, “I’m the oldest and I know I’m right.”
In terms of the property’s current value, James Nelson, principal and head of U.S. investment sales at the real estate advisory firm Avison Young, said he could not give an estimate without further information but that his firm had recently sold two similar buildings nearby for $11.5 million and $19.5 million.
Still, Mr. Lowry, said, “Whatever they’re offering, it’s not enough to ruin a legacy.”
“We’re not in the real estate business — we’re in the book business, and business is great,” said Mr. Lowry, who would like to see his two children take over the shop.
Bookstores are a rich part of New York City’s history, places like the Strand, Books & Co. and Gotham Book Mart. But with so many closing in recent decades, the Argosy has become a quiet contemplative curiosity amid the bustling blur of Midtown go-getters. An area dense with corporate behemoths, gleaming high-rises and chain lunch spots seems diametrically opposite to the Argosy’s conservancy of rarefied curios.
Stepping into the quiet first floor, there is a general offering of antiquarian books, prints, and rare, out-of-print and first editions. A nearly hidden back stairway takes you to a basement filled with reasonably priced volumes, a step up from the $3 bargains out front. A small elevator operated by a staff member takes you up to the more esoteric collections.
The Argosy computerized its card catalog in the mid 1980s and has shifted smoothly into the digital age, with roughly a third of sales now occurring online, according to Mr. Lowry. Otherwise, little has changed.
“We’re sort of in our own little treehouse,” he said, adding that people often peer in the shop window, mystified. “They think we’re a museum or something, not a place they can actually just walk into and look around.”
Famous customers have included Princess Grace, Kirk Douglas and Mick Jagger. The sisters know to leave Woody Allen alone and that President Bill Clinton, who knows all three sisters by name, loves to chat and enjoys getting advice on what to buy.
The writer Gay Talese, a regular, said the Argosy sisters “represent the best of New York enterprise, excellence and personal partnership with their multitude of faithful customers.”
Fran Lebowitz, another New York author, raconteur and steady customer, recalled buying a dictionary of shorthand there.
“One of the sisters, I’m not sure which, rang me up said, ‘I knew it would be Fran who would eventually buy this, and no one else,” Ms. Lebowitz said.
These days, Ms. Cohen and Ms. Lowry work four days a week. Ms. Hample works only one or two because she has begun to experience some memory loss, a sad irony because she was once regarded as the shop’s institutional memory.
“She could get inside people’s head and draw stuff out of them to find the perfect book,” her son, Zack Hample, said. “In a store of tens of thousands of shelved books, she could tell people from memory, exactly where a certain book was.”
Ms. Hample still takes pride in curating her beloved Select Reading section.
“This is where she feels most comfortable,” Ms. Lowry said.
Eating her lunch in the shop recently surrounded by old leather-bound volumes, Ms. Cohen — wearing red designer glasses and a mustard cashmere sweater and with her hair fashionably styled — said she had seen numerous friends retire to Florida.
“I’d like to, too, but working here is really interesting,” she said. “Every day, you don’t know who is going to walk in the door or what books are going to come in.”
As for the sisters’ longevity, Ms. Hample said, “We stick around because we love it. It’s as simple as that.”
Corey Kilgannon is a Times reporter who writes about crime and criminal justice in and around New York City, as well as breaking news and other feature stories.
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