Today, books fill the whole shop, on the shelves, on the long tables, at the front desk; there are paperbacks and hardcover books; fiction, history, crime; a terrific section on New York City that includes the first book printed by the Three Lives Press: “The Last Leaf,” O. Henry’s short story about art and life in old Greenwich Village.

Every day, as soon as the manager, Troy Chatterton, opens the door, customers rush into Three Lives as if for a fix of a singularly restorative oxygen. Troy feels like a kind of throwback, a 21st-century version of a true Greenwich Village book guy — welcoming, cool, well read with wonderful stories about visits to Three Lives by the likes of Edmund White and Oliver Sacks. I like to think of Three Lives as a secret garden hidden from the city streets with Troy as the custodian. There is the low chatter of people talking to each other, to friends and strangers, discussing favorite writers or offering opinions on new editions of classics. There is a joyous bustle.

“The best kind of customer,” says Joyce McNamara, who has worked at Three Lives for 20 years, “is the kind who just spends an hour looking at everything and absorbing it and maybe asks what you think.” McNamara took the job because of one book in particular. “I saw Michael Cunningham’s acknowledgment of Three Lives in ‘The Hours,’ and I was charmed,” she says.

I hate a certain New York sentimentality that celebrates the past for its own musty sake, but the disappearance of the independent bookshop has been tough. When I was growing up in Greenwich Village, the corner bookshop was as much part of the cityscape as the drugstore or the tavern, and a family stroll after supper always included a visit to one — and an ice cream from C.O. Bigelow. “I can’t tell you how many families brought their kids in after a walk and started them on a lifetime of reading,” Feder says.