Florence Lloyd, an emigrant from Imperial Russia who helped run the Smithsonian Institution’s bookstores, located in the museum shops, died Feb. 5 at her home in Chevy Chase, Md. She was 105.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said a son, Victor Lloyd.

She was born Fradl Resnick in Minsk on Sept. 7, 1910. Decades later, she would tell her children and grandchildren that as a child she had once seen Czar Nicholas II, the last monarch of the Romanov dynasty who, with his family, was executed by a Bolshevik firing squad in 1918.

Mrs. Lloyd came to the United States as a young girl. She became an assistant to the first headmistress of the private Dalton School in New York. For 10 years before settling in Washington in 1964 she lived in Costa Rica with her husband, Joel Lloyd, a geologist.

From 1970 to 1982, she directed the bookstores owned by the Smithsonian. She was a volunteer reader of correspondence in the Clinton White House and was known in Chevy Chase both for her abundant gardens of flowers and vegetables and as a costume judge at the annual Leland Street Halloween parade.

Her husband died in 2001 after a marriage of 65 years. Survivors include two children, Victor Lloyd of New York City and Lucy Lloyd, of Huntington, N.Y; a sister; six grandchildren; and 15 great-grandchildren.

Mrs. Lloyd was fluent in six languages: English, Spanish, Russian, French, Yiddish and German.

Near the end of her life, she liked to tell stories about her early years, often telling the same story several times, but in a different language.