One day in late December, I was sitting at a small table on the fifth floor of the Argosy Bookshop, on East Fifty-ninth Street, with the three beautiful sisters—Judith Lowry, Naomi Hample, and Adina Cohen—who own and run the business, which they inherited from their father, Louis Cohen, in 1991. Now in their seventies, the sisters have been at the Argosy—which sells autographs, maps, prints, and paintings, as well as old and rare books—since their early twenties. As each one graduated from college, she came to the bookshop, and found the work so congenial and was so good at it that when Cohen died the transition was seamless.

The sisters have distinct personalities. Judith has a firstborn’s quiet augustness; she is tall and elegant and could be taken for a college president. Naomi has the second child’s ease and confidence; she is merry and vivacious and the family raconteur. Adina, arguably the most beautiful of the beautiful sisters, radiates some of the wistfulness of the baby of the family who can never catch up, though in fact she is the equal of her sisters in every facet of the family business.

The room we were sitting in was Judith’s domain. She is an authority on English and American first editions, and a large collection of them is housed here, the most valuable in a locked case and others on open shelves. On the floor above, Naomi tends a large collection of autographs, letters, and historical documents. But both spend at least two-thirds of the working day on the ground floor, in the bookshop proper, where the life of the enterprise is lodged.

The daughters were very fond of their father—they refer to him as Lou—and have a repertoire of stories about his adventures in the antiquarian book trade that illustrate his cleverness and boldness. Adina told an anecdote from the days of cutthroat competition for books among dealers:

“One day, Lou went to an apartment whose owner was selling his library. There was another book dealer already there, and Lou saw the book dealer point to him and heard him say to the owner, in Yiddish, ‘I’ll top whatever he offers you.’ My father had blue eyes and the dealer assumed he wasn’t Jewish. Lou went up to the owner and said—in Yiddish—‘And I’ll top that.’ ”

Naomi recalled another instance of Cohen’s quick wit. It was during the Depression, and he had sent out penny postcards to people in the Social Register asking if they had books to dispose of. Many did. “Once, he went to a house in Tuxedo Park, and a very society type of woman came to the door and said, ‘And you are Mr.’—she paused meaningfully—‘Cohen?’ And he—knowing what was coming, namely that ‘I would not sell my books to the likes of you’—said, ‘Yes, I am Mr. Cullen—C-U-L-L-E-N.’ He got the books.”

Naomi then began a long story about a book-buying expedition she had accompanied her father on when she was ten. “It’s a very vivid memory. A Dr. Hart, who lived in Bridgeport, Connecticut, came into the store and said he had a houseful of books to sell—all medical.”

Judith said, “I think you’re wrong that it was all medical books. He had every subject, from animal studies to—”

“No, it was a medical library,” Naomi said. “There may have been other subjects. But it was a medical library.”

“I don’t think so,” Judith said.

“I don’t know,” Adina said. “I was only four.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter,” Judith said.

“So we drove to Bridgeport—”

“You went with him?” Judith said.

“I did go.”

“When you were ten years old?”

“Absolutely. It was one of the big moments of my childhood.”

“I didn’t go,” Judith said, “though I certainly know the story.”

“Well,” Naomi went on, “the house was on the main street of Bridgeport and it was full of books. The stairs were lined with books. There were aisles of bookcases in every room and piles of books everywhere. No one lived there. Dr. Hart had been pushed out of the house by the books and lived somewhere else. There was no way you could assess this library, so Lou pulled a price out of his head, a lowish price, because it was just a nightmare. And Dr. Hart was so relieved that someone was actually interested in the books that he said yes. But he said you have to take them all. Lou said all right and we made many trips there—we only had a station wagon then—and I remember Lou would go through the books and say, ‘I’ll take this one, I’ll take that one,’ and when he came to a book he didn’t want he threw it out the window.”

“No,” Judith said. “He couldn’t have thrown books out the window.”

“Judy—”

“I have told this story myself many times and—”

“But I was there.”

“Memory is a strange thing. What happened was that—”

Naomi glared at Judith. “I can’t believe that you are telling me what my experience was.”

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Any reader who has a sibling or siblings will recognize this exchange and its tone. The invisible cord that binds siblings together is wrapped in an insulation of asperity. Sisters, perhaps more than brothers, unendingly irritate one another and scrap with one another. And yet, until this moment—during all the hours over a period of several weeks that I had spent at the Argosy observing its workings—I had seen nothing but an almost preternatural amity flowing between the sisters. They seemed to be of one mind about how the business is to be run and how its functions are to be performed. The spat that had just taken place ended the way spats between cats from the same litter do—it dissolved into nothing. The dust of rivalrous feeling that memory had stirred up settled. Naomi, with a gesture of friendly irony, turned over the telling of the story of Dr. Hart’s library to Judith.

Judith said, “After Lou had taken half the books out of the house, something terrible happened. Dr. Hart had an offer on the house and he accepted it. He said to Lou, ‘You have got to get these books out of here in a month’—which was impossible. So Lou matched the offer and bought the house. Then he could take his time removing the books. Eventually, he sold the house.”

In 1953, Cohen took what proved to be his most decisive step for the bookstore. He bought the building on Fifty-ninth Street that the Argosy now occupies—a nondescript six-story commercial building with a bar on the ground floor and a lampshade business and dance studio above. At the time, the Argosy was one door down, in a town house that was part of a row of brownstones in which Cohen and other booksellers were renting space for their shops. In 1963, as if on cue, a developer bought up the brownstones and tore them down, in order to build a forty-story skyscraper. As Cohen’s fellow-booksellers dispersed like ants hysterically fleeing a wantonly destroyed nest, he serenely moved his bookstore into the refuge next door, where it remains a picturesque anomaly on a street of sleek tall buildings and shops such as Williams-Sonoma, Banana Republic, and Sherry-Lehmann Wine and Spirits. The developer tried to buy Cohen’s building, but Cohen turned him down. The developer kept raising his price, and Cohen kept turning him down. Everyone has his price, the developer believed, but Cohen had no price. “Everything Lou did was for the business,” Naomi said. “When he bought the building, he was not thinking real estate. He was not thinking about turning a profit. He only wanted to protect the business.” The daughters, who have had repeated offers for the building over the years, feel the same way. “We’re safe here,” Naomi said. “I can’t even imagine the panic of the people who are renting in New York. What will next month bring?”