Last updated: 2026 | Originally published: October 3, 2023

New York has more independent bookstores than most cities have bookstores, period. This is a guide to 23 of them, verified open, from a hundred-year-old antiquarian shop on the Upper East Side to a Bronx bookstore-and-wine-bar that opened on National Indie Bookstore Day. Argosy Book Store and Strand Bookstore anchor the list on sheer history alone, the last two survivors of the roughly forty-eight shops that once lined Fourth Avenue’s Book Row.

Independent bookstores close more often than anyone would like. Two stores from earlier versions of this guide, Bluestockings and Shakespeare & Co., have both shut down permanently since this article first ran, and they are not on this list because of it. Everything below was checked directly against the store’s own site, social accounts, or recent, reliable reporting before being included.

Best Bookshops in Manhattan

1. Argosy Book Store

📍 Location: 116 East 59th Street — Midtown, Manhattan | 🌐 Website: Argosy Book Store | Phone: [212] 753-4455 | Hours: Monday–Friday, 11 AM–6 PM

Louis Cohen founded Argosy in 1925 on Fourth Avenue’s old Book Row, when as many as forty-eight used and antiquarian bookstores lined the same stretch. The shop moved uptown in the 1930s and into its current six-story building at 116 East 59th in 1964, after the Cohen family bought the building outright, which is a large part of why it is still standing at all. Today only Argosy and the Strand remain from that original Book Row generation.

Third-generation family members Judith Lowry, Naomi Hample, Adina Cohen, and Ben Lowry now run the shop, specializing in out-of-print and rare books, antique maps and prints, and autographs across six floors. The store took on significant water damage during Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and rebuilt with community support.

A founding member of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America, Argosy keeps roughly 50,000 out-of-print books browsable on the main floor and basement, with a fifth-floor First Editions department and 80,000 additional rare items available by request even though they are not out on the shelves.

2. Albertine

📍 Location: 972 5th Avenue — Upper East Side, Manhattan | 🌐 Website: Albertine | Phone: [332] 228-2238 | Hours: Tuesday–Saturday [except Wednesday], 10 AM–6 PM

Albertine opened in 2014 inside the landmarked Payne Whitney mansion, home to the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, with roughly fourteen thousand French and English titles from thirty Francophone countries, the only store in New York dedicated entirely to that pairing. French designer Jacques Garcia handled the interiors, including a hand-painted celestial ceiling over the second-floor reading room.

Beyond the shop itself, Albertine runs French Book Corners in partnership with independent bookstores across the country, including Books Are Magic and Greenlight Bookstore right here in Brooklyn. It remains sponsored directly by the French government as a piece of cultural diplomacy as much as a retail operation.

3. 192 Books

📍 Location: 192 10th Avenue — Chelsea, Manhattan | 🌐 Website: 192 Books | Phone: [212] 255-4022 | Hours: Daily, 11 AM–7 PM

Editor Henry Holt and art dealer Paula Cooper co-founded this small Chelsea shop in 2003, and it still leans into that combination: literary fiction, art and photography books, and a rotating selection tied to Cooper’s adjoining gallery next door.

A weekly story hour runs each Wednesday at eleven for younger readers, and a dedicated Young Adult section sits alongside programming tied to Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month every fall. The shop remains independently owned by the same two founders more than two decades in.

4. Bonnie Slotnick Cookbooks

📍 Location: 28 East 2nd Street — East Village, Manhattan | 🌐 Website: Bonnie Slotnick Cookbooks | Phone: [212] 989-8962

Bonnie Slotnick runs this vintage cookbook shop as a real culinary archive rather than a general bookstore that happens to carry recipes. Hand-selected classic cookery books share shelf space with 1950s Pyrex and casserole dishes, quaint cookware, and kitchen tools most people have only seen at a grandparent’s house.

It is a narrow niche done extremely well, closer to a small museum of American food history you can buy your way through than a typical browsing bookstore.

5. BOOKOFF New York

📍 Location: 49 West 45th Street — Midtown West, Manhattan | 🌐 Website: BOOKOFF New York | Phone: [212] 685-1410 | Hours: Daily, 10 AM–8 PM

BOOKOFF is a Japanese multimedia chain, and its Times Square outpost remains one of the only East Coast locations of the brand, running deep on manga, Japanese-language titles, and used English-language books priced anywhere from a dollar cart to truly rare finds.

The lower level carries the bulk of the Japanese-specific inventory, alongside movies, music, toys, and video games. The annual Black Friday sale turns the whole shop into one of the better bargain-hunting stops in Midtown.

6. Housing Works Bookstore

📍 Location: 126 Crosby Street — SoHo, Manhattan | 🌐 Website: Housing Works Bookstore | Phone: [212] 334-3324 | Hours: Monday–Saturday, 11 AM–7 PM; Sunday, 11 AM–5 PM

Housing Works has run this SoHo bookstore for nearly three decades to directly fund services for people affected by HIV/AIDS and homelessness, stocking donated used books, records, and films inside a bright, two-story space with a real café attached. Every dollar spent here goes back into the organization’s programs.

The New Yorker named it among its writers’ and editors’ favorite New York City bookstores in 2024, and literary events and readings run most evenings. The space closes early some weekends to make room for private event rentals, including weddings.

7. The Mysterious Book Shop

📍 Location: 58 Warren Street — TriBeCa, Manhattan | 🌐 Website: The Mysterious Book Shop | Phone: [212] 587-1011 | Hours: Monday-Saturday, 11 AM–7 PM

Otto Penzler opened The Mysterious Bookshop on Friday, 13th of April, 1979, and it remains the world’s oldest bookstore devoted entirely to mystery, crime, and thriller fiction. It spent its first 25 years at 129 West 56th Street before the building was sold in 2005, forcing it to relocate to its current TriBeCa home.

Penzler also runs Penzler Publishers out of the same building, encompassing The Mysterious Press, Scarlet, American Mystery Classics, and Crime Ink imprints. Floor-to-ceiling shelves hold autographed first editions and a dedicated Sherlock Holmes section, with a bibliomysteries corner for true specialists.

8. Strand Bookstore

📍 Location: 828 Broadway — East Village, Manhattan | 🌐 Website: Strand Bookstore | Phone: [212] 473-1452 | Hours: Daily, 10 AM–9 PM

Open since 1927 and still run by the Bass Wyden family’s third generation, the Strand is the last survivor of Book Row’s roughly forty-eight stores and now carries more than 2.5 million titles across its famous “eighteen miles” of shelving. The Landmarks Preservation Commission granted the building landmark status in 2019.

The sidewalk dollar carts remain the place to find something unexpected without spending much, and a connected rare book room holds the true collector’s items. The Strand has continued expanding even as other independents struggle: it opened a new Upper West Side location near Lincoln Center in July 2025, taking over the space Shakespeare & Co. vacated when that chain closed its New York operations entirely.

10. Rizzoli Bookstore

📍 Location: 1133 Broadway — NoMad, Manhattan | 🌐 Website: Rizzoli Bookstore | Phone: [212] 759-2424 | Hours: Monday–Saturday, 11 AM–8 PM; Sunday, 11 AM–7 PM

Angelo Rizzoli opened his New York bookstore in 1964 at 712 Fifth Avenue, moved to 57th Street in 1985, and relocated again to its current NoMad address in July 2015. The shop specializes in illustrated books on architecture, design, fashion, and photography, alongside literature in Italian, French, Spanish, and English.

Now owned indirectly by the Italian publisher Mondadori, Rizzoli runs a packed calendar of evening author events most weeknights, and the eighteen-foot arched glass façade and cast-iron chandeliers make the space itself as much a destination as the inventory.

10. Word Up Community Bookshop/Librería Comunitaria

📍 Location: 2113 Amsterdam Avenue — Washington Heights, Manhattan | 🌐 Website: Word Up Community Bookshop | Phone: [347] 688-4456 | Hours: Tuesday–Wednesday, 12 PM–8 PM; Thursday–Saturday, 12 PM–6 PM; Sunday–Monday [Closed]

Word Up started as a pop-up in June 2011, organized by Veronica Santiago Liu, and has since become a permanent, volunteer-run fixture staffed by dozens of uptown residents rather than paid employees. It runs on a cooperative, cross-cultural model built around community education and literary programming.

A First Friday open mic combining poetry, storytelling, dance, and music has become a neighborhood fixture, and partnerships with local schools organize education fairs and after-school programming that extend well beyond a typical bookstore’s scope.

11. Book Culture

📍 Location: 536 West 112th Street & 2915 Broadway — Morningside Heights, Manhattan; 26-09 Jackson Avenue — Long Island City, Queens | 🌐 Website: Book Culture

What began as Labyrinth Books in 1997 became Book Culture in 2007, when founder Chris Doeblin bought out his original partner. A second Morningside Heights location on Broadway followed in 2009, backed by Columbia University and the surrounding community, and the chain has since expanded into Long Island City, Queens.

The customer base still skews heavily toward students and neighborhood locals rather than tourists, which keeps the inventory truly tied to what the surrounding community is actually reading, and coursebook service for Columbia students remains a core part of the business each fall.

12. Sister’s Uptown Bookstore

📍 Location: 1942 Amsterdam Avenue — Washington Heights, Manhattan | 🌐 Website: Sister’s Uptown Bookstore | Phone: [212] 862-3680 | Hours: Tuesday–Saturday, 12 PM–6 PM

Janifer P. Wilson opened Sister’s Uptown on New Year’s Day 2000 under the motto “Knowledge is key,” and it now runs as a mother-daughter operation with her daughter, Kori Wilson, alongside her. It functions as both a bookstore and a community resource center built explicitly around African-American authors.

Separate book clubs for children and adults run alongside a weekly P.R.E.P. program [Promoting Responsible Enthusiastic Pupils] aimed at supporting local students, making this one of the few Manhattan bookstores where advocacy for Black authors is the organizing principle rather than one section among many.

13. Sweet Pickle Books

📍 Location: 47 Orchard Street — Lower East Side, Manhattan | 🌐 Website: Sweet Pickle Books | Phone: [646] 649-2484 | Hours: Monday–Saturday, 10 AM–9 PM; Sunday, 10 AM–8 PM

Leigh Altshuler, formerly the communications director at the Strand, lost her job at the McKittrick Hotel during the pandemic and opened Sweet Pickle Books in November 2020 with 360 jars of pickles she preserved herself. Trade in any four books and walk out with a jar, Double Dill Spears, Bread & Butter, Big Jar of Dill, or Big Jar of Spicy.

Altshuler has Jewish heritage and drew a direct line between books and pickles given the Lower East Side’s history as a Jewish neighborhood once home to nearly three thousand pickle vendors. The shop also sells tote bags, tees, and other pickle-themed goods alongside the books.

Top Picks Bookstores in Brooklyn

14. Dear Friend Books

📍 Location: 343A Tompkins Avenue — Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn | 🌐 Website: Dear Friend Books | Hours: Monday–Friday, 4 PM–11 PM; Saturday–Sunday, 11 AM–11 PM

Dear Friend Books pairs a curated, clutter-free selection with a backyard and indoor bar, so a visit can run from browsing straight into a drink without changing venues. Staff lean into hands-on recommendations rather than letting shoppers wander unassisted.

The bar setup makes this one of the more social entries on this list, better suited to an afternoon with a friend than a solo browsing trip.

15. Books Are Magic

📍 Location: 225 Smith Street — Carroll Gardens; 122 Montague Street — Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn | 🌐 Website: Books Are Magic | Phone: [718] 246-2665 | Hours: Daily, 10 AM–6 PM

Novelist Emma Straub and her husband opened Books Are Magic on May 1, 2017, after Cobble Hill’s longtime BookCourt closed and sold its building. Opening day drew writers including Phil Klay and Jazmine Hughes, and the store has run as a true literary hub since, not just a shop that happens to host events.

A second location opened on Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights in 2022, after the Brooklyn Heights Association pushed for a bookstore to help revitalize a stretch of the neighborhood with rising vacancies. Both locations run a steady schedule of readings for established and emerging writers alike.

16. Greenlight Bookstore

📍 Location: 686 Fulton Street — Fort Greene, Brooklyn | 🌐 Website: Greenlight Bookstore | Phone: [718] 246-0200 | Hours: Daily, 10 AM–10 PM

Jessica Stockton Bagnulo and Rebecca Fitting opened Greenlight in 2009 with help from a neighborhood lending program, and it has run as a Fort Greene anchor since, partnered with BAM for programming. A second Prospect Lefferts Gardens location closed in 2023 due to financial pressure, leaving Fulton Street as the flagship.

New fiction, secondhand titles, and digital audiobooks all sit alongside a full calendar of community readings and signings, and Greenlight participates in Albertine’s French Book Corner network alongside its regular English-language stock.

17. PowerHouse Arena

📍 Location: 28 Adams Street — Dumbo, Brooklyn | 🌐 Website: PowerHouse Arena | Phone: [718] 666-3049 | Hours: Monday–Friday, 11 AM–7 PM; Saturday–Sunday, 10 AM–7 PM

Founder Daniel Power established PowerHouse Books as an independent art-book publisher in Manhattan in 1995 and moved the growing company to Dumbo in 2006. PowerHouse Arena now runs as both a gallery-meets-bookstore and event space, with expansive glass windows framing East River views toward the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges.

The space has hosted launches and readings from Pulitzer winners and major literary names for years. PowerHouse’s original Park Slope offshoot has closed, but the Dumbo flagship remains open alongside newer sister locations in Industry City and at Columbus Circle in Manhattan.

18. Community Bookstore

📍 Location: 143 7th Avenue — Park Slope, Brooklyn | 🌐 Website: Community Bookstore | Phone: [718] 783-3075 | Hours: Monday–Saturday, 10 AM–7 PM; Sunday, 10 AM–6 PM

Susan and John Scioli opened Community Bookstore in 1971, making it Brooklyn’s oldest continuously operating bookshop, built on early success selling The Whole Earth Catalog. When the couple separated in 1980, Susan kept the Park Slope shop and John took a second location, which he later moved to Cobble Hill and ran until closing it in 2016.

Susan’s original Park Slope store has kept going through Barnes & Noble’s 1997 arrival in the neighborhood and every retail shift since. A rotating cast of resident animals, cats, a bearded dragon, occasionally a rabbit, has become as much a reason regulars stop by as the new releases table.

19. Unnameable Books

📍 Location: 615 Vanderbilt Avenue — Prospect Heights, Brooklyn | 🌐 Website: Unnameable Books | Phone: [718] 789-1534 | Hours: Daily, 11 AM–11 PM

Adam Tobin founded this shop in 2006 as Adam’s Books, before a trademark conflict prompted the rebrand to Unnameable Books. It moved a block to its current address in 2022, and its dollar carts and used inventory sit alongside a truly strong poetry and small-press section, including work from Ugly Duckling Presse.

Cartoonist Adrian Tomine put the shop on the cover of The New Yorker in 2008, and it appeared again on the magazine’s 2024 list of staff favorite New York City bookstores. The monthly Feral Voices reading series gives emerging and unpublished writers an actual stage, rarer than it should be among indie bookstores.

20. Freebird Books & Goods

📍 Location: 123 Columbia Street — Columbia Street Waterfront, Brooklyn | 🌐 Website: Freebird Books & Goods | Phone: [718] 643-8484 | Hours: Saturdays & Sundays, 11 AM–7 PM

Freebird sits on a quiet stretch of the Brooklyn waterfront, weekend hours only, with a strong selection of New York history and culture titles alongside science and technology sections. Local presses get real shelf space here rather than being buried in a general fiction section.

A backyard café hosts regular readings and workshops, and the store’s partnership with the all-volunteer NYC Books Through Bars collective sends donated reading material to incarcerated people nationwide.

21. McNally Jackson Books

📍 Location: SoHo, Rockefeller Center, South Street Seaport, Williamsburg, and Downtown Brooklyn [City Point, 445 Albee Square] | 🌐 Website: McNally Jackson Books

Sarah McNally, whose parents founded Canada’s McNally Robinson chain, opened her first New York store in 2004. The SoHo flagship nearly closed in 2019 when its landlord proposed a big rent hike, but McNally negotiated a gentler increase and expanded instead, adding the City Point and Seaport locations that same year.

The company now runs five stores across Manhattan and Brooklyn alongside McNally Editions, a publishing imprint devoted to reviving out-of-print titles. New York magazine has called McNally Jackson the city’s third-largest book buyer after Barnes & Noble and the Strand, and in-house Espresso Book Machines print out-of-print titles on demand for anyone who strikes out on the shelves.

Best Specialty Bookstore in the Bronx

22. The Lit. Bar

📍 Location: 131 Alexander Avenue — Mott Haven, Bronx | 🌐 Website: The Lit. Bar | Phone: [347] 955-3610 | Hours: Tuesday–Thursday, 2 PM–7 PM; Friday–Saturday, 2 PM–8 PM

Noëlle Santos opened The Lit. Bar on April 27, 2019, National Independent Bookstore Day, after the Bronx spent years without a general-interest bookstore. It pairs a curated fiction, history, and poetry selection with an on-site wine bar, a combination that has made it a true neighborhood anchor rather than a novelty.

Regular events and a loyal local following have kept it running as one of the borough’s few dedicated literary spaces, and it remains a point of civic pride for a neighborhood that had gone without one for years before Santos opened it.

Independent Bookstore in Queens

23. Astoria Bookshop

📍 Location: 36-19 30th Street — Astoria, Queens | 🌐 Website: Astoria Bookshop | Phone: [718] 278-2665 | Hours: Daily, 11 AM–7 PM

Lexi Beach and her wife, Connie Rourke, opened Astoria Bookshop in 2013 after Beach, then working in publishing, kept hearing that the neighborhood lacked a real bookstore. It moved to a larger storefront nearby in August 2023, giving the shop room for a bigger children’s section and event space.

Author events have brought in Roxane Gay and Judy Blume among others, and staff recommendations lean heavily into personalized suggestions rather than a one-size-fits-all shelf talker approach. Book clubs and local-writer readings keep the shop tied closely to the neighborhood it was built for.

Twenty-Three Bookstores, Five Boroughs

Every store on this list survives the same way independent bookstores always have: by being specific enough, and good enough, that Amazon and Barnes & Noble simply cannot replicate the experience. Pick one near you this fall and see for yourself.