Three Lives & Co. Gets Another Life

Some good fucking news for a change! I got this email last night from Toby Cox, owner of Three Lives & Co. bookshop. Their building sold to a luxury developer last month and many of us were in a state of panic about their fate.



Dear Three Lives & Company Customers,

We have wonderful news to share with you – we are here to stay!

As most of you know our building recently sold and after a tenuous month-to-month situation since January we have now completed negotiations on a new lease with the new owners. I have put signature to paper. We are delighted with the cooperation we have had with the new owners, grateful for the opportunity to work out a new lease to remain in our home of thirty-three years, and we thank them for their commitment to keep Three Lives & Company in the West Village.

I would also like to thank our customers for the incredible support and amazing outpouring of appreciation we have received these recent months. Through all this uncertainty, hearing your great many well-wishes and knowing that we have so many people supporting the survival of the bookshop has made the process much easier. Your passion for Three Lives & Company is why we do what we do.

As I mentioned in our letter from June, the bookshop is doing well, on solid ground despite some tough challenges over the years, from online shopping and the proliferation of e-books to the recession of 2008. Despite these difficulties we have strived to stay true to the principles our founders stated years and years ago: maintaining a bookshop dedicated to bringing the best books to the attention of our customers, offering an interesting and eclectic selection, and artistically arranging it all in the incredible space created by Jill, Jenny and Helene when they moved to the corner of West Tenth and Waverly in 1983.

I am also deeply grateful for and incredibly proud of a staff that so ably attends to the needs of our customers and delights in sharing their passion for reading and recommending favorite books. Together we have over 85 years of bookselling experience and many more years of avid reading to share with our customers.

We look forward to serving as your bookseller for the years ahead. While we are a business that depends on the support of its customers for its success, we truly think of our shop simply as a member of the community, a thread in the warp and woof of our West Village neighborhood and of greater New York. Three Lives, as always, remains a space for conversations around the book, for enthusing over the joys of reading, and for the spontaneous and unscripted interaction among fellow customers that take place every day.

It has been a long road for us all, my staff, our customers, the community, but we can now celebrate Three Lives & Company remaining in place. Please stop by and join in on our revelry. And, as always, let’s talk books; this fall is a glorious feast of wonderful new titles.

Sincerely,
Toby Cox