"The store has an amazing selection of books despite its small size."
(in 14 reviews)
"good selection, nice staff and well chosen displays."
(in 20 reviews)
Loading...
Three Lives & Company
Rating Details »
Category: Bookstores [Edit]
Neighborhood: West Village154 W 10th St
(between 19th St & 20th St)
New York, NY 10011
(212) 741-2069
- Nearest Transit:
-
Christopher St (1)
9th Street (PATH)
W 4th St (A, C, E, B, D, F, V)
- Price Range:
-
$$
- Accepts Credit Cards:
- Yes
- Parking:
- Street
- Wheelchair Accessible:
- No
Sponsored Result
You Might Also Consider
Strand Book Store
- 427 reviews
- Neighborhood:
- Greenwich Village
"This is one of my favorite bookstores in the world. With three floors, 10 foot-high stacks and a seemingly endless number of books, I could…" read more »
27 reviews for Three Lives & Company
Review Highlights
I've popped in here a couple times just walking around the neighborhood and am always surprised at the amount of time I can spend browsing this seemingly tiny bookstore. They pack a lot of interesting books into this corner shop. The staff is friendly, the selection of reading material is wide and they are very willing to order a book for you if you cannot find what you are looking for on the shelves.
I also really like that they seem to be open later than most stores of this kind during the week!
This store is so wonderful - it immediately feels like you've walked into someone's personal library. The small of books is so pungent. The lamps give it a personal library feel as well as the wood shelves. The store has an amazing selection of books despite its small size. It has some of the best sellers, whose covers are displayed in the front window, but inside is a much more interesting and unique selection of books. The store seems to specialize in fiction, but there are plenty of nonfiction books as well as specialty books. I think there are a lot of great gift ideas in here, too. Prices are pretty much what you'd expect in an independent bookstore.
Three Lives & Co. is a great neighborhood bookstore with a friendly staff and a decent selection of reads (for its small size). If I still lived in this neighborhood, I would frequent this spot more often for texts and tomes for all my bibliophiles.
When you're in the West Village, you should definitely stop by.
It takes some time to find the good local bookstores in any city.
Great selection, well displayed. friendly staff.
I will certainly be back to buy some books for some travel reading.
Cute little bookstore with great selection if you're in the West Village.
What a marvelous bookstore. While small in stature, its breadth of books is magnificent. I walked in and perused for an hour before settling on my selection. However, if free from time constraints, I could easily spend hours perusing their stacks.
While they will not have as large as a selection as your local B&N, Three Lives offers a sense of camaraderie with the other customers as well as the feeling that the staff really values you. They have about three rather large tables stacked with piles of books. The walls are line with shelves and there are ledges along the bottom with even more books. It's a book lover's paradise.
Three Lives is a bookstore that I will return to.
wide selection of books. the staff are cool..
Quaint friendly little place with a smartly chosen selection across genres. Really evokes the village of yore, or what I'd like to think it was.
In her seminal work on pain, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Elaine Scarry has a tremendously moving passage about the function of rooms in our lives:
"It [the room] is, on the one hand, an enlargement of the body: it keeps warm and safe the individual it houses in the same way the body encloses and protects the individual within; like the body, its walls put boundaries around the self preventing undifferentiated contact with the world, yet in its windows and doors, crude versions of the senses, it enables the self to move out into the world and allows that world to enter. But while the room is a magnification of the body, it is simultaneously a miniaturization of the world, of civilization."
If I were to choose one room to encompass my internal self, it would have to be Three Lives. The structure of this bookstore is perfect; while small enough to be only one room, there are nooks and crannies where one can sit and browse through their judicious selection of literature. The wood paneling gives an old-fashioned Dickensenian feel to the place, and indeed, there is an older and more traditional approach to books here. You will find only the best books here selected by a knowledgable staff.
Go in there and buy Elaine Scarry's Body in Pain to read more of her amazing work, or her smaller, yet no less significant, book On Beauty. Or better yet, ask one of their staff for a recommendation...they won't steer you wrong.
GREAT independant bookstore, I happened to be in this neighborhood yesterday and after reading the reviews, I decided to stop in and check it out myself and the reviews are spot-on. Really easy going, relaxed atmosphere, West-Village vibe, well-lit, a true bibliophile's paradise, clean, knowledgable and well-read staff, and not a whiff of cookie-cutter corporatism decor anywhere.
I know if I lived inthis area, this would be where I'd be buying my books all the time.
Worth it!
Every other bookstore, perhaps save Elliott Bay Books in Seattle or City Lights in San Francisco, makes me long to live in New York simply to drop by Three Lives and Company.
Hard to overstate my love for this place.
An amazing little bookstore with a conservative, but very tasteful selection. I came here with friends one day in the springtime, and we spent a good 45 minutes just browsing and soaking in the atmosphere.
I suppose you could find books for cheaper elsewhere, like http://amazon.com, but I wouldn't mind paying a little extra to support a place like this.
Selection can be limited but I guess you could also say it is culled - so that may not be a bad thing. Easy to find yourself perusing for close to an hour... A wonderful part of the neighborhood.
You'll find a larger selection and pay less at any one of the bookstore chains, but there's much to be said for patronizing a shop that looks like it belongs in an old-time movie. A charming setting and a friendly staff make this a nice place to browse and hopefully buy. It's a throwback to a gentler age that's worth supporting, and worthy of five stars for having the gumption to battle the big guys.
Close your eyes and picture the perfect bookstore. It probably has floor to ceiling shelves filled with everything from paperback literature classics to the latest hard-cover non-fiction. It probably has table after table of staff recommendations, and a bright, friendly and knowledgeable staff to go along with them. Is it big enough to have lots of options but small enough to feel intimate and cozy? Is it bathed in glossy pinewood and warm golden light? Does it host authors big and small? Always make you feel welcome but never bothers you while you're browsing? Now open your eyes, get on the subway, and head to Three Lives.
Three Lives and Company is the shop around the corner. It is a wonderful little bookshop where you will always end up in an intriguing conversation with a stranger. The staff is brilliant and knows everything. They specialize in Women's Lit. but have a good selection of other genres as well.
A wonderful classic bookstore filled with treasures. I always find books that I never heard of here as well as books I have always wanted to (or meant to) read. The staff are all intelligent, friendly, and ready to help you if you need it, but they give you space to browse and explore if that is what you want. They are all great readers, of course, so they give great recommendations. I buy all of my books here . I love to buy gifts here as well. They often have book signings. Just a wonderful place and one of my all-time favorite bookstores.
Simply one of the best independent bookshops in NYC, if not the best.
I love ducking into Three Lives on a winter evening, where you can warm up as you leaf through some wonderful book you've never heard of. the cozy space and impeccable selection makes this my favorite bookstore on earth.
Three Lives is just the sort of store that I hope will never close no matter how many superchains try to wipe it out. A pleasant place to buy a novel that will impress other people when they see you reading it. The shop is notable not only for a smart selection of literature, but for a surprisingly busy roster of author events that seem to be quite high-profile despite the place's small size.
A perfect bookstore. They have a great selection and most likely you'll walk out with something that you didn't quite expect, but that's the beauty of a perfect bookstore!
exactly what i want in a bookstore. good selection, nice staff and well chosen displays. its not barnes and noble but i would rather go here any day of the week.
Best. Bookstore. Ever.
I buy more books here of the fascinating funky kind than anywhere else. Wonderful selection of fiction - all it needs is a dog or a cat snoozing in the corner and then it would be the most perfect bookstore ever. LOVE IT.
I was looking for the Lonely Planet for France, and I heard such great reviews about this place, so I went out of my way to check it out. I thought it was very nice and quaint and despite being small, it had a great selection of relevant books. I found my book. I had plenty of time to just sit there and look over it, no one bothered me as me and my friend just sat there looking it over. I ended up buying it despite having to pay full price, which you never have to do anymore for any book thanks to http://Amazon.com. My friend said the salesperson was hitting on me, but I thought he was just being nice.
Save the independent book shops! Sure, that sounds like a cry from the painfully sappy movie You've Got Mail, but it's a valiant cry. That's why everyone should swing by Three Lives. A quaint little shop that has an eclectic collection of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and travel books. The shelves have a little bit of everything and while you may not find many copies of one book, you'll find many different books by various writers. They also have some interesting events every month which means you can get a book signed, meet a writer, and get free cookies, too! The staff is friendly and helpful. They don't mind if you plop down on one of the two benches and thumb through three or thirty volumes for an hour. The only drawback is that you have to navigate the store blindly--a lack of signage as to what's memoir, what's fiction, and what's in between. Though small, Three Lives by far surpasses the B&N a few blocks away.
Gertrude Stein is cool, therefore, so is this store. Wandering shelf to shelf is an adventure in itself.
my favorite, with an interesting selection of books, and a great, cozy, small, inviting store layout on a quiet corner in the west village. it's not overwhelming, the owners have great taste, and it just feels like a very literate, curious, unpretentious, quiet little bookshop. i love this place.
