Bigelow's big time; Fueled by nineteenth-century inspiration, Manhattan's favorite apothecary branches out.

Byline: Sarah Brown

This book is like a Who's Who of New York," says Ian Ginsberg, gently lifting the dusty, dog-eared cover of a giant ledger whose thick, yellowed pages barely hold together. Inside, written in elegant black script-the kind of deft penmanship that would require a professional calligrapher these days-is the name of Mark Twain, among others. It's a record of his house account, circa 1906, at C. O. Bigelow.

Did you know that Thomas Edison, legend has it, ran to Bigelow for treatment after burning his finger on a certain lightbulb? Eleanor Roosevelt, who lived in the neighborhood on Washington Square, was a regular customer, too. In fact, since the chemist Clarence O. Bigelow opened shop in Greenwich Village in 1838, New Yorkers-from the average to the extraordinary-have relied upon Bigelow as the place to fill prescriptions, stock up on household staples (and, in the 1950s, pints of Louis Sherry ice cream from the soda fountain), and browse the ever-expanding, always interesting inventory of French hand-milled soaps and Italian toothpaste. Ginsberg, whose pharmacist grandfather bought the business in 1939 and whose family has run it ever since, has dedicated most of his adult life to continuing the tradition started so many years ago, with an eye on both the future and the past.

Today we're in a warehouse somewhere on Long Island rummaging through boxes. Hundreds of boxes. From beautiful hand-tooled glass bottles in every shape and size to vintage balancing scales, mortars and pestles, and even an old tablet-maker, 166 years of history is loosely spread across tables and stacked in glass medical cabinets, carefully cleaned and cataloged. "In the old days, everything was formulated by a doctor and made right in front of you-pills, powders, even hand lotion. And whatever it was, it went in a fancy box. Prescriptions here were wrapped like gifts," says Ginsberg, a young, with-it kind of guy whose cell phone rings to the strains of AC/DC's "You Shook Me (All Night Long)" when it's business, Lou Reed's "Sweet Jane" when his wife is calling. "You see a lot of recurring themes," he says, handing me a tiny bottle filled with even tinier pink pills, "a lot of problem-and-solution." (Which is disturbing when you consider the bottle of strychnine sitting on one shelf, and the spleen marrow below it, not to mention the ancient-looking jar containing an actual liver nearby.) Ginsberg catches me studying a vial of poison-complete with skull and crossbones on the label-that looks as if it came from Dr. Frankenstein's laboratory. "I guess they used it for compounding," he says in a cheerful, gee-whiz way.

This spring, Ginsberg's meticulous archiving is paying off: In a partnership with Bath & Body Works, he has created a new line of ...