When Andreas Brown, owner of the Gotham Book Mart, put his five-story building in the Diamond District up for sale three years ago, he received a call from Woody Allen the following day. Might the store’s famous sign be on the market, Mr. Allen’s secretary asked?

The metal masterpiece, which announces that “Wise Men Fish Here” in a design by the artist John Held Jr., was not for sale then, and it won’t be in the near future, either. Once its dents have been smoothed out, it will adorn Mr. Brown’s new shop on 16 East 46th St., just a block from where it had beckoned casual browsers, budding artists, and literary legends to the city’s finest collection of contemporary fiction, poetry and drama for 58 years.

Mr. Held Jr. created the sign for Frances Steloff, who founded Gotham in 1920 and remained a presence there until she died at the age of 101. He was an inimitable illustrator and cartoonist, and his talents earned him a fortune in the Roaring Twenties before the Great Depression took it all back.

A child prodigy, he began selling cartoons as early as age 9 or 10 and took a full-time job as a sports cartoonist in Utah at the age of 16. In his heyday in New York, he drew satirical cartoons of bobbed-haired flappers and similar icons of the era for The New Yorker, Esquire, and numerous other magazines.

In 1935, he designed the costumes and sets for George Balanchine’s ill-received production of “Alma Mater,” a satire of college told through a ballet about football. Before he died in 1958, Mr. Held Jr. tried his hand at watercolors, sculpture, and works of iron – none more famous than “Wise Men.”

The sign, though, is the second one that Mr. Held Jr. built for Gotham. Mr. Brown, who purchased Gotham from Ms. Steloff in 1967, said he was uncertain of the details, but legend has it that someone walked off with the first “Wise Men” sign and never returned it, likely in the 1940s. That original sign was never found, and Mr. Brown said Ms. Steloff commissioned the artist to make another one. It has been synonymous with the store ever since.

At Mr. Brown’s new shop, “Wise Men” will hang high between two second-floor windows, up and away from passing thieves. There, it will keep watch over what was once the H.P. Kraus bookstore, a repository for pre-19th-century literature that closed last year. The five-story building offers twice as much space to display Gotham’s out-of-print books and private libraries, many of which had been stowed away in storage, oftentimes off premises. “I like to say it was like having a size-16 foot and wearing a size eight shoe,” Mr. Brown says of the old store.

Mr. Brown, who is 71, took 32 trips through the rough-and-tumble world of Manhattan real estate before uncovering the Kraus store, and he said he more than once thought about calling it quits. The old Gotham attracted 122 suitors before fetching $7.2 million last year from a diamond merchant, and it would have been easy for Mr. Brown to decide that he had sold his last book.

Instead, as he gives a tour of the store, Mr. Brown sounds like a man drawn to a new adventure, just as he was lured from San Diego and his training as a lawyer to take over Gotham. “We think we can do a better job of what we enjoy doing,” he says. “We have exceptional stuff, and it’s not out for anyone to see. We’re looking forward to putting it on the shelves.”