The Strand and Book Row: A History

History of the Strand on Dipity.

The Strand Bookstore is now ubiquitous with the common notion of the used bookstore. Walking past the 18 mile, several building store, its imposing largeness would make you think that the Strand has always been the large, well known bookstore that every book fiend flocks to while in New York. This is of course not the case, as the Strand has a history as rich and large as the insides of its large store.

If you take the time to look around the Strand bookstore with Google street view, you can see the main area’s of Greenwich Village, full of independent stores, coffee shops and movie theaters. The Strands wrap around banner has become as well known as the store itself. It gives the book lover just a taste of how long the bookstore really is. However, what many people do not know is that the Strand’s current location is not its original location.

The Strand was started in 1927, by founded by Benjamin Bass on 4th Avenue. At the time, the Strand would have not stood out solely own its own merits, for a very good reason. The Strand was located on Book Row, a collection of streets “six blocks from Union Square to Astor Place in Manhattan, a corridor of three dozen shops selling used books” (The New York Times). Walking into the shops one by one could take over a week, as there was much to see and many books to buy. Interestingly enough, many of the booksellers on book row were not like the jovial Professor that we see in the novel Parnassus on Wheels, but had a much more unlikable temperament, as shown in the video below.

 

“They hated you,” says Fran Leibowitz in the video above, “it was like you had broken into their house.”

Sadly, yet unsurprisingly, the Strand is the last of all of these used bookstores that exists today.

“I think what happened to Book Row” says current Strand owner Fred Bass, “is that it was run by a lot of interesting, strong, self centered individuals, including my dad, and very few of them imparted knowledge to the younger generation.”

The Strand in its original location in Book Row
The Strand on Book Row

Laura Miller writes in her book Reluctant Capitalists that “a booksellers judgement about what books to carry and sell is shaped by the extent at which she sees herself as rightfully taking an active role in guiding the reading of her customers” (55). Its increasingly obvious that most of the booksellers on book row did not subscribe to the idea of guiding their readers.

“The sort of thing that goes on now at Barnes and Nobel, where they give you service with a smile and have coffee,” says Marvin Mondlind, the estate book buyer for Strand, “old Book Row people would have just scorned the whole thing. We’re selling books here, and if people don’t want old books we don’t want them here.”

The original Book Row
The original Book Row

The days of Book Row have ended, and now there are less then ten used bookstores in New York City. However, Benjamin Bass did not seem to be as overwhelmed with the snobbish attitude of his bookselling peers. Benjamin was “twenty-five years old when he began his modest used bookstore. An entrepreneur at heart and a reader by nature, this erudite man began with $300 dollars of his own and $300 dollars that he borrowed from a friend” (Strand website). Unlike his fellow bookstore owners, who would throw you out of their shops for no reason whatsoever, Ben “create a place where books would be loved, and book lovers could congregate” (Strand website).

He hired his son Fred to start working at the store while Fred was still in high school, where Fred would develop a love for the trade and selling of books. After serving a tour in Armed Forces, Fred joined his father working at the Strand, and would eventually take over the business when his father retired. Like how Christopher Morley feels, Fred Bass seems to consider it his “duty and a privilege” to sell books (46).

It would be soon after Fred tool over the Strand that the once powerful Book Row would begin to disappear. In 1958, the Strand lost its lease due to their landlord dying, and the small bookshop could no longer afford to stay in their current location.

”My rent tripled,” said Fred Bass, talking to the New York Times. ”But I bit the bullet and I made the deal. If I was 10 or 15 years older I might have quit. But I’ve got a lot of young people. I’ve got an organization here.’’

The store then moved to its current location on 12th and Broadway, continuing its progression as the only used bookstore left from Book Row. As the bookstore continued its transformation, so did the surrounding neighborhood of Greenwich Village. It would be around this time that the village would become known as an artist bohemia. After the horrors American youth had seen in WWII, a new kind of youth was emerging from the shadows.

As profiled in a 1951 TIME magazine profile on American youth:

“Some are smoking marijuana; some are dying in Korea. Some are going to college with their wives; some are making $400 a week in television. Some are sure they will be blown to bits by the atom bomb. Some pray. Some are raising the highest towers and running the fastest machines in the world. Some wear blue jeans; some wear Dior gowns. Some want to vote the straight Republican ticket. Some want to fly to the moon.”

images-1

Many of the more artistically and book inclined youth were coming to Greenwich, clashing with the original Italian neighborhood. The “image of the Village as the heart of New York subculture, the neighborhood still retained a significant immigrant element. Though the Italian immigrant population of the Village experienced a steady decline starting after World War I, by 1960 there were still nearly 9,000 persons of Italian birth and parentage in the South Village.” Conflict between the Italians and the new bohemians was very common, with many fights breaking out.

“I had seen plenty of [racism] in the Village of 1953-54,” said Diane Di Prima, “when Italians would swarm up MacDougal Street en masse from below Bleecker to threaten or wipe out a Black man for coming to the Village with a white woman”

The new bohemians, also known as the Beat generation, helped the Strand create its notoriety as a mecca for book lovers. As the bohemians grew is size, so did the store. by 1973, plans to remodel the store to make it bigger, growing total space to 21,000 square feet. By 1979 the major remodels would be completed, and by 1997 the Bass family would buy the building for $8.2 million, cementing their place forever among Greenwich village as one of the few used bookstores that was not going to disappear.

Nancy Bass and Fred Bass
Nancy Bass and Fred Bass

Around 1987 the Strand tradition of keeping the business in the family would continue when Fred’s daughter, Nancy Bass, would join the business to co-manage the store with her father. Nancy, like her father, grew up in the bookstore, her fist job being sharpening pencils for the Strand Staff at the age of six. Though she tried to work at a different place of business then her father after college, “books were in her blood,” and eventually she followed her father to start working at the Strand. She now oversees the behind the scenes business at the Strand, while Fred remains mostly up front, interacting and forming relationships with customers, both long time and new.

The Strand bookstore has made a truly remarkable transformations, being once a small bookshop among many to the largest used bookstore in the world, carrying over 2.5 million books, as well as other merchandise. Its obvious, looking at the history of the Strand and other stores on Book Row, that the Strand knew what other booksellers did not: that forming a relationship with ones customer is more important that ones snobbery when it comes to books.

Sources:

Images:

The Strand on Book Row: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2007/06/the_strand_turns_80.html

Book Row: https://nyhistorywalks.wordpress.com/2012/02/20/the-books-of-new-york-past/

Greenwich Village: http://www.heartofavagabond.com/things-new-york-counter-culture-bohemia-greenwich-village/

Fred and Nancy Bass: http://www.zimbio.com/photos/Nancy+Bass+Wyden/Fred+Bass

Maps:

Google Maps: The Strand Bookstore

Text:

Print: Morley, Christopher. Ex Libris Carissimis. New York: A.S. Barnes & Company, Inc

Print. Miller, Laura J. Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

Book Row Is Gone, But Used Bookshops Aren’t: http://www.nytimes.com/1988/03/13/nyregion/book-row-is-gone-but-used-bookshops-aren-t.html

The Late 20th Century (1950-1999): http://creatingdigitalhistory.wikidot.com/late20thc

STRAND BOOKSTORE: Crain New York Business: http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA208046463&v=2.1&u=susqu_main&it=r&p=ITOF&sw=w&asid=cfecb3922c81bed86bf2ad2d93ccb4fd

Strand History: http://www.strandbooks.com/strand-history

Timeline:

History of the Strand on Dipity

Video:

Book Row: The history of the Strand Bookstore with Fran Lebowitz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Wl9zhC-snY

The Sole Survivor: From the Past and On Into the Future

 

Since it was founded in 1927, The Strand has had a track history of survival and does not seem to be going anywhere anytime soon. There is a statistic that says 70% of family owned businesses will fail in the second generation of family dissent and 50% in the third. (Rosen) However, The Strand, as a family owned business through and through, is one of those that seems it will succeed. Nancy Bass, the third generation and granddaughter of the store’s original owner, Ben Bass, now co-owns the store with her father Fred.

Nancy+Bass+Wyden+Fred+Bass+Aperture+Foundation+4q6-uj85fsCl
This photo of Nancy and Fred was taken at the Strand Book Store in New York City on November 19, 2008. (Photo by Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images)

The Strand first started out on the famous “Book Row” on Fourth Avenue, which over its course of time housed at least 47 other bookstores, stretching from Union Square to Astor Place. The bookstores along the avenue had their fair share of eccentric customers, as a 1944 article from The Saturday Evening Post explains. However, even the strangest of these customers found a home among the shelves of these many bookstores and were welcomed to stay and browse. Today, The Strand remains conducive to this type of bookselling environment. With 18 miles of books upon shelves, all are sure to find something interesting, even if they only end up dusting off its cover and continuing on. “People love this store because it’s a browser’s paradise. Those eight miles are now over 18, but the thrill of getting lost in the stacks persists,” writes Rachel Deahl from Publisher’s Weekly. Art Spiegalman, a loyal customer of The Strand calls the feeling of getting lost among the rows, “The Strand Stupor.”

Secondhand bookstores on Lower Fourth Avenue
Customers browse outdoor shelves of secondhand bookstores along Fourth Avenue. (Photo by Andreas Feininger)

Today The Strand is known as the sole survivor of Book Row. What has made the store so successful when so many others around it had failed, and continue to fail? The trick of the trade must run in the family. Fred Bass started working in the store alongside his father Ben at age 13, and later, after completing a tour of duty in the Armed Forces, took ownership in the year 1956. (www.strandbooks.com) Not too long after, Fred moved the store to it’s present main location on Broadway, where it now claims around 55,000 square feet of space.

Besides this massive location, The Strand also had an Annex located at 95 Fulton Street but presently, the location has been closed for about seven years. Many of its customers were surprised and upset to see the store go, as it was seen as more convenient and, to some, even friendlier than the main store. “The numbers just didn’t add up,” Bass said in an article in The Downtown Express. “It was a great store. We sold a lot of books. I’m sad to see the store going because it was doing very well, but given the circumstances it wasn’t worth it to stay in that location.” This only goes to show how delicate the balance is for bookstores, especially independent ones in areas where rent is pricey.

On nicer days, the store continues to have a few kiosks in Central Park and around the city for passers-by to peruse. The Strand is often called one of the most “beloved” bookshops in the city by New Yorkers and non-city folk as well. Throughout its history, it has been able to route its footing throughout the East Village community of Manhattan and beyond. While some previous customers and even previous employers claim that the store environment is not always the friendliest, it is hard to believe that a store so big would not have room, and a book or two, for everyone genuinely interested in books and reading.

Inwood-Academy-for-Leadership-Students june 6 2014
Fifth and sixth graders from the Inwood Academy for Leadership during a visit to The Strand on June 6, 2014. (Photo from www.strandbooks.com)

“…The transaction between the bookseller and the bookbuyer remains essentially unchanged as the free passage of ideas from the maker of them to the reader,” writes John Tebbel in the first chapter of A History of Bookselling in the United States. “As the middleman in this exchange, the bookseller is not only the conduit between author and audience, but in the conduct of his business he is in a position to influence that relationship profoundly, whether for good or ill.” This is something that co-owners Fred and Nancy Bass surely understand, and it was something that Ben Bass must have understood, too. In its almost 88 years of existence, The Strand has been able to establish a relationship with its customers and its community to ensure that it would be successful.strand_discountshelf_erinontherun

According to the 2010 census, close to 42% of the area’s population receives some type of financial help from the government. The Strand does not try to exclude these people. While their rarest of books can reach up to $45,000 in value, they have many books as low as $1, some of them located right outside of the store. They also have reviewers copies which go for 50% off their normal price. Nancy Bass claims that the store’s “most enduring aspect of the store’s success” is the good deals that a customer can find inside, or out. “Almost everything in the store’s discounted, some might even say cheap,” says Nancy Bass in a Publisher’s Weekly article from 2007. (Deahl)

“… The permanence of place and the mobility of capital are always in tension and places are constantly having to adapt to conditions beyond their boundaries,” states Tim Cresswell in chapter three of his book Place called “A Global Sense of Place.” Cresswell argues that this tension has driven the importance of a place’s identity into near obscurity, which is why chain bookstores and other businesses have become so popular and successful. The Strand has managed to keep its own unique brand and identity despite this. It did, however, begin to use technology soon after Nancy had become co-owner of the store. As so many other bookstores have developed an online presence, it was important that The Strand did, too, in order to keep up with competition.

Nancy introduced the online format for The Strand so that the store is able to continue establishing relationships with customers and its community, as well. Not only does the online format allow customers who feel uncomfortable or overwhelmed in the store setting to continue to buy books with more ease, it also provides the bookstore with a way to communicate an abundance of information about the store with its clientele. People in the community are able to rent out the bookstore for events and check the website to see what is already scheduled. In this way, the bookstore has become more than just a bookstore to its community. The online format has definitely helped to keep the store in business, as well. In 2006, around 22% of the store’s revenue was from online orders and in 2007 the percentage increased to around 27%. As online shopping has only become more and more prominent in the years since then and technology has only improved, it would be an agreeable assumption that the revenue from online purchases has only increased further.

Throughout its history, The Strand has been not only a bookstore but a cultural center where the always diverse city population could come and enjoy exploring through its many shelves, attend readings or book signings, and make purchases or sell their old books. No matter how the dynamics and population of the city had changed, the bookstore was there for its customers and ready to adapt to their needs. Today, the bookstore continues to be that place for the city’s inhabitants, and with the development of its online presence, for those outside of the city boundaries, too.

 

Sources

Text

Cresswell, Tim. Place: A Short Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. Print.

Deahl, Rachel. “At 80, the Strand Feels as Young as Ever.” Publishers Weekly 254.22 (2007): 25. ProQuest. Web. 12 Feb. 2015.

Nawotka, Edward. “Eight More Miles Of Books.” Publishers Weekly 249.41 (2002): 25. Business Source Complete. Web. 12 Feb. 2015.

Rosen, Judith. “Passing The Torch.” Publishers Weekly 253.1 (2006): 20-21. Business Source Complete. Web. 12 Feb. 2015.

Tebbel, John. “A Brief Hisory of American Bookselling.” A History of Book Publishing in the United States. New York: R.R. Bowker, 1972. 7. Print.

Woodman, James S. “Stranded by Construction, Book Store Will Close Its Doors.” Downtown Express. Community Media LLC, 27 June 2008. Web. 15 Feb. 2015.

Websites

www.strandbooks.com

http://www.nyc.gov

Images

http://www.strandbooks.com/about-strand_event-photos/

http://www.zimbio.com/photos/Nancy+Bass+Wyden/Fred+Bass

http://www.downtownexpress.com/de_269/strandedbyconstruction.html

http://nymag.com/fashion/lookbook/34712/index2.html

https://nyhistorywalks.wordpress.com/tag/strand-books/

http://blibiomania.blogspot.com/2014/08/sebo-em-nova-iorque-second-hand-books.html

http://erinontherun.com/2014/09/

18 Miles of Books: Something for Everyone

The Strand Bookstore, with its unmistakable red awning, has its main location at 828 Broadway (& 12th Street) in New York City. Nestled in between the borders of Manhattan’s Greenwich Village and East Village (the territory which the store’s location favors) the Strand is home to “18 Miles of New, Used, and Rare” books, as well as to many New Yorkers. According to the 2010 Census, the East Village alone has approximately 24,527 housing units among which their population of roughly 43,755 people live, the majority of them aged from 25-34 years old, and that’s only a portion of the Strand’s potential customers. The Strand has had this location as its home since 1957, when Fred Bass, the son of the store’s original owner Ben, moved the store just around the corner from its original location on Fourth Avenue. The Strand itself has been in business since 1927 and is known as the “Sole survivor of Book Row.”

 

With its long-standing history, the Strand has been a home to book lovers of all types for around 88 years now. The store carries a little bit of everything for everyone, catering to the diverse interests for those living in or visiting the diverse city of New York. According to Tim Cresswell, the Lower East Side of Manhattan, which East Village is part of, “has been known as a place of successive immigrant groups- Irish, Jewish, German, Italian, Eastern European, Haitian, Puerto Rican, Chinese.” The majority of the East Village’s population, around 42,536 people, identify as one race, while only around 1,219 people identify as two or more races. With approximately 31,859 identifying as Caucasian, East Village is now known to be a predominantly white area. At a significantly lower number, approximately 6,419 people identify as Asian, followed by Hispanic/Latino at around 5,195 and Black/African American at around 2,719. While these are only the top three largest groups, the area is not as diverse as one might have originally thought. Though in the past few years there may have been some changes in these numbers, as they have evolved throughout history, it is not likely that the overall demographics of the area have changed too drastically. While race is not the determining factor of interests or literary preferences, it is, in some cases, one of the many influences that determine the diverse interests of an individual. This is why it’s important for a bookstore in the city to carry a little bit of everything, even outside of books.

The Strand carries other goods such as coffee mugs, totes, and even onesies, though this merchandise tends to remain relevant to literature or to the store. In this regard, the Strand stands firm in its footing as a location for book lovers which many other bookstores throughout history have been unable to do successfully. “Bookstores, in fact, were really the first drugstores, as we know them now,” writes John Tebbel in the first chapter of his book, A History of Book Publishing in the United States. It has proved difficult for bookstores to survive only selling books, especially in locations which require the bookstore to pay a high rent. Luckily for the Strand, a densely populated area is likely to have many readers with many different interests. Plus, when the surrounding area is taken into consideration, it is clear to see certain connections throughout the community which allow the store to thrive, as well as some which may not.

New York University and The Cooper Union, both in relatively close proximity to the Strand, are home to thousands of bright-eyed students craving knowledge. Without a doubt, the relationship between the schools and the Strand is a symbiotic one. The students bring business; The Strand houses a plethora of knowledge-filled books, ready to be cracked open. On the other hand, Barnes and Noble is just a tad farther and university students may feel more comfortable in the familiar, standardized setting that it has to offer. According to Laura J. Miller, author of Reluctant Capitalists, Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption, chain bookstores such as Barnes and Noble or Waldenbooks “communicated that they were informal places welcome to all by standardizing the interiors from one outlet to another.”

Though the Strand may offer a multitude of books for many different people, some may still find it intimidating due to its atmosphere and size, and may instead choose to go the extra distance to Barnes and Noble. “Because of a continuing association of books with education and an attendant stratification system,” writes Miller, “any bookstore is vulnerable to being perceived as an elite enterprise.” It is possible that some may shy away from the Strand then, with its determination to claim its identity as a store for lovers of literature. Or, some may simply stick to perusing the discount racks outside where they feel more comfortable. Regardless, the Strand seems to have remained an integral part of the community and probably won’t be going anywhere anytime soon. Customers can peruse the many aisles at their leisure or stop by for one of the many events being held. They can even request to host one of their own. While in the area, they can check out Second Hand Rose Music to go along with their new (or used) books and grab a bite to eat at one of the many restaurants in the area, offering a vast range of food types from Asian to Mexican and everything in between. The Strand, despite any competition, is a home within a home for book lovers of all types, and is probably more welcoming than those who are intimidated by it believe it to be.

 

Sources

Images/Maps

http://www.google.com/maps

Text

Cresswell, Tim. Place: A Short Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. Print.

Miller, Laura J. Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption. Chicago: U of Chicago, 2006. Print.

Tebbel, John. “A Brief Hisory of American Bookselling.” A History of Book Publishing in the United States. New York: R.R. Bowker, 1972. 7. Print.

Websites

http://www.strandbooks.com

http://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/union-square-park