The Strand Bookstore: A Pilgrim’s Complete Guide to New York’s Greatest Bookstore

There is a building at the corner of Broadway and East 12th Street that functions as something more than a bookstore. It is a monument. It is an argument — made in paper and ink and decades of accumulated human attention — that certain things are worth preserving. The Strand Bookstore has stood in some form since 1927, has survived the Great Depression, two World Wars, the death of Book Row, the rise of Amazon, a global pandemic, and the slow attrition that has claimed nearly every independent bookstore that once made New York City the literary capital of the world. It is, in the words of The New York Times, “the undisputed king of the city’s independent bookstores.”

For the literary pilgrim, there is no more sacred secular address in New York.

How to Find It — and Why You Need to Walk

The Strand sits at 828 Broadway, at the corner of East 12th Street, in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan — two blocks south of Union Square. The nearest subway stops are the 14th Street–Union Square station (4, 5, 6, L, N, Q, R, W trains) and the 8th Street–NYU stop on the N and R. The walk from Union Square south along Broadway takes roughly three minutes and is, if you pay attention, a walk through the ghost of what this neighborhood once was.

Fourth Avenue — the parallel street one block east — was once called Book Row. From the 1890s through the 1950s, six city blocks between Astor Place and Union Square held over three dozen used bookstores, a dense concentration of secondhand literature unlike anything that has existed before or since in an American city. The stores had names like Biblo & Tannen, Dauber & Pine, Argosy, University Place Book Shop, Weiser Antiquarian. At its peak, a person could walk these blocks and browse tens of thousands of volumes without spending a dollar. “Booksellers’ Row,” some called it. “Second-Hand Row.” The writers of Greenwich Village — and there were many — haunted these streets the way their descendants now haunt coffee shops.

By the 1960s, skyrocketing rents had killed almost every one of them. Apartments replaced the storefronts. The books scattered to estate sales, warehouses, oblivion. Only one store from the original Book Row survives today: the Strand, which moved away from Fourth Avenue in 1957 — pushed out by rent — and found its permanent home a few blocks away on Broadway. When you walk from Union Square to the Strand, you are walking a street haunted by the dead of American literary commerce. The Strand is the last one standing.

The Family That Built It

The Strand was founded in 1927 by Benjamin Bass, a Lithuanian immigrant who came to the United States at the age of 17. He had worked as a messenger, as a salesman, as a subway construction worker — laboring at the physical infrastructure of the city — before he discovered the used-book district on Fourth Avenue and understood, with the clarity that sometimes arrives in immigrant lives, that this was where he belonged.

His first attempt was the Pelican Book Shop, on Eighth Street near Greene Street. It failed. He tried again. The second store, opened in 1927 with $300 of his own savings and $300 borrowed from somewhere, he named after a street in London — the Strand, that great thoroughfare of publishing and bookselling. In the early days, he slept on a cot in the store.

The Depression nearly ended the Strand before it could become what it would become. Bass survived through the strength of his contacts and a landlord who was unlike any other: the last heir of the Stuyvesant family, one of the oldest names in New York. When Bass could not pay rent, the landlord carried him. Bass paid back every dollar and, during the rent controls of the war years, voluntarily paid increases he wasn’t required to pay. When rent controls ended and the Stuyvesant interests doubled rents on their other properties, they held the Strand’s rent steady. It is a New York story of a particular kind — the immigrant, the old family, the handshake agreement, the survival.

Benjamin Bass died in 1978. His son Fred, who had started working weekends in the store at the age of 13, took over in 1956. The following year he moved the Strand to its current home at Broadway and 12th Street. The store expanded into the entire first floor, then the first three floors in the 1970s. In 1996, Fred Bass bought the building outright for $8.2 million — a remarkable act of permanence in a city where independence is perpetually threatened by real estate. By then the Strand was the largest used bookstore in the world.

Fred Bass’s daughter Nancy Bass Wyden began helping in the store at age six, sharpening pencils for the staff. At sixteen she was taking phone requests and managing the store’s Central Park kiosk. She earned an MBA from the University of Wisconsin, worked briefly for Exxon, and then returned to New York — and to the Strand — because the Strand was what mattered. She officially joined as a manager in 1986. She established the Books by the Foot department, which curates custom collections and private libraries for clients who need their walls to look read. She drove the major renovation of 2005 that added an elevator, air conditioning, and a reorganization that made the floors navigable. She married a United States Senator — Ron Wyden of Oregon — whom she met on a trip to Portland to see Powell’s Books.

Fred Bass retired in November 2017. He died in January 2018. Nancy Bass Wyden is now the sole owner, the third generation of a family that has kept a single extraordinary bookstore alive for nearly a century.

18 Miles of Books — and Then Some

The Strand’s slogan — “18 Miles of Books” — appears on its tote bags, its T-shirts, its stickers, on merchandise that has become a totem of a certain kind of New York intellectual identity. The number is, if anything, an understatement. The store now houses what its staff estimates at over 23 miles of shelving. The collection has grown from 70,000 books in the early years to 500,000 by the mid-1960s to 2.5 million by the 1990s — a number so large it required the rental of a warehouse in Sunset Park, Brooklyn just to hold the overflow.

The store occupies three and a half floors of the Broadway building, with another floor and a half devoted to offices. Each floor has its own character. The basement holds the store’s review copies — advance reading editions sent to critics, acquired by the Strand, resold at a fraction of cover price — a resource that has made the store indispensable to journalists and academics for generations. The first floor is where most of the traffic flows, where the staff picks tables sit, where the new books and art books and coffee-table volumes compete for attention. The upper floors grow quieter, stranger, richer: art history, philosophy, poetry, the sections where serious browsers disappear for hours.

The rare book room deserves its own category of attention. The Strand’s collection of rare and antiquarian books is one of the most significant in the city. At last recorded measure, the most expensive single item in the store was a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses, priced at $38,000. An edition of Magna Moralia was once the oldest item for sale, priced at $4,500. These are not display objects — they are, in theory, for sale, waiting for the collector who understands their weight.

Outside the store, on the Broadway sidewalk, the discount carts remain one of the great institutions of New York literary life. Books priced at $1, $2, $5 — discards and review copies and damaged treasures — sit in the open air for anyone to browse, free from the social pressure that sometimes accompanies the interior of a bookstore. Tom Verlaine of the band Television, who worked at the Strand as a young man, was particularly fond of these outdoor carts. So was nearly everyone who has ever lingered over them in the specific pleasure of finding something unexpected for a dollar.

The People Who Worked Here

The Strand’s staff has, over the decades, constituted something like an unofficial salon of New York literary and artistic life. The list of people who worked behind its counters reads as a cross-section of the city’s creative underground.

Patti Smith worked at the Strand in the early 1970s. She recalled it as an experience she did not particularly enjoy — the store, she said, “wasn’t very friendly” — but she was there, sorting books in the same building where thousands of others were beginning their own paths. Tom Verlaine worked there. Richard Hell worked there. The novelist Sam Shepard worked there. The writer Mary Gaitskill, the photographer Ken Schles, the essayist Lucy Sante — all passed through. The store has had a unionized workforce for over 35 years, a fact that gives its history of labor a formal, documented quality unusual for a cultural institution usually remembered only for its atmosphere.

Ben McFall worked at the Strand from 1978 until his death in December 2021 — 43 years. He had no official management title, but he had something rarer: personal authority over an entire section. The fiction section was his. He had his own desk, the only employee so designated. Nancy Bass Wyden called him “the heart of the Strand.” His death, at home from a fall, was mourned by the New York literary community with the particular grief reserved for people who have become institutions themselves.

The Films, the Culture, the City

The Strand appears in Six Degrees of Separation, in Julie & Julia, in Remember Me, in which Robert Pattinson played a Strand employee. It appeared in the 2020 documentary The Booksellers, which chronicled the antique book trade and featured Nancy Bass Wyden at its center. It appears, more diffusely, in the background of almost every account of literary New York written in the past fifty years — as setting, as landmark, as the place where someone found the book that changed something for them.

The Strand is also a place where you are likely to encounter other readers. Not tourists performing the act of reading — actual readers, with lists, with opinions, with the specific focused intensity of people on a hunt. This is part of what the pilgrim comes for: the community of the serious, assembled without announcement around the stacks.

The Crisis — and the Survival

In October 2020, at the depth of the COVID-19 pandemic, Nancy Bass Wyden posted a message on Twitter that the Strand was in danger of closing. The store had laid off most of its employees in March 2020. It had received a federal Paycheck Protection Program loan between $1 and $2 million, but the loans had not prevented layoffs that had eliminated 188 of 212 jobs. The post, released on a Friday, generated 25,000 online orders over the following weekend. The Strand survived.

The survival was complicated. The labor issues — layoffs, the gap between the emergency appeal and the store’s treatment of its workers — drew criticism alongside the outpouring of support. The Strand’s fight against a city landmark designation, which it ultimately lost in 2019, revealed the tensions inherent in running a family business inside an institution the city has decided to treat as public heritage. Nancy Bass Wyden’s argument was clear: “I’m not asking for money or a tax rebate, just leave me alone.” The Landmarks Preservation Commission’s argument was equally clear: the Strand is not merely a private business but a piece of the city’s living inheritance.

Both arguments are true. The Strand is a privately owned, family-run business that has survived nearly a century through commercial acuity, family devotion, and a particular kind of stubbornness. It is also a place that belongs, in some non-legal sense, to the city. This tension is part of what makes it worth a pilgrimage.

Planning Your Visit: Everything the Pilgrim Needs

The Strand’s main location at 828 Broadway is open daily. Current hours are 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Saturday, and 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Sunday (confirm current hours at strandbooks.com before visiting, as they have adjusted seasonally). The store is fully accessible via elevator to all floors.

Additional locations include a branch at Lincoln Center (near Broadway and 66th Street) and a newer location on the Upper West Side, both smaller than the flagship but sharing its character. The Central Park kiosk operates seasonally in the park near Fifth Avenue — check the website for its summer schedule. A Times Square kiosk operates in summer. There is also a curated shelf at Moynihan Train Hall, for the traveler departing Penn Station who realizes they need one more book for the journey.

For the serious collector, the rare book room on the upper floors is the destination. Call ahead or check the website for appointments if you are seeking specific titles or want to sell books — the Strand buys books daily, paying cash or store credit, and the evaluation desk near the entrance is one of the more interesting sociological observation points in the building.

The discount carts on the Broadway sidewalk are always worth fifteen minutes regardless of your purpose for the visit. They are free to browse, representative of the store’s range, and occasionally miraculous.

Pairing the Strand: The Literary Neighborhood Around It

The Strand does not exist in isolation. The surrounding blocks are thick with literary association and practical utility for the book-obsessed visitor.

Union Square, two blocks north, is where the city’s literary calendar stages some of its outdoor events and where the greenmarket operates on select weekdays and Saturdays — a useful stop before or after the bookstore. The neighborhood around the store includes some of the city’s better independent cafes for reading and recovery after an intensive browse: the walk south along Broadway toward NoHo, or east toward St. Mark’s Place in the East Village, rewards the pilgrim who is not yet ready to return to the subway.

Washington Square Park, fifteen minutes south on foot, is the literary heart of Greenwich Village — the park where Henry James set his great novel of the same name, where the Beat poets gathered, where the folk revival happened on Sunday afternoons. McNally Jackson’s Prince Street location is twenty minutes south by foot through SoHo. Three Lives & Company, one of the city’s most beloved small bookstores, is another twenty minutes west in the West Village. A Saturday morning that begins at the Strand and ends at Three Lives, with the Village in between, is one of the finer possible ways to spend six hours in New York City.

For the pilgrim who wants to stay close to the Strand’s own history: Fourth Avenue, one block east, is where Book Row stood. Nothing remains of the bookstores that once lined it. The buildings are apartments and restaurants and the ordinary texture of a neighborhood that has moved on. But the street itself is still there, and knowing what it once held makes walking it a different experience than it would otherwise be.

What the Strand Knows That Other Places Don’t

A new bookstore sells you what a publisher has decided you should want. A used bookstore of the Strand’s scale and age sells you what everyone who came before you decided they couldn’t keep. The difference is epistemological. Among the Strand’s 2.5 million volumes — the contemporary fiction and the out-of-print philosophy and the obscure literary criticism and the decades of review copies — there are books that have been waiting specifically for you, that no algorithm would have suggested, that you would never have found except by accident. The Strand is one of the last places in the city — perhaps in the country — where that kind of accident can still happen at scale.

Benjamin Bass came to it with $600 and a borrowed cot. Fred Bass moved it to Broadway and bought the building. Nancy Bass Wyden has carried it through a pandemic and into a third century of use. The slogan says 18 miles. The reality, now, is 23. The number grows because the books keep arriving — from estates, from editors, from the city’s ceaseless churn of reading and moving on — and the Strand keeps accepting them, sorting them, shelving them, waiting for the next person to come through the door who needs exactly that one.

The pilgrim comes to New York for many reasons. This one is worth the trip on its own.

Plan Your Visit

• Address: 828 Broadway at East 12th Street, East Village, Manhattan
• Subway: 14th St–Union Square (4, 5, 6, L, N, Q, R, W); 8th St–NYU (N, R)
• Hours: Mon–Sat 10am–9pm; Sun 11am–8pm (verify at strandbooks.com)
• Rare Books: Upper floors; call ahead for appointments
• Buy/Sell: Walk-in book buying daily at evaluation desk
• Other locations: Lincoln Center branch; Upper West Side; Central Park kiosk (seasonal); Times Square kiosk (seasonal); Moynihan Train Hall shelf
• Nearest cafes: Multiple options on Broadway and east toward St. Mark’s Place
• Pair with: McNally Jackson (SoHo), Three Lives & Company (West Village), Washington Square Park

Will

See Full Bio